Bosch's Love Letter to Los Angeles

By Jim Benning
Westways, March/April 2020

When people ask Claudia Eastman what she’s looking for on the streets of Southern California, she loves to tell them, “A place to put the dead body.”

She’s not always joking.

Eastman is a location scout for Bosch, the Emmy-nominated Amazon Prime Video series about LAPD homicide Detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch, who’s played by Titus Welliver. Based on the best-selling novels by Michael Connelly (who’s also the show’s executive producer), Bosch delivers binge-worthy drama, and for Southern Californians, an additional pleasure: seeing one familiar locale after another on screen, from Santa Monica beach to the Hollywood Hills, where Harry often listens to jazz in his living room as the lights of L.A. flicker in the distance. In its own noir way, Bosch is a love letter to Southern California. The show’s sixth season is expected to debut in April.

Eastman was thrilled when she landed the job in 2015. The veteran location scout had not only devoured every Connelly novel to date, but after years spent searching L.A. for spots that could stand in for other places—Boston on CBS’s Judging Amy, for example, and Texas on NBC’s The Pretender—she was relieved to look for locales that were supposed to represent SoCal. As she explained while scouting in Canoga Park not long ago, “On Bosch, we can show palm trees. We don’t have to crop them out.”

On this particular morning, Eastman was behind the wheel of her Toyota Tacoma looking for a house where Harry could pull up and find a roomful of guns. She’d placed letters on the doorsteps of promising homes the day before, noting that if a property was selected, the show would pay a site rental fee. For her appointment with an interested homeowner, Eastman introduced herself and headed inside to snap photos. She liked a guest house in back that she thought could double as a gun-storage room. (The show’s production designer and location manager would weigh in on the final decision.)

As she drove back to the studio lot in Hollywood, Eastman reflected on ways her job has changed over the years. She now uses Google Street View to identify potential filming locales, she explained, and she flashes her Bosch badge at Ring cameras when she arrives at many homes. But the essence of the work remains the same. “I like being able to contribute to the look of the show,” she said. “And with Bosch, we help tell the story of this incredible, huge megalopolis.”