New Yorkers, Los Angelenos and Vancouverans probably don’t need to reply.
What are the films or shows that you connect with strictly because of the location where they are filmed? Nothing to do with where the plot says they are set but where they did the filming. The film could be good or bad but you get some satisfaction just by recognizing what’s in the background. This thread inspired by seeing the barbershop I’ve been going to off and on since childhood turned into a movie set this weekend.
There are a couple off the top of my head. I.Q with Tim Robbins, Meg Ryan and Walter Matthau as Albert Einstein. At the time it was filming in Princeton I was driving through the town pretty regularly. I recognized many locations like Palmer Square and Carnegie Lake where they filmed the rowing scenes. I also heard some stories about the cast when filming. Matthau was as great as you would hope.
St Elmo’s Fire was a pretty bad movie but it was partially filmed at University of Maryland where I went. Georgetown wouldn’t let them film there so UMD had to act like a more expensive school.
Fire Birds was an awful movie but it was filmed on Fort Hood not long before I was there. And I was in Army Aviation so I knew all the facilities and even recognized some of the training areas.
I went to Basic Training at Fort Knox. Sure I recognized the Gold Depository from Goldfinger. But more importantly Stripes was filmed there. I ran on that obstacle course. The room where they meet Hulka was the actual room they brought in new recruits from the bus. All different now but it was exactly as I saw it.
An Officer and a Gentleman was filmed at Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend, Washington, where we held the annual Fort Worden Kitemaker’s Conference.
Torontonians can also probably excuse themselves from this competition, as we’d swamp the place. The TV show Nikita was a great game of Spot Toronto. Opening episode climaxes behind City Hall, there’s an alley two blocks from my office that’s used repeatedly, and I recognize a ton of the neighborhoods used. They’d go out of town once and a while for more “exotic” locations. There’s a stairway by the river in Cambridge, Ontario, that they used twice as a location (once it was Budapest, I think, I forget what it was doubling the other time). I recognized it because I’ve done a cosplay photoshoot on that same staircase.
The Boys is filmed here but they do remarkable things with CGI. The Vought headquarters is Roy Thompson Hall, but they’ve extended the curved walls up to skyscraper height. The interiors are used early on in the first X-Men movie; it’s where Magneto and Professor X have their first onscreen conversatrion. And The exterior of Hannibal’s house is across the street to the east. Back to The Boys…early in season one, there was a scene set in a electronics shop. Karl Urban exits the store, and we see Yonge Dundas Square …and then the pan flows right into Times Square. It was pretty trippy to see.
Gumball Rally had a lot of the cross country scenes filmed all in Arizona. It’s really obvious (and really ridiculous) to see scenes supposedly in Illinois on state highway 89A. Does this look like central Illinois to you?
Escape From NY had the climactic escape bridge scene filmed in St Louis on the Chain of Rocks Bridge, a route 66 must-see. I’ve visited it several times, and walked across.
My favorite is Used Cars, filmed in Mesa, AZ back when I lived in WI and though Arizona was the place the sun went down into. I bought a car from the dealership that “played” Roy L. Fuchs dealership. I think I went to the junkyard where the “mile” of used cars came from. The whole place has changed since then.
The movie version of The Fault in Our Stars was filmed in Pittsburgh for the tax benefits, but the novel was based in Indianapolis, and the scene in which one of the kids threw up in his car was on 86th and Ditch, probably in the parking lot that once belonged to the Village Pantry convenience store when I lived in Indy, before its parent company Marsh Supermarkets went under. I worked at the Marsh Supermarket in that shopping center, as well as the Blockbuster, and at one point lived within walking distance. The kids went to my high school, too.
A LOT of stuff is filmed in Atlanta. It’s fun to recognize the shooting locations. There’s currently a Netflix show filming in the lobby of my office building.
For the movie Vertigo, the scenes at the mission in San Juan Bautista and on the highways as Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak drive to SJB are all quite close to where I live.
Rodney Dangerfield’s Back to School filmed its exterior campus shots at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the fall of 1985, during my junior year there. Several scenes were shot just outside of my dorm. I spent a fair amount of time that fall watching movie production, rather than studying.
When I was working at Helene Curtis in Chicago in the early '90s, a few scenes in Backdraft were filmed in our offices (which were used as stand-ins for an alderman’s office).
Edit: I also remembered that a few scenes from the Samuel L. Jackson / Kevin Spacey film The Negotiator, involving a helicopter, were filmed in the vicinity of my office at Quaker Oats, also in downtown Chicago. One scene had the helicopter making close flybys of our building, which was very distracting the afternoon that they were filming it.
I hear State of Play (with Russel Crowe and Ben Affleck) was all shot inside-the-beltway in and around DC and Arlington (more specifically Crystal City, where I live) and supposedly pretty accurate because it captures all these little places that people who actually live in DC like to frequent.
A tiny independent film called Another Earth was filmed in and around New Haven, so as I was watching it, I was looking for familiar settings. (Like one scene that was clearly shot on the New Haven Green.)
Battlefield Earth ! Parts of it were filmed in an abandoned sewing machine factory in my home town. So they took this derelict site and painted it to look even more derelict, and left it that way.
Also, Amnesia: The James Brighton Enigma . Much of the movie takes place in Montréal, but at one point they’re driving around the guy’s home town in the States, filmed from inside the car. Of course they didn’t bother to fly a crew down to the U.S. just for that scene, they just drove around the main street of my old suburb, avoiding the most obvious signs in French; I was like “Hey wait a minute, that’s my shoe store!”. They also filmed an outdoor scene about 5 minutes from my current house.
About 15 years ago my wife and I visited Skellig Michael, a tiny island just off the southwest coast of Ireland. I don’t know what it’s like now, but at the time very few people were allowed on the island each day. There are hundreds of old stone steps up to some very old beehive huts where monks once lived. A gorgeous, really remote place, one of my top vacation highlights of all time.
So imagine my surprise when I saw from the newest Star Wars trilogy that Luke Skywalker was hiding out there all those years!
Las Vegas. I have yet to see a movie or TV show that doesn’t worship at the throne of Television Geography. Even in places way off the Strip and Downtown they still screw up where things are in relation to everything else. The only movie that got semi-close that I have seen is The Hangover.
I had been living in Benešov, Czechoslovakia, for several months when I saw Drop Dead Fred (no comma), which was filmed in Minneapolis and St Paul. I was immediately transported back to the cities I had left behind.
Of course, I can’t see any movie filmed in Moscow without recognizing lots of landmarks, since I lived there full-time from 1992 to 2008 (and another 11 months as a student). I’m often amused at how filmmakers rearrange the geography of the city, Val Kilmer’s The Saint being the most egregious example. (“Oh, wow! The dude just ran two miles in five seconds, and the American Embassy looks like the Peking Hotel!”)
Slapshot was filmed in my hometown of Johnstown, PA. The hockey scenes were shot in the Cambria County War Memorial, where I spent many a night rooting on our local hockey team, the Jets.
All the Right Moves was also filmed in Johnstown. I had moved away by then, but I still recognized many locations.
I’ve visited Las Vegas, New Mexico several times because it’s been a filming location for many productions. To name a few: Easy Rider, No Country For Old Men, Longmire, Outer Range, Red Dawn, and Paul. The town makes an effort to maintain the main drag with a late 50s/early 60s vibe.
