TV/Film: Circus Liquor in North Hollywood
A big, creepy clown sign, with lots of neon, made this liquor store a landmark, and attracted a lot of movie and TV directors to use it as a location
This is the famous clown sign and the front of the store, at Circus Liquor, located at 5600 Vineland in North Hollywood, California. Alicia' Silverstone, in her breakout role as high school socialite Cher, got robbed in the parking lot, in the movie 1994 movie Clueless. A post Blondie Debbie Harry kicked a gangbangers ass inside this store in the 2002 movie Spun. The big clown is silent, be he’s seen some shit go down on this corner. #steveemigphotos
Let’s start with the term “liquor store,” to get this started. For those of you outside of California, the term “liquor store,” in California, refers to an independently owned convenience store or mini-mart. Liquor stores, obviously, sell liquor, but they also sell beer, lottery tickets, cigarettes, chewing tobacco, vapes, and all kinds of snack food, ice cream, and basic items. These are generally neighborhood stores that take the place of a 7-11 or Circle K type market. In the hood areas, often “food deserts” without a major grocery store close by, the local liquor store may be the main food buying location for most people in a neighborhood.
By contrast, we still have 17 “control states” in the U.S., states still living in the mid 20th century culturally, where hard liquor can only be purchased in state controlled ABC stores, or where sales of most alcohol and hard liquor are very strictly controlled by state authorities. Often these states don’t allow sales of alcohol on weekends, on Sundays, or on holidays. You know, the days when people generally drink the most. There are also a lot of restrictions on marketing and advertising alcohol and hard liquor products in those regions. You can learn more about control states here, if you’re interested.
Believe it or not, there are still about 80 “dry counties” in the United States, where all alcohol sales are completely prohibited, all of the time. Really. In 2024. I’m not kidding. Counties that allow some limited alcohol sales are called “moist” counties, and “wet” counties are where all kinds of alcohol are sold. Here’s a map of where dry counties are, in red, with moist counties in yellow, and wet counties in blue.
Cher (Alicia Silverstone), alone in the Circus Liquor parking lot at night, after being mugged for her purse and her early cell phone (with a pull-up antenna), and forced to lie on her stomach in the parking lot, while wearing her designer dress, in the 1995 movie, Clueless.
With the liquor store part explained for non-Californians, lets get to the business. Circus Liquor is an operating liquor store, on the corner of Vineland avenue and Burbank boulevard, in North Hollywood, California. It’s set apart from hundreds of other SoCal liquor stores by the 32 foot high, creepy, clown sign in the parking lot. It was built in 1959, according to one site. So it was built right at the end of the run of the popular Howdy Doody Show, featuring the fairly creepy clown Clarabell. That was also early in the live action TV career of Bozo the Clown, billed as The World’s Most Famous Clown, animated here in 1958, and here in 1966, in a later live version. Obviously, circus clowns, with costumes similar to the Circus Liquor sign, were popular in the era when it was built.
The Circus Liquor clown not only represented the clowns of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, but it was, and still is, highlighted in neon lights. First debuted the public in Paris, in 1910, and first used on a Packard car dealer sign in Los Angeles, in 1923, neon lights were used widely for business signs by the post war boom years of the 1940’s and 1950’s. Times Square in New York City, and the strip in Las Vegas, were known worldwide for their large number of neon lights, by that time. The Circus Liquor clown, weird as it seems today, is a piece of advertising and cultural history of the mid century era of the 20th century. And you can buy booze there.
The iconic nature of the sign, in close proximity to the “real Hollywood” of Burbank, Studio City, and bits of North Hollywood, where most of the actual film and TV studios are located, has made it a popular location for film and TV shows, particularly in the 1980’s and 1990’s.
Even though Circus Liquor is a long way from Long Beach, Snoop Dog gets killed in at the liquor store in the 1994 short film and music video, “Murder was the Case.” Alicia Silverstone, in her breakout starring movie role, as wealthy, high school socialite Cher, gets mugged in the Circus Liquor parking lot in the 1995 movie Clueless. Did you know that Alicia Silverstone starred in the Aerosmith music videos “Cryin’,” “Crazy,” (with Live Tyler) and “Amazing,” in 1993-94, before her role in Clueless? I didn’t. In the 2002 tweeker and box office bomb movie, Spun, a post Blondie Debbie Harry plays a lesbian character who kicks a gangbanger’s ass, inside Circus Liquor, after he disses the women working at the counter.
According to the sources I can find online, Circus Liquor also has appeared in the movies Blue Thunder (1983), Love and Lies (1990), The Living End (1992), Deadfall (1993), Alpha Dog (The clown is in the trailer- 2006), and American Satan (The clown and the store are in the trailer- 2017). The store has also appeared in episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, Death Valley, Californication, Grace and Frankie, and Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, and probably a few more.
In 1991, my first real TV job brought me from Orange County up into the San Fernando Valley. When I left that production, I got a job at a small, video duplication business near the Burbank airport, and found a cheap, sketchy place to live on Vineland Avenue, renting the lower bed in a set of bunk beds, paying by the week, not even getting the whole room to myself. It was weird, but cheap, and my roommate wa cool, a club bouncer and wannabe actor. Circus Liquor was about a mile away, down Vineland. My car had been towed, so I was riding my BMX bike for transporation. I used to go down to Circus Liquor for snacks, and even cashed a couple of paychecks there.
It was just a local liquor store with the weird, old clown sign to me then. Since then, many places have been gentrified, and covered over with absolutely boring and lame architecture. Also, as I got older, I began to appreciate places with nostalgic and quirky architecture and signs more, like Circus Liquor in North Hollywood. I believe they have three more locations, also in The Valley, but only the original one has the big clown. You can check this link for Circus Liquor out on Instagram.
There are no paid links in this post.
