Sam Rockwell takes over the googie coffee shop in Gore Verbinski’s latest movie

In the new film Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (in theaters Feb. 13), a soaked and disheveled Sam Rockwell stumbles into L.A.’s iconic Norms restaurant after dark, with LAPD squad cars swarming outside. Shocked patrons ignore their club sandwiches as the bedraggled stranger, covered in electrodes, hoses, and sci-fi gadgetry, barks out, “I am from the future … and all of this goes horribly wrong.”

The juxtaposition of the comfortable family-restaurant setting (complete with Boy Scouts and seniors getting coffee refills) and a potentially dangerous situation unfolding raises tension and sets the scene for an offbeat adventure. Norms on La Cienega is a modernist landmark designed by architects Louis Armet and Eldon Davis in 1957. It has been immortalized in an iconic painting by pop artist Ed Ruscha, a song by Tom Waits, and countless movies and TV shows over the decades.

“I guess that’s where bad guys like to meet, over a cup of coffee,” says location manager Robert Foulkes, who recently scouted Norms for a film set in the 1950s. “These coffee shops are great-looking, have a lot of character and are perfect for conversation scenes. They’re timeless. A period piece plays really well, or you can do a scene with a contemporary hipster.”

Directors love shooting inside midcentury Googie coffee shops designed by Armet & Davis. Quentin Tarantino used their Hawthorne Grill for the opening scenes of Pulp Fiction and their Johnie’s at Wilshire and Fairfax for Reservoir Dogs. That counter can also be seen in The Big Lebowski, American History X and Miracle Mile. David Lynch chose one of the firm’s vintage Denny’s locations in Gardena for Mulholland Drive. A&D’s masterpiece Pann’s, near LAX, was the setting for Vin Diesel’s fight scene in xXx, and their Corky’s on Van Nuys Boulevard appears in the 2010 reboot of A Nightmare on Elm Street.

“Noir often took place in a diner,” says Alan Hess, author of Googie Redux. “This is just continuing that tradition. Villains’ lairs are often modern houses that feel evil in some way. Somehow, coffee shops fit into the atmosphere of noir.”

Director Gore Verbinski, who hung out at Norms while attending UCLA film school, filmed the exteriors for Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die on La Cienega. For the interior scenes, the filmmaker built a larger-than-life version in Cape Town, South Africa, some 10,000 miles from L.A.

“In our film, the protagonist [Rockwell] is cinematically and symbolically trapped in a world of triangles,” Verbinski tells Los Angeles. “[He’s] ironically imprisoned by this icon of enlightenment as he endeavors to save the world from a new intelligence being born. I think the architecture of Norms is perfectly suited to take the rectangular frame and slash it with the diagonal, making it askew and creating the sense of a world gone cattywampus.”