I’ll just add “The Dark Knight” for anyone who’s ever been to Chicago.
You got that right.
I lived a few blocks from where the opening scene in Erin Brockovich was filmed, Magnolia Blvd & Lankershim, North Hollywood.
A diner scene with Walter Mathau, I forget which movie, was filmed at Phil’s Diner, an honest-to-god railroad car parked off the tracks near me. Supposedly the characters were taking a break from the hospital – but there is no hospital nearby. Phil made a pretty good penny renting out the dining car to movie companies, a day at a time.
Hollywood Blvd was used for many movie scenes, including Elephant Parts, a groundbreaking Michael Nesmith video. Ditto the LA River for chase scenes, really only a concrete ditch.
I saw Myra Breckenridge at a theater on Hollywood Blvd when it premiered. The first scene in the movie was a shot of the same theater, outside. And the Chinese, right across the street, is everywhere in movies – think Blazing Saddles.
I remember driving down the street in sunny 90F weather and seeing a church entrance covered with deep fake snow drifts for a winter scene. The many movie trucks gave it away. Next day the snow had been completely vacuumed up.
I was pretty surprised to recognize Upper Kananaskis Lake and the mountains surrounding it when X-Men was released in ancient times. And in Brokeback Mountain, Brokeback Mountain is played by Moose Mountain. One can see it from here if one knows where to look.
If we’re doing Chicago locations, my pick for a non-obvious one that had me go “Holy shit, that’s up the street!” is from the Wayne’s World “Bohemian Rhapsody” scene.
Right here where they pass by the statue of the giant native American at the cigar store (which is now an eyeglass place; the statue is still there.) 63rd and Pulaski. As a child, we drove by it almost every week, and as a high school student, every school day.
ETA: Oh, and the Scatchell’s beef stand in the next cutaway I know as well! Cermak, just east of Cicero Ave. And Chicago Joes. Don’t know which White Castle that might be, though.(ETA2: Apparently, it’s a White Castle in Aurora that has since been torn down and rebuilt.) None of these are really near each other.
Yeah, if you live in London, New York or LA the chances you’ve been somewhere a major movie or TV was filmed are higher than you not having been there. So you have to get really specific (like you have) for it to be worth mentioning, to be honest.
So for a really local one, the TV Catastrophe used an obscure kids’ playpark located under a tower block for some of its scenes, and that’s on the road next to me; I pass it all the time. Watching Catastrophe and Luther was a game of spot the place you walked past yesterday. And my own former flat was in a BBC documentary about social housing, while I was living in it. Just the outside, but they featured my windowbox and commented on the garden gnome I had in it. But I can’t even remember which documentary it was because that building turns up now and then on various things. (It wasn’t “the Secret History of Our Streets,” though that did feature a cafe I’d worked in).
My small road, though not my specific house, turns up now and then in Call the Midwife, apparently.
Luther, weirdly, used a Hoover shop where I once bought a hoover.
Most shows and movies supposedly set in Whitechapel (and there are tons of them) don’t seem to be filmed there for the most part though.
The town I grew up in is more obscure, but turns up surprisingly often, usually depicted as a grim Northern town despite being just outside the M25 (which is why it’s used. And it is grim). Four Weddings and a Funeral filmed the funeral scene on a road my friend lived on (opposite a flat I lived in for a while) and the church for the funeral was my nearest church.
The LA River is also featured in Buckaroo Banzai (closing credits), Grease (the drag race), Them! (the ant nest entrance) and so, so many others. Anyplace they race along a big concrete ditch, there you are.
Las Vegas is just like Los Angeles that way. Every intersection in Hangover, every street they drive on Counting Cars, we can spot.
I always think of it for Buckaroo, of course, but also for the big motorcycle-and-semi chase scene early in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
Another movie that comes to mind using the LA river (and sewer system) was Them!.
I’ve been to Mitchell Caverns in the Mojave a couple of times, used in Oliver Stone’s The Doors. According to the tour guide, the production company kind of trashed the place by painting assorted symbols on the cavern walls.
Every Spanish location in Game of Thrones but one 
I have not been in the bullfighting ring which was used as one of the arenas. The last few seasons were hilarious that way: “hey, I’ve been there! It’s on the coast near Barcelona!” “hey that’s Bardenas!” “hey that’s…”
People from Southern Spain have this idea that the north is “cold, rainy and green”: that used to apply to the Atlantic Shelf, but it certainly doesn’t apply to Bardenas or Monegros. Nowadays I can use “ok, the dothrakis? That desert they live in? For the last half of the series you can see it from my mother’s windows” to disabuse southerners of this notion that everything northward of Madrid looks like England. Both Bardenas and Monegros have seen their share of being “desertic location” in multiple movies.
When I’m at my mother’s and CSI: Miami comes in, she likes asking me who long would it take to go from Place A to Place B. The two locations can be 5h away with good traffic, but man, those cops just teleport.
Both downtown Madrid and downtown Barcelona crop up in quite a few movies. Conversely, pretty much any time you see “the running of the bulls in Pamplona”… it’s anywhere but.
I’ve been to Blenheim Palace, where Winston Churchill was born; it’s appeared in a whole bunch of movies, among them Spectre, Rogue Nation, Gulliver’s Travels, The Young Victoria, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, The Avengers (the spy one, not the superhero one), King Ralph, Greystoke and Barry Lyndon.
