(500) Days of Summer|Grand Park Fountain — the morning the whole street danced

Day 34. Tom walks out of Summer's building having finally slept with her, Hall and Oates starts up, and the entire Civic Center falls into step behind him — commuters, a marching band, an animated bluebird, a man in a bear costume — until he arrives at the fountain and throws his arms open like a man who has solved something.

The water is the Arthur J. Will Memorial Fountain, a circular 1960s basin at the top of what used to be a windswept concrete mall between City Hall and the Music Center. In 2012 the whole slope was rebuilt as Grand Park: lawns instead of paving, magenta chairs scattered loose across the terraces, a splash deck at the fountain's rim where children are actively encouraged to get wet. The basin Tom danced around is still the centrepiece, ringed by the same low wall.

It is public, free, open dawn to dusk, and the four blocks of park make the best downtown lunch hour in the city. The big jets do not always run — drought rules and maintenance take them offline for stretches, while the smaller water features usually keep going. Come mid-morning on a weekday and you get roughly the light and roughly the crowd the scene was shot in.

Stand at the rim and the sequence reads differently than it does on screen. It is not a love scene. It is a man alone in a public park, choreographing strangers in his head, and the film knows it — which is why the last shot of the number is his reflection, on his own, in the water.

Location photo: Wikimedia Commons, free licence.