In the Charlie Sheen movie, Hot Shots!, his father has the same name as my Minnesota hometown, Owatonna. The scene where a group are supposed to be having a discussion in a native language, the words are just towns in Minnesota that have native american names.
Quite a lot of the Inspector Morse detective show, nominally filmed in Oxford, was actually shot around here, because it’s cheaper (saves paying the cast and crew overnights).
In the pilot episode, The Dead of Jericho, Patrick Troughton drives his VW Bug down Church Street in Hatfield.
Much of Who Killed Harry Field is filmed at and around Brocket Hall near Welwyn Garden City.
St Albans Cathedral, and nearby Fishpool Street, doubled as various Oxford churches or chapels in at least one other episode.
Lord Salisbury’s estate at Hatfield House regularly gets used for various period dramas such as Cromwell and also in the Tomb Raider movies.
Short Circuit.
Free Willy
The Goonies
Kindergarten Cop
The Ring II
Point Break
Into the Wild
The Road
And others, all filmed or partially filmed in my little hometown of Astoria Oregon. The old county jail is now a film museum featuring movies filmed locally.
I’m happy to have kicked off a popular thread, but it doesn’t seem that surprising to me that Detroit and San Diego have been the settings of or mentioned in a movie 
. Of course, where I was grew up going shopping in a town with 5,000 people was “going to the city”.
The Owatonna one is gold, however - I’ll have to rewatch that sometime to see how many I recognize.
About ten years ago, I saw a movie called Another Earth, mostly because it was filmed in and around New Haven. I remember one scene in particular that was filmed on the New Haven Green. And the early parts of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull were set at “Marshall College” but filmed in New Haven. (You can imagine how excited the locals were to have Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford in town for a few days.)
The thread I cite below is from early this year on a different but related topic. Which in turn cites to an earlier thread on yet another different but related topic.
Folks interested in the stuff in this current thread might like either or both of those others:
In the “hey I recognise that place category”: years ago I was reading Time and noticed a picture of Terry Gilliam dodging under some bushes in a flat country setting, on a grey, grey day, and I said to myself, “Hey, Terry Gilliam is in Saskatchewan!”
Read the article for the picture, and yup, he was filming on the prairies in Saskatchewan, and was dodging under some bushes because it was about to storm.
I don’t know why I was so certain that it was in Saskatchewan country, but it was an automatic reaction.
The movie didn’t fare so well at the box office, though:
Alexander Payne’s movie “About Schmidt” is set in Omaha NE and filmed here. All of the externals were clearly definitely local.
Another Kokomo reference was made on the 1970’s sitcom One Day at a Time. Soon after Indianapolis resident Barbara Cooper (played by Valerie Bertinelli) meets Mark Royer (Boyd Gaines), he takes her for a spin, and they somehow end up in Kokomo, about an hour’s drive away.
I rented it back when movie stores were a thing, solely on the fact it was a Terry Gilliam movie. There was an introduction to the film of Terry basically apologizing for you getting conned into seeing the movie because it was by him. Ok, not really, but he definitely didn’t give us much confidence in letting us know how terribly it had been received but that we should really give it a chance or whatever. I suppose that’s better to know up front than to spend most of the movie wondering whether it was going to get any better. I don’t think it’s an utter failure as a film, but it certainly is not anything remotely commercial. It was very weird, very depressing, and featured a bunch of things you really wish people hadn’t done.
The 1977 film Outlaw Blues was filmed mostly in Austin, Texas (and set there, I think). Just by accident I happened to walk by a scene that was being filmed at the time. This was in the Dobie Mall next to the University of Texas campus.
And to go the other way, there’s a 2012 novel called Every Day that’s by David Levithan. It’s set entirely in Maryland (except a little bit in Washington, D.C.), and nearly all the locations are in cities I know well. A movie was made of it in 2018. It was shot entirely in Canada (except for a few seconds of establishing shots). I frequently drive by the Laurel (Maryland) Library. I tell myself, “Hey, a movie is partly set there, but it was too expensive to film there, so they shot the scene that’s supposedly in that library in Canada instead.” Incidentally, I’ve gone to book signings by Levithan and got him to sign copies of Every Day and its two sequels.
