So we’ve gone from home states to towns with this question. I live in NYC, NY so …as those overly cliche headline writers love to say… fuggetaboudit!
Let me know when you get down to blocks.
Current residence of Atlanta:
Too many to list all of them. The ones with any personal connection for me include Driving Miss Daisy, which was filmed in the Druid Hills neighborhood where I lived when I first moved to Atlanta (I rented a room in an old mansion on Springdale Road, just a couple of long blocks from the Lullwater Drive location of Miss Daisy’s house). The grocery store was an old store in the Little Five Points district that was at the time the Sevananda Natural Foods store. The TV series Matlock (set in Atlanta but filmed in CA for the most part) used an exterior establishing shot of the Hurt Building downtown to represent the outside of Matlock’s office; I worked on the fifteenth floor of it for a couple of years in the late eighties.
Former residences and haunts in Arkansas:
Much of the TV miniseries The Blue and the Gray was filmed around Fayetteville and Fort Smith, Arkansas. I was in high school in Fayetteville at the time, and a lot of my friends and friends’ parents appeared (or at least were filmed) as extras. One is even listed in the credits on IMDB, as is her father. My best friend spent a few days as bugler in some battle scenes, but I don’t think he made it into the final cut.
Fayetteville was also the location for an early (mid '70s) Jonathan Demme writing/directing effort, Fighting Mad, produced by Roger Corman and starring Peter Fonda (those two facts should tell you all you need to know). Corman had previously shot his Ma Barker tale, Bloody Mama in Arkansas, and sent another promising young director, Martin Scorsese, to Arkansas for 1972’s Boxcar Bertha, during which Barbara Hershey (in the title role) and David Carradine purportedly conceived one of Hershey’s children on camera.
Billy Bob Thornton’s movies have of course featured Arkansas settings and locations. One False Move (which he wrote but didn’t direct) was shot mainly in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, quite close to Augusta, where my parents lived when I was born, but there are also numerous scenes that use locations in and around Clarendon, where I spent most of my middle childhood years. Sling Blade was shot primarily in Benton, where my dad lived for a couple of years on a temporary assignment (it also features my college classmate Natalie Canerday as Frank’s mom – she was also in One False Move as the Bill Paxton character’s wife).
Percy Adlon’s Rosalie Goes Shopping was set and partially filmed a few miles away from Clarendon in Stuttgart (where my sister lived for a few years) and DeValls Bluff.
Clarendon also appears in the town scenes of Norman Jewison’s A Soldier’s Story, filmed primarily at Fort Chaffee near Fort Smith. Fort Chaffee has had a pretty successful movie career after its second life as a refugee camp, first for Vietnamese and then for Cuban refugees. Large parts of it still look like they did in WWII, so it’s been used in other films set in that era. Besides A Soldier’s Story, it’s appeared in Biloxi Blues and the made-for-TV The Tuskeegee Airmen.
The regrettable Charlie Sheen vehicle Three for the Road was filmed at a variety of locations around Arkansas, including some scenes that didn’t make the final cut at my alma mater, Hendrix College in Conway. Conway (specifically what’s now University of Central Arkansas) also served as the location and setting for September 30, 1955 with Richard Thomas, Dennis Quaid, Tom Hulce, and Lisa Blount, about a small-town college kid’s reaction to James Dean’s death.
Finally, I’m assuming Gone With The Wind is familiar to most folks. The mill that’s visible in the opening credits is a block away from one of my college girlfriends’ house in North Little Rock. There’s a picture of it on the North Little Rock Vistor’s Bureau home page. It’s actually all concrete, and was a Depression-era public works project. It was only a couple of years old when GWTW was filmed.
There are another couple of dozen movies filmed at least partially in Arkansas – those are just the ones I personally know something about.
When I was a kid living in Sapulpa, OK, they filmed a scene or two for ‘Rumblefish’ there.
Dallas, TX (where I live now) gets used a lot for futuristic movies - Logans Run being one of the more memorable ones. RoboCop used our city hall because of it’s weird architecture.
‘Office Space’ really freaked me out. Mike Judge, the writer and director, is from the Dallas area and was a cube slave just like me, and the movie very accurately captures the feel of life around here. The opening scene in the traffic jam was filmed on a stretch of highway that I had to drive on every day on my way to work.
Well, I posted some stuff already in the other thread, such as that the New Mexico church shown in John Carpenter’s Vampires (it’s St. Michael’s Cathedral) was the church in which my brother was married. But, here’s another tidbit for you: City Slickers was filmed very near our garbage dump. From the dump, you could see the food tents and such.
Also, the TV series Earth 2 was filmed around Los Alamos, not far from where I worked when I was in NM. They chose the location because it had pretty well all the sites they’d need in one spot: forest, mountains, desert, lakes…