They’re from both Wisconsin and Minnesota. Minocqua, Wauwautosa and Mendota are Wisconsin place name.
The cartoon about the aardvark Arthur is set in my hometown of Ellwood City, PA. (The city name is spelled incorrectly as Elwood on the show.) The creator had an assistant from EC and he liked the name so much he set the show there.
That list isn’t quite correct. For example, “Away We Go” has a scene set in Montreal, but it was filmed in Vermont. I remember thinking, as I watched it, “This doesn’t look like Montreal at all!”
Sling Blade. I used to work in the same building at the State Hospital that Karl is living in at the end of the movie.
I know of no films or TV shows that were set in my hometown of Norristown, PA but the courthouse was on national news quite a lot during the Bill Cosby trial.
The Tom Hanks/Jackie Gleason movie Nothing in Common had scenes in the hospital where I was born. Not that I remember much…
Not mine, but my kids’ hometown is Northport, NY, which is a North Shore of Long Island village with a very picturesque harbor.
Which made it a natural stand-in for In & Out, with Kevin Kline and Tom Selleck, and was set in Indiana.
They added a second floor facade with some grain store logo to Skipper’s Pub to make the street scenes seem midwestern.
I grew up in a small rural fishing village in New Zealand. It’s not the kind of place that shows up in movies.
Except for this one starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig, that is.
Yesterday, they were filming here on our block for the new NCIS Hawaii.
Ladysmith, British Columbia, Canada is disguised as a Colorado town in the show Resident Alien but if you’ve ever been to Ladysmith (I grew up there), it’s obviously filmed within about a one block radius of First Avenue and Roberts St. The “clinic” on the show is a credit union, the Sheriff’s office is a bar and the bar is a coffee shop. The Traveller’s Hotel is famous for its pre-WWII architecture which includes a row of swastikas on the building which are digitally edited out of the show.
Airport was filmed at the Minneapolis/St Paul International Airport in the winter of 1969-70. It was an unusually warm and dry winter, so the production company had to import snow to film the outdoor scenes. The cute babe at the insurance counter was Nancy Nelson, who was best known as the WCCO late–Saturday night weathergirl.
When I was teaching English in Czechoslovakia (1991–92), I went to the local cinema Friday nights because they usually ran films in English on the weekend. My jaw dropped when I saw the opening scenes of Drop Dead Fred because I was suddenly back in Minneapolis and St Paul.
I could tell that despite the two female leads (Phoebe Cates and Carrie Fisher) it was written and produced by locals, since the characters were doing all sorts of trendy, au courant (read “pretentious”) things that Minneapolitans love to do (e.g., hold wine and cheese parties).
And yeah, having also lived in Milwaukee for 18 months back in the '80s, I agree with the “anonymous” filmgoer in the audience.
Billy Madison, starring Adam Sandler, was filmed mainly in and around Toronto, my home town. Interestingly, Billy goes to the same elementary school that I did–I recognized the playground where he plays dodgeball with the kids immediately. After that, the hallways and classrooms fell into place.
I didn’t attend Billy’s high school, but again, I recognized it immediately. I took swimming lessons in its pool when I was a child, and my high school’s football team played that school’s team there. Heck, I could walk to that school to attend games there when our team was playing. (Go Panthers!)