Except for the University of Nebraska scenes—they were filmed on the University of Kansas campus in Lawrence, KS. Apparently KU’s campus had the right look.
Which leads me to a story my father-in-law, a University administrator told me: when they were filming The Graduate, they wanted to film on a campus somewhere in the U of California system. The local administrator read the script and hated it, and said no, forcing them to film elsewhere.
After the film became a hit, he was roundly criticized for his decision. Fast forward 10 years, and the producers of Animal House wanted to film at the University of Oregon, where he was now an administrator. He said, fine, no problem without even checking the script—and was roundly criticized for his decision when the film became a hit.
My mistake–I have it backwards. The KU scenes were filmed in Nebraska.
I don’t think my home town has shown up in any movies, but my wife’s has.
She was raised in Grover’s Mill, NJ (actually a part of West Windsor Township), which became infamous as the site of the Martian Invasion in Orson Welles’ 1938 Mercury Theater on the Air broadcast of War of the Worlds. Fifty years later, her sister was instrumental in having a monument erected in Grovers Mill:
That’s not a movie, of course. But the premise of the Adventure of Buckaroo Banzai across the 8th Dimension is that the invasion was real (only by the Lectroids, not Martians), and that Yoyodyne[sup]1[/sup] was founded there as a consequence.
The Yoyodyne plant as depicted in the film was probably about as large as Grovers Mill itself. And Grovers Mill has no palm trees.
The scenes of New Brunswick in the movie didn’t look like the real New Brunswick, NJ, either.
My wife’s family also had a place down in Seaside Heights (until Sandy, anyway). Seaside Heights shows up in The President’s Analyst. William Daniels’ character lives there. Except it doesn’t look at all like the real Seaside Heights.
[sup]1[/sup] Yoyodyne was, I was surprised to learn, actually invented by Thomas Pynchon in V and later used in The Crying of Lot 49. It evidently also showed up as a sign in Deep Space Nine.
Lady Bird was based in, and partially filmed around, Sacramento. When the movie was in the theaters it made a lot of buzz in this area (I am east of Sac).
The Amityville Horror was based in the town where I was born. Altho, I lived in the next town over until I was a few years old.
The TV series 911: Lone Star is set in my hometown of Austin. However, I find that the show is completely unwatchable. The people who make the show have clearly never visited the Live Music Capital of the World. The geography doesn’t work, the exteriors don’t even look like anything in Central Texas, and the fires they fight are not at all typical of the area. A friend of mine, also a native Austinite, does a great synopsis of it on Facebook, pointing out all the impossibilities of the show.
The film Hope Floats was set and filmed in Smithville, Texas. Smithville is a short drive from Austin and and an even shorter drive from where I am sitting right now.
My hometown of the last twenty years has a rather infamous story associated with it. The long-time locals fail to see any humor in this story and have refused to assist in any commercial telling of that story. However, our little town’s story has led to a hit Broadway musical and a hit film of the same name. The story is also told in a popular song by a well-known rock band. The rock song involves the same story, but is otherwise unrelated to the musical. I’ll leave it to the readers to figure out the town, musical, and song. 
I am not familiar with either campus, but have been in many of the locations numerous times. The house that was used for Kathy Bates house was about three blocks from where I was living at the time. I was called one Saturday night to a warehouse where one of the sound stages was built. They had a small fire and used the fire extinguishers and could not resume until I showed up with replacements.
SCTV filmed episodes in Edmonton for a couple of years and there are dozens of outsides shots incorporating Edmonton and vicinity locations. Here you can see 81 ave. between 101/102 street - Polynesiantown.
It’s not where I was born, but I grew up in Hudson, Ohio, and consider that my hometown. Hudson’s only brush with Hollywood, that I know of, was standing in for a New England town in the 1977 made-for-TV Christmas movie “The Gathering”. The opening shot shows Ed Asner walking down Main Street, with the town’s iconic clock tower reflected in a shop window. Some of my childhood friends’ older siblings played a group of kids that sing carols to Asner and Maureen Stapleton.
Senoia, Georgia, was the stand-in for Woodbury in The Walking Dead. When I visited, the production company had placed a sign downtown: “The producers of The Walking Dead wish to thank the residents of Senoia for not cutting their grass for six months.”
Oh, and I forgot to add, the star of the film was an Australian actress.