I enjoy trying to recognize Toronto in various Hollywood movies, but there’s only one movie I can remember watching solely because it was filmed in Toronto: the remake of Total Recall. One of the filming locations was a corridor that I walked through every day to get from my workplace to the subway station and I wanted to see if I could recognize it, so I watched it on TV. It was okay, but not really worth seeking out.
When I was in high school I was bicycling through downtown Orange (California)
and found they had blocked off the traffic circle around the plaza to shot a film. Cars
chased by a motorcycle gang were running around the circle as the cameras rolled.
There was also a near collision with some police cars that rushed into the circle.
Some years later the film - titled “Gumball Rally” - appeared on T.V. and I was
able to view what I had seen filmed
I worked in downtown L. A. in the 1980’s and it wasn’t unsual to encounter a film
crew working. During my lunch break one day I saw a film crew set up with
their cameras aimed at the door of a Sharper Image store at the corner of
Wilshire and Grand Ave. As I watched, the director yelled “Action!” and out of
the door popped Milton Berle and Sid Caesar! Several months later I watched the
movie just to see the scene that I saw filmed. It was a made for TV movie titled “Side
by Side” and wasn’t all that good but it was fun to see the part
that I had watched being filmed.
I also watched an episode of “Cagney & Lacey” just because they had used the
exterior of our building for a shot.
Last year I watched “Its a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” again after learning that parts
were filmed in downtown Long Beach, not far from where I lived.
One of the fun things about living in the L. A. area is watching a film and
suddenly recognizing location of the shot. I’ve also visited places where
films have been shot to see what they look like today. For example, the
long staircase that Laurel and Hardy carried a piano up in “The Music Box”
and the Griffith Park Planetarium (used for “Rebel Without a Cause” and
“The Rocketeer”). Recently, I swung by Ferris Bueller’s house - it’s just a few miles
from where I live.
First Blood, while a great movie, has some of the best outdoor scenes of any movie.
I went to see X-Men because I’d heard it was filmed around Upper Kananaskis Lake, despite not thinking anyone could really pull off a live-action X-Men movie.
How wrong was I?
Anyway, I know the region like the back of my hand and was tickled pink to see all the familiar landmarks colour-timed and with a CGI dam stuck in there.
The ladies traveling across country in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything stopped at the New Tower Inn in Omaha, NE. I spent more than a few nights drinking at the Lazy Leopard Lounge where part of the action takes place.
The where Kathy Bates lives in About Schmidt is visible from the second floor deck of the apartment where My wife lived when we met.
A South Omaha institution, Louie M’s Burger Lust shows up in multiple films.
It is always nice to see a bit of my home town on the big screen
I will watch Transformers Age of Extinction when it comes out. Part of it was filmed right in front of my work. I actually have to work Sunday afternoons (Futures markets open at 530 PM Chicago time) and It was a very weird experience trying to get to my building while they were filming the movie right in front.
There will be some scenes which will look like Hong Kong or else someplace else in China, the lettering on my building was changing to some Chinese lettering and it looks like there were street stalls also set up near by.
You should look at some of the earlier Three Stooges shorts. There were frequent exterior shots that I assume were Los Angeles.
Including Thomas Sweets, an ice cream store which started up decades after Einstein died. They didn’t even try to disguise the modern Palmer Square, at least they did redo the gas station in Hopewell where the Robbins character worked.
My wife and I live in Annapolis, Md, where they filmed Better Living Through Chemistry. The movie opened this weekend, but not anywhere around here. FIOS had it on-demand, though. Seeing the locations in Annapolis and Baltimore was nice. The movie was … Meh
City Island, with Andy Garcia, because City Island is very close to our neighborhood and we spend a lot of time there in the summer. I picked it solely because of the title, I didn’t know anything about it, but we ended up enjoying it.
I saw a dumb 1990s comedy buddy cop movie, I can’t even remember the title, because it used the apartment building I was living in at the time as an exterior location The production crew was VERY nice the day they were filming, I guess they have to be because they can’t actually make the residents cooperate and they have to rely on your goodwill. I was slightly put out when I saw the film, and in the movie, the building is supposed to be a slum where some shady witness involved in a drug deal lives, which is not at all how it is in real life. But of course I get that it’s a movie, it wasn’t supposed to be a documentary about my building.
And despite my feelings about my personal apartment building, I went through a phase where I watched a lot of movies filmed in 1970s New York, because I guess I was having a weird nostalgia for gritty, pre-clean up New York City? Like Network and The French Connection, that sort of thing. At least there are so many of them that I was able to pick good ones.
Doc Hollywood, because most of it was shot in Micanopy, FL, pop 653, while I was living there.
Damn you for mentioning Thomas Sweets while I’m on a diet.