When I was on my college semester abroad, I visited the English country estate of Stourhead, which later appeared in my favorite Keira Knightley movie, Pride & Prejudice.
I was stationed at Woomera, South Australia, when Mad Max Thunderdome was filmed. A bunch of us GIs would drive up to Coober Pedy to watch some of the filming.
Was in Las Vegas at the time Conair was filmed and watched The Sands get destroyed.
All of the Basic Training scenes in Stripes were filmed in Fort Knox. I was at many of those locations. The big room where they meet Sgt Hulka was really the first room they put us in when we got off the bus. The obstacle course in the movie was the real Army obstacle course. The WWII style barracks in the movie were still up but I didn’t have to stay in them. God knows how they got the Army to cooperate with the movie.
Goldfinger was also really filmed there. The model of the gold depository that Goldfinger used in the film to explain his plan was in the Patton museum on post.
St Elmo’s Fire was supposed to have a few scenes on the campus of Georgetown. They weren’t allowed to film there. Instead University of Maryland in College Park stood in for it. There was one scene with a chapel behind them that was filmed there and also when Rob Lowe was playing football. That was a frat on frat row.
Bangkok and Thailand have doubled for Saigon and Vietnam in so many movies including Good Morning, Vietnam, and The Deer Hunter, as well as Phnom Penh and Cambodia in The Killing Fields. Here is a list of 7 Movie Locations in Bangkok, and I have been to all.
As a Peace Corps Volunteer in Mae Hong Son, Thailand in the late 1980s, I was present when the movie people moved in and filmed Air America with Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr. In the film, it’s Laos, but I am one of the few Americans who can recognize the Burmese style of the temples and other buildings, the province, Thailand’s northwesternmost, being on the Burmese border. A small town, only 5000 population at the time, I knew every location shot. The Hangover, Part II played like a travelogue of my 23 years living in Bangkok. Many more that can’t think of either.
Lots of locations in Hawaii too including TV shoots. In fact, Hawaii Five-0 is scheduled to shoot on our condominium grounds for three days later this month.
I recognize so many movie scenes in Japan, Nepal, Singapore, Mexico, Europe. China. Hong Kong. Not to mention New York City and Washington. And Gettysburg. And Philly. And LA. And San Diego. And Vegas. And the Grand Canyon. The list goes on and on.
Really, now that I think of it, the list is virtually endless.
Did she work at the Waterfront, by any chance?
A few instances that spring to mind of movies filmed during my time as a resident of California in locations I know intimately:
My Blue Heaven. It was supposed to be set in San Diego, but many of the scenes were filmed in San Luis Obispo County – including in one of our satellite courtrooms. One of our court reporters was used as an extra in the film to be… a court reporter. Commando was also filmed in San Luis Obispo.
The movie, Arachnophobia was filmed in Cambria.
The movie, Murder by Numbers, was filmed in San Luis Obispo and Morro Bay.
None of these are great films, but it is still fun seeing the familiar locations used.
The Ten Commandments (1923 silent version) by Cecil B. DeMille was partially filmed in the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes, but that was a bit before my time.
Too many to name in Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Malibu and San Francisco.
I’m just reading all Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s books (after The Shadow of the Wind which I read a few years ago), and I really want to go to Barcelona now. I have all these images in my head.
I also started streaming The Good Place, and they sure did a lot of shooting at the Huntington!
I’ve been to the Meteor Crater in Arizona, where the ending to Starman was filmed.
Smokin’ Aces has Tahoe locals that I’ve been to. Most notable, the penthouse of Cearers, now Mont Bleu and Cave Rock boat launch (which would have been closed at the time of the movie, but whatever…
And Prescott, Arizona, Right? Isn’t that where the 'I’m gonna kick you in the face’? fight took place? Been there.
I’ve always wanted to go to that gas station. Sacred Mountain.
When I lived in LA, I made a special trip to see the steps from “The Music Box.” (I knocked, Anamorphic, but you didn’t answer. This was in 1990, so maybe you didn’t live there yet.)
Shortly after returning from a trip to Paris, I went to see Red 2 — Bruce Willis sat at the same table in the same outdoor café around the corner from the Parthenon that I had been in just a few days earlier.
Leaving work in the RCA Building (that’s what it was called then) late one night, I was surprised to find Rockefeller Plaza filled with antique cars and people in 1950s-style clothing. They were filming a scene for My Favorite Year.
Also in the 80s, I watched Ragtime several times over the course of a week or so, then nearly fell over myself when I turned a corner and found myself in front of the J.P. Morgan Library, which I’d just sorta assumed had been torn down decades earlier. (I know, they reproduced the entire block on a sound stage and never filmed on E. 36 St. at all. I’m counting it anyway.)
There’s a car chase in The Hot Rock that at one point tears past a Long Island shopping mall. The movie theater I watched the movie in was in that mall. It got a big laugh as it flashed by.
The LI town I grew up in, Glen Cove, has appeared in a number of movies, and was mentioned by name in North by Northwest (I’ve been in the house where James Mason’s goon pored a bottle of bourbon down Cary Grant’s throat), A New Leaf (I’ve driven past Walter Matthau’s house), and the original Sabrina (I’ve been to two of the mansions it was shot at, and I lived two blocks from the train station where William Holden picked up Audrey Hepburn).
The restaurant scene early in the movie where the 246 toothpicks hit the ground was filmed at Pompilios. This is an actual place that I have eaten at several times.It is located in Newport, Kentucky.