Parts of the Sandra Bullock movie The Net were filmed in Alameda, CA where I grew up. The sleazy motel she stayed in was the Linoaks Motel, which used to be a block down the street from my family’s apartment. (It’s gone now, replaced by a new city library.) There’s also a scene where she’s being chased and is running on a bridge, which is the Park Street Bridge, in the same part of town. I cross that bridge every time I go visit my sister (who still lives in the same neighborhood).
There have also been some movies that were filmed in part on the old Naval Air Station in Alameda, where I used to work for a brief spell. There’s at least a scene or two in Star Trek IV filmed there (where the “nuclear wessel” is docked, according to Chekov). And I remember seeing the location where the freeway scene in The Matrix Reloaded was filmed; I was riding my bike on the old base and cruised by where they had built the freeway set, which took up probably a quarter of a mile on the old tarmac. It was all walled off, though, so there was nothing interesting to see.
I forgot to mention–just last night, DeathLlama and I both had a “Hey! We know that place!” reaction to some headache medication ad (got distracted by scenery, so don’t remember the brand). It’s shot on a corner of Green Street in downtown Pasadena–you can see the bright red walls of Buca di Beppo’s, and Design Within Reach is visible just behind the woman’s shoulder.
The actress is sitting at an outdoor cafe, and we were both scratching our heads–we can’t think of an outdoor cafe at that site. Of course, they may have just created one.
Oh…and the film Demolition Man was filmed at the old GTE Building (now Verizon, I think) in Westlake, California when I was working there as a temp. We had a crashed futuristic vehicle in the decorative pond at the entrance for over a week. Employees (even temps) got invited to watch filming…gotta say, it was pretty effin’ boring. Same scene repeated about 10 times in 40min…not too interesting. And, as is often reported, Sly Stallone is indeed very short.
The Rocketeer was filmed at the airport in my hometown, where I worked in high school. My best friend’s older sister bought about a zillion copies of the sticker book, because there was quite a good shot of her on one of them.
Junior was filmed at my college while I was there.
And that’s about it for me. Except the 1938 Robin Hood was filmed in our local park, which is really obvious when you live here. There they are, riding through Nottingham Forest, only it looks just like home.
Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000) was set in 1960s Hong Kong but filmed largely in Bangkok. The older Bangkok neighborhoods have that old Chinese feel, while Hong Kong simply does not look like Hong Kong anymore.
I was born and raised in Johnstown, PA, and was there (and participated in crowd scenes) while the movie Slap Shot was being filmed, but I guess it doesn’t strictly fit the OP’s description becasue none of the places I actually lived in were visible in the movie.
How about instead, these couple of slightly surreal experiences:
When I first started going to Paris on business, the company I worked for tended to put us up at a fairly shabby two-star hotel named the Kuntz (cue Beavis-type snickers), overlooking Gare de l’Est. One time I came through town and as I was traveling on the next day, got a hotel room at CDG airport instead. When I got to my room, I flipped on the TV and there was some kind of French detective show on. After a few minutes a scene comes up where the detective has to interview some criminal lowlife at a sleazy hotel, and so they show him walking into the Kuntz.
Last summer I went to Vegas for a wedding and stayed at the Luxor. The first evening I was there I happened to turn on the TV, and the very first thing that came up was an episode of COPS, with the very first scene (involving a half-dressed guy harassing traffic) shot about two blocks south of my location, with the Luxor’s pyramid clearly visible in the background. In fact, I could just about see the location from my window.
A LOT of movies have been filmed in the area I grew up in Sonoma County, California. Like most movies in general, the majority are crappy and forgettable. The two you may have actually seen are Peggy Sue Got Married and American Graffiti. There’s a scene in PSGM that takes place in a clothing store - that store really existed when I was a kid, but it went out of business when I was a teenager, and the town bookstore moved into that space. I worked there for a year and a half in my early twenties. It was funny to run across that movie on AMC and see my store on TV. The high school they used is Santa Rosa High, where I took my SATs.
