Having often driven through Grover’s Mill on the way from Princeton to the Cranbury Book Worm, there is hardly a Grover’s Mill in Grover’s Mill anymore. There are lots of little towns in NJ, still on the signs, that don’t really exist anymore.
Here’s my list
In the bad monster movie, The Beginning of the End, giant grasshoppers march from Champaign to Chicago - with those tall Illinois mountains visible in the background.
In IQ, where Walter Matthau plays Einstein, they took great care to refurbish a gas station in Hopewell to look like a mid-50s gast station. However they had Einstein ride around the real Nassau Square - without bothering to disguise the signs on the modern stores.
In A Beautiful Mind, they shot the Princeton scenes in Princeton - but it looks like they shot the MIT scenes also in Princeton. It sure wasn’t MIT. You also never heard the train going by the Nash’s house, which was located just feet from the New York / Philadelphia line and maybe 100 feet from the Princeton Junction station. They have the interior wrong also, but I’ll give them that.
One more. In the first Nero Wolfe on TV (not the good one on A&E) Archie drives to a marina, with lots of nice boats. None of them in Manhattan. Does it count that Archie also never had a problem getting a parking space in mid-town Manhattan?
The A&E one, on the other hand, was practically perfect - down to shirt color.
But Grover’s Mill does exist – Pepper Mill lived there until she took up with me. It’s been absorbed into West Windsor, but it’s still a recognized part of it.
Heck, the actual Mill is still there. As is the windmill someone shot at, thinking it was a Martian Tripod.
Too many for San Francisco. Bullitt, they’re basically driving all over the place with no regard whatsoever for continuity. Play Misty For Me, they walk along having an unbroken conversation, and every time the camera switches they’re ~100 miles away from the last location. Pacific Heights: Potrero Hill, actually. Quicksilver: bike messenger with a million dollar loft apartment. Mrs. Doubtfire: a multi-million dollar Steiner house, owned by a jobless actor and his interior decorator ex-wife.
And my favorite: The Wedding Planner. Hundreds of people gather to watch free movies in Golden Gate Park (has never happened) at night (you don’t want to be in GGP at night, ever) with no one wearing a coat (you would freeze to death) next to a bunch of carnival rides (that don’t exist) and then it starts pouring down rain (harder than I’ve ever seen it rain in SF in my life). Ugh.
Also true for the chase scenes in Prague in “Mission: Impossible.” Tom Cruise runs around a corner and suddenly he’s at another location on the other side of the river, ten miles away. He runs around another corner and he’s ten miles away again. If you have any knowledge of the city at all it looks jarringly like he’s teleporting.
“RoboCop” was supposed to be set in Detroit, but it was so clearly Dallas that the suggestion it was somewhere else borders on hilarious.
In the 1989 indie film Chameleon Street, the scenes set at Yale University were actually filmed at the University of Michigan Central Campus. I had some serious cognitive dissonance when the protagonist started talking about being at Yale, and the Michigan Student Union building was featured prominently on-screen.
Well, existing is a relative term. Down the road from me was Marshall’s Corner (named after the guy who really found the gold at Sutter’s Mill) - population - a bowling alley, a motel, and a few goats. I think some guy was the honorary mayor.
I thought of one more, by the way. In Star Trek IV, the whale tank, which I think was supposed to be in Golden Gate Park, is actually the big tank in the Monterey Aquarium. Not a whale to be seen there.
And yet, that doesn’t stop innumerable and enormous plot holes from surfacing in movies set in New York (and presumably L.A.).
Rumble In The Bronx has already been mentioned, or as I like to call it, Rumble In Vancouver. The end scene with the hovercraft running amok on the beach had me rolling. I’ve been to Orchard Beach in the Bronx. I’d prefer to be on the beach shown in the movie any day, even with a runaway hovercraft.
In Spider-Man 2, one of the main action sequences is of Spider-Man having to stop a runaway elevated subway train that’s going through the middle of midtown, amid tall office buildings. There is no such line – the only elevated trains in Manhattan are north of 96th St. through residential (apartment building) areas. It seemed to me to be a Chicago el, if not completely fictitious.
And every New Yorker I know who saw the movie The Day After Tomorrow, which has a huge oceanic tidal wave crashing into Manhattan from the east as a crucial plot element, had the same reaction: What happened to Brooklyn, Queens and the rest of Long Island? Manhattan doesn’t border the ocean; its eastern boundary is the East River, which divides it from Long Island. There is no way for a wave to go straight into midtown and flood, say, the main branch of the Library because the largest island in the continental US acts as one big-ass buffer.
I already knew I’d have to suspend disbelief in terms of environmental science to watch the movie. But geography was taken down by friendly fire!
PS - Is that Wikipedia entry for Long Island for real? It says: The Native American name for Long Island is Big Dick, meaning "The Island that Pays Tribute". Just because it should be true, doesn’t mean it is true!
This was on TV not long ago, the first time I’d seen it since I moved out here. I noticed the whole “whale center” was the aquarium (I think even the outside of the building). But what I got stuck on was. . . why doesn’t anyone they stop on the street know where Alameda is? Not even a general “Somewhere in the East Bay”?
It was actually filmed outside Ridgeway, Colorado, which is not that far from Telluride.
Speaking of Colorado being a stand-in for another place; The Father Dowling Mysteries series which supposedly takes place in Chicago, in fact was filmed in Denver. If you watch carefully, virtually all the cars have Colorado plates and watch for bus signs or billboards. Also, on wide shots, you can occasionally catch the Rockies (the mountains, not the baseball team) in the background.
“I Still Know What You Did Last Summer” was set in the Bahamas but was actually filmed in Mexico. The fact that they show mountains should tell you that it was not filmed in the Bahamas. (Highest point in the Bahamas is 209 feet)
Yeah, I think Chicago is probably one of the most visually iconic cities out there since so much of what makes it popular are the huge landmarks. Moreso than LA. NYC, Chicago and San Francisco are easily the most visually recognizable if not the best known.
If Wiki is to be believed the original script was much more specific about the scenes being set in Chicago, but then it was made to be more homogeneous in production. This could be why parts of the dialog make it abundantly clear but the visual effects less-so. Overall it makes it a little odd.
I vaguely recall reading that the City of Pittsburgh objected to the show and made it clear that they would make it very hard to do any such filming in Pittsburgh.
