No, it isn’t.
“Eye-eighty.”
“Eye-five.”
No “the” is ever applied to interstates in any west-coast state, at least not by someone who is from there (like me).
Northern California vs. southern California. Dead giveaway that someone is from the south or has lived there for a while is that they stick “the” on freeway names. People in the north don’t personify freeways; it’s just “I-5,” not “the I-5.”
Damned Yankees. 
I’ve never heard anyone from Southern CA do this, nor anyone from any SW state (AZ, NM).
Another one was when they took Highway 17 to get from (I think) Long Beach to LA. Ummmm . . . Hwy 17 is down by the Mexican border.
Yeah, I know those mountain ranges. 
It’s hard for Vancouverites to watch a lot of movies without being pulled out of the story a bit, even with less blatant violations. (Gastown for small-town Alaska in Insomnia was particularly hard to take.)
The name of the show escapes me now - an American adaptation of a British detective series, where the protagonist lives in a motel, ostensibly in San Francisco All the establishing shots for the motel prominently featured its actual signage - “City Center Motor Hotel,” plainly showing a stylized Vancouver skyline. (Much plainer than in the motel’s webpage, obviously.) What the hell was the name of that series?
Actually, Hwy 17 is in the Bay Area. It runs from San Jose to Santa Cruz.
I was just in LA about two weeks ago and heard one of my friend’s friends say this, and I remembered thinking “damn that sounds funny,” then I promised myself I would never do the same.
I live in San Francisco currently, and lived in WA before that, and I had never heard it before.
Sharpes Waterloo doesn’t quite resemble rain sodden,green Belgian fields so much as somewhere a lot more hot and dusty but as there are only about twelve people standing in for the massed amies of the Allies and France thats the least of their problems.
All planets in the Stargate universe are remarkably similar to N.California?Oregon.
Sorry I’m a Limey
As to Pushkins.reference to N.Ireland terrorists dressed as Frenchmen and with southern Irish accents it just goes to show the cunning of them but the British army after it got over its initial confusion reponded by dressing our troops as South American marching bandsmen and speaking in an obscure dialect of Mandarin.
That sorted the bad guys out alright.
Born and raised in Southern California. It’s “the 5” to me, and always will be. I never put “I” in front of it.
In Broadcast News, Holly Hunter gets into a cab in DC and starts giving very explicit directions to the cabbie about the route to the destination. Except the directions make no sense. Things like “go north on x, and take a left on y”, except X and Y don’t intersect.
It’s been too many years since I’ve seen the movie to remember the actual street names, but I was living in DC at the time. And I thought, how cheezy can they be? Ok, if they want to film somewhere else, but they can at least get the dialog right.
Thought of one more. At the end of Anywhere but Here (1999), Susan Sarandon sees Natalie Portman off at LAX for her flight cross country. However, that’s clearly the international terminal she’s seeing her off at. The international terminal is big and wide and open, makes for a better wide-view closing shot, I guess, than the more closed-in domestic terminal.
(But the actual gate she goes through is somewhere else, because in the international terminal, the gates aren’t right there at the front. You have to go through security and walk a long way.)
Not to mention the palm tree trunks plainly visible in the yards. (Though they were at least careful enough not to show any palm fronds.)
I was born and raised in northern California, had several friends in southern California that I visited with some regularity, and lived in San Diego for five years, during which I had a girlfriend who lived in the LA area. This is one of the regional variations that both northern and southern Californians notice. Believe me, it is common. People outside of southern California do not, to my knowledge, say “the” before highway names.
Seconded. Lived in San Francisco since 1992, have several friends in LA - they all use “the” and I’ve never heard anyone use it in the Bay Area.
It’s a dead giveaway in shows like Monk, where Adrian Monk, who grew up in San Francisco and has lived there his whole life, said in one episode “I’d like to report an accident on the 101.” No way he’d say it like that.
The original series, or the movie? The movie was shot in New Orleans.
It was odd to see Lee Circle in a scene that was supposed to be in downtown Atlanta. I guess the big monument to General Lee was appropriate for the movie though.
WMATA hardly ever grants permission to film in any of their facilities. I recall seeing an outdoor Metro platform in one movie, one guy was chasing another guy in and out of a stopped train. Wish I could remember what it was, I want to say the French Connection sequel with Ed O’Neill but IMDb only has NYC & Tokyo as locations for it.
The worst example I’ve heard of involved an obvious NYC subway train standing in for Metro with passengers disembarking into the Old Post Office Pavilion, instead of using Federal Triangle’s escalators across the street.
I haven’t read the entire thread, so someone may have mentioned this. Its a stupid movie, and maybe it doesn’t count since its all fantasy, but *The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen * made me want to punch my DVD player when they went to Venice. The entire sequence was BS, but a ship the size of the Nautilus could not fit in or navigate in the canals of Venice. There are very few streets in Venice where a car could actually fit. To my knowledge there aren’t even any cars in Venice. (I’ve been there three times as recently as last friggin’ year).
I guess it just upsets me because people might actually think thats what Venice is like.
Does the Errol Flynn Robin hood movie count? Because I think its hilarious that in medieval england you can see a white truck drive by in Sherwood Forest.
Sci-Fi filming crews must crash into each other in the woods in Vancouver all the time. I have seen the same grove of trees in Stargate, Battlestar Galatica and several SciFi specials. Those trees should get mentioned in the credits!