The school in American Graffiti is my high school, Petaluma High. (Part of the movie is filmed in Modesto, where it takes place, but a large hunk of it is filmed in Petaluma.)
When I was at university I stayed (briefly) in student accommodation in a site several miles from the campus. Long before it became student accomodation, some parts of The Dam Busters was filmed there. Allegedly. It’s something that everyone knew. I’ve seen the film, and didn’t see anything I recognised.
Some scenes in Just Cause happen in a “courtroom” where I sometimes appear for my job. Various bosses of mine get to sit in Sean Connery’s spot from that flick. But I doubt it’s the same chair. The movie folks had to build a jury box for the scene since it’s really the Chamber for the Board of Commissioners rather than a bona fide courtroom.
I stayed at Harlaxton Manor while taking summer classes in 2006. You may recognize it as the exterior of Hill House in The Haunting. The interiors were filmed elsewhere.
The crappy little town in Utah where I grew up (Magna) was in the opening scenes of The Stand as one of the towns ravaged by the plague. it’s the scene where all the army trucks come barreling in at the beginning.
The town I was born in (another little crappy town in MN, Hibbing) was used in The North Country. The high school was used in the high school scenes.
Although I didn’t realize it at the time, the scene where the car enters the freeway from “The Chase” with Charlie Sheen & Kristy Swanson was filmed about a mile from my parents’ house in Houston while I lived there.
(in case you are curious, it’s the Northbound entrance to the Sam Houston Tollway just north of Bellaire Blvd). The scene starts with them getting on there, and goes until they’re roughly at Westheimer, then the scene switches.
The movie Mississippi Burning, a fictionalized account of the Goodwin/Schwerner/Chaney murders, was actually filmed in the town of LaFayette [pronounced ‘lah-FAY-it’], Alabama, and features in the background of some scenes an antebellum house (pic of the house today) my family owned and lived in during the school year from 1969-72.
The dorm I lived in for 5 years at UC Berkeley (first as a resident, then as an administrator) appears behind Dustin Hoffman–across the street–as he runs into the fraternity of Elaine’s fiancee towards the end of The Graduate. It’s on the corner of College and Durant two blocks south of campus.
The Scott Bakula movie Necessary Roughness was shot at my undergrad while I was there; I got a free sandwich for being in a football game crowd scene. I never got around to seeing it, but my mom swears my brother walks by in the background of one shot as clear as day.
Remember Independence Day? No, not that one: this Independence Day. It was shot in a small town about 30 minutes away from my hometown when I was a kid. My 7th grade math teacher and a few other people I know had bit parts.
Prague, well…see for yourself. The first “Mission: Impossible” was shot around the time I was there, and seemed to make a concerted effort to show every single landmark in the entire city, with occassionally hilarious results. The new “Casino Royale” Bond film and “The Bourne Identity” were much more subtle. They also shot “From Hell” right around or right after I lived there. A few people I know got to hang out with Johnny Depp.
The castle-looking “mansion” that is where the Holy Grail is kept in the Terry Gilliam movie The Fisher King is actually my high school, or rather, the abandoned armory in its courtyard.
It just so happens that I had taken a bus up Madison Ave. while they were shooting the movie (unbeknowst to me) and saw the addition of the staircase and other facades they had put on the armory to make it look like a residence while shooting the movie, and wondered what the hell they were planning on using that armory for now (“Did they sell it to a condo developer?”). Then I saw the movie in the theater about a year later and laughed out loud.
Snakeater was shot in Shediac, NB, Canada. I’ve never seen the whole thing, but I caught the scene where he’s on the jet-ski type thing, and I recognized the bay as being at Shediac Bridge.
The hotel I was married in is in Fargo. They have since renovated the heck out of the place, but in the movie all the interiors are the same as it was on my wedding day. It’s a very odd little memento.