Corner Gas - although the outdoor scenes were mainly shot at Rouleau, about 40 km down the highway, there were a lot of scenes in Regina (eg Emma going on a shopping spree and taking advantage of a handicap parking pass - I shop at a lot of the big box stores she was hitting).
was shot in Regina and Moose Jaw. I was in the shopping centre when they were filming (I work nearby), and regularly drove by the house with the huge decorations that they used, seing both the “before” and “after” versions. I’ve also had beers in the Moose Jaw pub that was in the movie.
This isn’t a feature film, but many years ago, I lived in Quincy, Illinois, which is also the hometown of Dr. Michael Swango, one of the most notorious medical serial killers out there. There was a show on Discovery or some similar channel, before they went Honey Boo Boo on us, and while I wasn’t surprised to see the dilapidated building he lived in at the time he was poisoning his co-workers at the ambulance corps, I WAS surprised to see re-enactments in the building where they happened. This was a satellite building to the main hospital, and has since been demolished. Anyway, they must have gone in on a weekend, and we knew nothing about it until air time.
Major League, while set in Cleveland, was shot in Milwaukee. In our stadium, in our houses, with our announcer.
While I never saw it and don’t know if it’s set in Milwaukee, Mr 3000 was also filmed in Milwaukee. I remember my aunt saying that was the point when she felt my uncle, the baseball fanatic that will take any opportunity to get in front of a camera (he’s been on the news a few dozen times), was finally a ‘grown up’ when he decided at the last minute not to be an extra because he would have had to take the day off of work.
Bridesmaids was, at least in part, set in Milwaukee.
If we get in to TV Shows, Laverne and Shirley and Happy Days are in Milwaukee. Step By Step and That 70’s show are close by (Port Washington and [a fake city in] Kenosha).
Also, in A League Of Their Own, we had the Racine Belles. When I was in college, I drove past Horlick Field (where the IRL Racine Belles played) on a daily basis.
The Nicholas Cage flick “The Weatherman” was set in Chicago which is no big deal. But it briefly mentions Bolingbrook which is where I worked at the time and lived one town over so I was tickled by that.
The Place Beyond the Pines (2012) was filmed in Upstate New York near my hometown of Latham NY. Filmed in Schenectady and Niskayuna, it stars Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper, with Eva Mendes and Bruce Greenwood.
The under-the-bridge door to the entrance of The Librarians lair is within walking distance of my house. The bridge is the St. Johns Bridge, the door is real, and no one ever goes in or out…as far as you know.
The John Wayne flick The Cowboys ends the cattle drive in Belle Fourche, South Dakota (my hometown… well, where I went to school, anyway. Actually grew up in an even smaller town 8 miles away.)
Folsom Prison Blues is an easy one. Though you did tag this as “movies”. How about Riot in Cell Block 11, then? Or Another 48 Hrs.. If we’re going for other media, New Folsom Prison made an appearance in Starcraft II.
Ok, don’t want solely prison references? I present this Onion News item:
I lived in close range of both the prison and the flood area for a dam collapse.
When The Mothman Prophecies was being filmed in Kittanning, PA, near my business, I decided to mess with an employee. She had a long term crush on Richard Gere, that’s all she talked about for weeks.
I got a friend to call my business and state he was Mr Gere’s personal assistant and Mr Gere had a problem, blah, blah, blah. Long story short, Richard Gere desperately needed my help.
The phone call was timed out to occur as I prepared to leave work for the day. My employee caught me at the door, telling me the story and asking me to wait around, Richard Gere could be there in 10 minutes. I told her no, I had plans, and she melted down. I had to quickly tell her it was all a joke, before she had a stroke.
I grew up in Ottawa, which is virtually never used for location shooting for Hollywood films. Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal really have the lock on those for Canada. When I was living there, even some cheapshit straight to video movie production passing through town would be subject to keen, fawning media interest.
That said, the Oscar-nominated Mr. and Mrs. Bridge filmed one scene in Ottawa. There’s a scene where Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward are walking along a leafy residential street; for whatever reason, the location scout found the perfect spot in Rockliffe, not far from 24 Sussex (the PM’s residence). And for stars of that magnitude to pass through Ottawa was literally front page news for a week. Considering most of the celebs to ever set foot in the capital were either politicians or other visiting dignitaries, or rock bands passing through (if they didn’t bypass Ottawa for Montreal, the bane of my high school rock fandom existence), you’d have through it was the second coming.
The obvious one for me is MASH’s Radar O’Reilly hailing from Ottumwa, Iowa. While I’m not from Ottumwa, actually, I grew up on a farm about 20 miles away, we did most of our shopping there, I had several jobs there.
I currently live in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where the 2007 baseball movie The Final Season and the 1988 Richard Gere movie Miles From Home were filmed. When I first moved here in 1991, I stayed in one of the cabins at a motel where some of Gere’s scenes were shot; I auditioned a couple of times for a part in The Final Season, but wasn’t cast (even though they filmed part of it at a high school two blocks from where I live - nuts).
Oddly enough, one of the few times Ottawa was actually the setting of a show, it wasn’t filmed there. There was a fun CBC comedy called Insecurity that aired for two seasons about a decade ago, and a university friend of mine was one of the leads. It was ostensibly set in Ottawa, as it’s the capital and out intelligence services are based there, but was filmed in Regina, SK because reasons. It was surreal hearing lines like “He’s being kept at a safe house in Orleans.” as my family lived in Orleans (suburb in the super-far east end) and I’ve NEVER in my life heard it referred to in fiction.
In 1979 at my high school while I was there, a no-name and not popular movie was filmed there: Promises in the Dark, with Marsha Mason, Ned Beatty, Susan Clark, Michael Brandon, Kathleen Beller, Paul Clemens, and Lorenzo Lamas.
My high school was William H. Hall High, in West Hartford CT. The filming caused some disruption and distractions. It was an interesting experience. I didn’t make it into any of the scenes, but many friends and people I knew did.
I rented the horror movie “It Follows” several years ago. Didn’t know much about it except that it was supposed to be a well-regarded horror movie made on a small budget. While watching I was vaguely wondering where it had been shot, having no idea it had been filmed in the greater Detroit area, and tried to place it by landmarks and things, but the beginning of the movie took place in some anonymous looking suburb.
Then they walked past a local ice cream place I recognized, and I said “hey…!”
How about Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison, which was the film that inspired Johnny Cash to write the song? Or for a relatively more recent film, Walk the Line.
Although I live in Folsom now, I actually grew up in Mooresville, NC. There was an episode of Pawn Stars in which they were interviewing candidates to hire to work in the pawn shop. One of the candidates looked like an exact clone of “The Old Man” (it was pretty obviously staged). He said he was from Mooresville (The Old Man is from Lexington, NC, not too far from there).
If we’re talking filming locations rather than story locations (thread seems to be back and forth), I twice daily drove by the farm in Yorkville, IL where they filmed all the “Kansas” homestead stuff for the recent Superman movies. They built the Kent family home for the first movie, then knocked it down when they were done only to rebuild the whole thing for the second film which I found sort of amusing.
The REM song “Don’t Go Back to Rockville” was written by bassist Mike Mills about a girl he was dating at the time in college who was leaving school to return home to Rockville, Maryland.
If you listen to the song and have ever been to Rockville, it’s clear that Mike knew absolutely nothing about the place; he assumed it was some small factory town.
As far as I know, unless The Cheesecake Factory counts, there’s never been any kind of factory in Rockville, ever. It’s a very comfortably upper-middle-class city that is the county seat of one of the richest counties in the country.
