Are TV shows okay? The US Queer as Folk is set in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is a very distinctive city. There are no freaking bridges in the show, and very few hills. The weird thing is, there’s an episode where they go to New York, and they obviously bothered to leave Toronto or wherever and actually go to New York. I mean, it’s clearly and recognizably New York. But they couldn’t be bothered to even take establishing shots of Pittsburgh?
…Or the western end of the Isle of Wight.
Much of the story is set in Suffolk, which does suggest that the Yarmouth in question is Great Yarmouth, however, Dickens apparently wrote much of it while he was on the island - and there are (perhaps completely spurious) claims that it’s the IOW Yarmouth in the book. Haven’t read it myself, so maybe I’m also overlooking some really obvious reference pinning it to Great Yarmouth.
All of those California license plates on the cars in Halloween, set in Illinois.
As David travelled from Blunderston (definitely in Suffolk) to Yarmouth by Barkis’s cart I doubt if they made the 240 mile journey to the IOW Yarmouth when Great Yarmouth is only ten miles away.
I mentioned The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, which was filmed in Springfield, Massachusetts. Peter goes on a hunt to find the statue of the Pilgrim that he keeps dreaming about. You think he would have noticed it when he came into the city on the road that runs right by it.
This is pretty minor. Stripes with Bill Murray was shot partially in Louisville, Ky. Early in the film they’re in a taxi headed for the airport, crossing a bridge. The only bridges in Louisville take you to Indiana, not the airport, which is south of downtown.
There is a made-for-TV movie (c. 1988) starring Cheryl Ladd called Bluegrass and it was mostly filmed here, in the Bluegrass region of Central Kentucky. Amusingly, there is a scene in the beginning of the move where the Ladd character works on a horse farm in Arizona, or somewhere similar in the Southwest. These scenes, too, were filmed in Central Kentucky, at a horse farm whose house is indeed done in a Hacienda architectural style.
I’ve never seen Heaven’s Gate but I’ve heard of it as one of Hollywood’s most expensive disasters. Once in a compendium about turkey-films I saw that the opening scene shows the hero graduating from Harvard University – but the scene was actually filmed at Oxford in the UK. Why? Harvard’s still there, you know! Right there in Cambridge, MA! No, it doesn’t look like a 19th-Century school any more, but there’s all kinds of ways you could film it there with the old buildings as backdrop and block, screen or edit out all the cars, power lines, etc. Why spend a fortune on an overseas shoot?!
The movie The Silver Streak with Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor was supposedly set in the American midwest, but was actually shot in Alberta. In one scene you can see the train going past a city which, if memory serves, was identified as Chicago. Only you could clearly see the Calgary Tower on the skyline.
And apparently, the sun sets in the East.
No wonder we got so lost there.
I would guess that alone explains the decision.
It’s not really hilarious, but nobody ever gets Salem, MA right. It’s incredibly tight and packed, and everything looks cramped. I understand they shot two episodes of the old “Bewitched” there, but I don’t remember them. They shot a couple of establishing shots for Hocus Pocus there, but the rest of the film was shot elsewhere. You couldn’t get lost in a graveyard in Salem – or even hide from witches there – you could easily toss a stone across one. Aside from the main drags, most of the streets are claustrophobically narrow.
That’ll be the obvious reference, thanks.
I was recently rewatching the movie Shoot-Em-Up. Now, keep in mind that this movie is purposely way over the top in every aspect (it was originally visioned as a live action Bugs Bunny-Elmer Fudd movie). It was filmed in Toronto, but would use stock footage of New York City, Boston, Washington, Baltimore, Chicago and possibly even more cities to establish shots, even though most of the movie was supposed to take place in the same city (which is never mentioned by name).
There was a drought.
Bruce Almighty was set in Buffalo, NY (my hometown), but virtually nothing in the film looks like it. The skyline of Buffalo was CGI-altered to look more like the skyline of Manhattan (concentrating all the big buildings in clusters by the lakefront) and in at least one scene the ‘street’ is instantly recognizable (to me at least) as the generic ‘city street’ set used by “Seinfeld”, “Friends” and any number of NYC-based shows.
The first few scenes of Stuck on You were supposed to take place on Martha’s Vineyard, but they were filmed some 60 miles away in Rockport. Since those are my two favorite places in the universe, I was not fooled.
The Verdict was set in Boston. Pretty much all of it is accurate, but there’s a scene where Paul Newman pulls the pull tab off of a beer. Massachusetts didn’t have pull tabs in those days.
I’ve seen at least one film set in Florida that featured mountains in the background, although I can’t recall what bad film it was. The highest point in Florida is an overpass and measures about 300 feet above sea level. Florida is a relatively cheap place to film so I’m always surprised when they use a location double.
On the other coast, the main thing that made me chuckle when watching Sleepless in Seattle was the place where Meg Ryan’s home is supposed to be, in Fell’s Point. The doorway that she walks out was the entrance for a store that sold condoms (Condomania?), at least about the time the movie was filmed.
Most of Keys to Tulsa was filmed in Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas. The IMDb says that Tulsa was one of the filming locations, but it sure doesn’t show. I bet the only place in the USA that this neo-noir dud made any money was in Tulsa, where a bunch of folks like me paid to see it just to see whether our hometown was well-depicted. Pfui.
Le Voyage dans la Lune, perhaps? *
- Based on Verne’s novel From the Earth to the Moon, in which the first cannonshell-spaceship to the Moon is launched from “Stone Hill,” a (nonexistent) high point in Tampa (a place, BTW, where it is extraordinarily difficult even to find a stone, excluding limestone, coral or “coquina rock” shell-aggregate); from which Tampa’s noble and venerable Stone Hill Science Fiction Association derives its name.
Elizabethtown was actually filmed around Kentucky, though I don’t recall how much of it was actually in E-town. There were a couple of head-scratchers.
–There was a whole sequence where people were giving complicated and convoluted directions about how to get to E-Town from Louisville. In reality, it’s like this: 1.) Get on I-65. 2.) Get off I-65 in E-Town. It’s hard not to get there.
–As he’s leaving the airport and headed toward E-Town, they show him driving toward the Louisville skyline. Nice shot, except that E-Town is in exactly the other direction. I’m sure he would have figured it out when he crossed the river into Indiana.
(Note that these don’t even make the list of what was wrong with the movie.)