Some Like It Hot: When Hotel del Coronado Became Florida

Some Like It Hot: When Hotel del Coronado Became Florida | San Diego Uncovered

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Some Like It Hot: When Hotel del Coronado Became Florida

One of Hollywood's most famous “Florida” resorts was actually sitting on Coronado Beach.

In September 1958, director Billy Wilder brought Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and a large production crew to Hotel del Coronado to film exterior scenes for Some Like It Hot.

The movie was released in 1959. The hotel has been associated with it ever since.

The Del Was Already 70 Years Old

Hotel del Coronado opened in 1888. By the time Wilder arrived, its enormous wooden Victorian building, red roofs, verandas and turrets already looked like something from another era.

That was exactly what the movie needed.

Some Like It Hot takes place in 1929, and Wilder needed a grand seaside resort that could plausibly belong to that period.

Except the Movie Was Supposed to Be in Florida

In the story, musicians Joe and Jerry witness Chicago's St. Valentine's Day Massacre and flee by disguising themselves as women.

They join an all-female band traveling to a luxurious Florida resort.

That “Florida” resort was Hotel del Coronado.

The movie never needed audiences to recognize San Diego. It needed them to believe Coronado was somewhere on Florida's coast.

Billy Wilder Was Looking for a Hotel the Modern World Hadn't Erased

The Del's architecture solved a difficult production problem.

Many large American resorts had been remodeled, demolished or surrounded by modern development by the late 1950s.

Hotel del Coronado still possessed a sprawling nineteenth-century silhouette that could convincingly represent a luxury hotel three decades earlier.

Wilder later explained that he was looking for something that looked like a Florida hotel and, once shown The Del, his search was essentially over.

Here's the Part Many Visitors Get Wrong

Only the exterior sequences were filmed at Hotel del Coronado.

The beach, hotel exterior, porch, steps, arrival scenes and nearby waterfront views are genuinely Coronado.

But the interior hotel scenes were filmed on studio sets.

Those sets were designed to resemble The Del so convincingly—including details such as stairs, paneling and the general arrangement of spaces—that generations of viewers have assumed the interiors were filmed inside the hotel.

Hollywood Created a Better Version of Reality

This is a classic movie trick.

Use a spectacular real exterior to establish the location.

Then recreate the interior on a soundstage where lighting, cameras, walls and actors can be controlled.

The result feels like one continuous building even though the audience is moving between Coronado and a Hollywood studio without realizing it.

Marilyn Monroe Arrived in September 1958

San Diego History Center photographs document Monroe filming at The Del in September 1958, including scenes with Tony Curtis on Coronado Beach and with Joe E. Brown on the hotel's porch.

The shoot at The Del lasted a little more than a week, according to the hotel's historical account.

The production brought roughly 200 cast and crew members, many of whom traveled from Los Angeles by train and stayed at the hotel.

The Beach Became One of the Movie's Most Recognizable Settings

The wide Coronado shoreline gave Wilder an enormous natural set.

Monroe's Sugar Kane and the band could be photographed against sand, ocean and the unmistakable Victorian hotel without constructing an expensive resort exterior.

The location simultaneously looked glamorous and slightly fantastical—which perfectly matched the tone of the movie.

Even Critics Thought the Hotel Looked Fake

One of the funniest pieces of Some Like It Hot trivia is that Hotel del Coronado's architecture was so elaborate that some viewers assumed it had been constructed for the movie.

The Del's official history notes that at least one critic described the hotel as an improbably extravagant set.

It wasn't.

The unbelievable movie set was a real San Diego County hotel built in the nineteenth century.

The Movie's San Diego Connection Goes Deeper Than One Hotel

Hotel del Coronado had been attracting filmmakers long before Marilyn Monroe arrived.

Early motion-picture companies were filming around Coronado by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Silent-film stars including Rudolph Valentino and Gloria Swanson appeared in productions using The Del and its surroundings.

By 1958, Hollywood wasn't discovering the hotel.

It was returning to one of Southern California's oldest location stars.

Marilyn Wasn't the Only Legend on the Beach

Some Like It Hot brought together an extraordinary cast.

Jack Lemmon played Jerry/Daphne. Tony Curtis played Joe/Josephine and the millionaire persona Junior. Marilyn Monroe played Sugar Kane. Joe E. Brown delivered the movie's legendary final punch line.

Behind the camera was Billy Wilder, already one of Hollywood's most celebrated writer-directors.

The Movie Almost Certainly Looked Easier Than It Was

The finished film is effortless and fast-moving, but its production history was complicated.

Monroe was one of the world's biggest stars and also famously struggled during filming with lines, retakes and the intense pressures surrounding her career.

Stories about those difficulties have sometimes overwhelmed discussion of her actual performance.

The more useful historical point is that the final movie contains one of her most enduring comic performances despite a production that could be demanding for everyone involved.

Coronado Became Florida Without Palm-Tree Movie Magic

The location worked partly because Wilder didn't need to radically transform it.

The beach, sunshine, resort architecture and coastal setting already suggested the fantasy destination the screenplay required.

Audiences accepted Southern California as Florida because the visual language of a grand American beach resort mattered more than precise geography.

The Del Was a Character, Not Just a Background

Some locations are interchangeable.

Hotel del Coronado isn't.

Its enormous roofline and turret appear repeatedly behind the characters, establishing wealth, escape and romantic fantasy before anyone says a word about the resort.

Remove The Del and the movie would still have its script and performances—but it would lose part of its visual personality.

Then the Movie Became Bigger Than Anyone Expected

Some Like It Hot was released in 1959 and became one of the defining comedies of American cinema.

The American Film Institute later ranked it the greatest American comedy on its “100 Years...100 Laughs” list.

That reputation transformed Hotel del Coronado from a filming location into a destination for movie fans.

The Hotel Never Really Let the Movie Leave

The Del has repeatedly celebrated its connection with the film.

Billy Wilder, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon returned for the movie's 25th-anniversary celebration in 1984. The hotel hosted events surrounding the Marilyn Monroe postage stamp in 1995 and the film's 50th anniversary in 2009.

The movie became part of the hotel's own historical identity.

And the Connection Is Still Alive

In 2026—the 100th anniversary year of Marilyn Monroe's birth—Hotel del Coronado created new Monroe programming, including an exhibition and a self-guided experience tied to Some Like It Hot filming locations.

More than six decades after the movie was released, visitors are still coming to Coronado partly because of images captured during that brief 1958 shoot.

That's an Extraordinary Return on One Week of Filming

Think about the economics of cultural memory.

A film crew spent a little more than a week shooting at a historic hotel.

The resulting images have promoted Coronado to generations of movie viewers around the world for more than 65 years.

No conventional tourism advertisement could easily buy that kind of longevity.

Hollywood Helped Preserve the Del's Image in Time

The movie also created something more subtle: a visual record of Hotel del Coronado and Coronado Beach in 1958.

Buildings change. Landscapes change. Cities grow.

Movies accidentally become historical documents, preserving architecture, clothing, streets and landscapes while telling fictional stories.

Some Like It Hot preserved The Del as both a fantasy of 1929 and a real place in 1958.

The Best Movie Illusion Was the Simplest One

No elaborate visual effects were required to turn Hotel del Coronado into a glamorous resort from another time.

Wilder mostly needed the audience to accept one small lie:

that Coronado was Florida.

Everything else was already there.

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The next time you watch Some Like It Hot, ignore the movie's Florida destination for a moment.

Look at the beach. Look at the porch. Look at that impossible Victorian roofline.

You're looking at Coronado.

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