Venice, Italy, is another city where I instantly recognize lots of landmarks, since I was there for Easter in 2000. There’s one movie (I don’t remember the name) that starts with a woman snapping photos as she strolls along the embankment near the Bridge of Sighs, and each time the shutter clicks there’s an insert showing what she’s supposedly looking at.
None of the images are within the realm of possibility.
In the movie Silver Streak, there is a shot of the train coming into St. Louis, but it is actually Calgary.
Downtown Calgary subbed for Metropolis in the first Superman movie.
Calgary also stood in for Detroit, I think, in Exit Wounds.
The Place Beyond the Pines was shot in Schenectady, and it was fun picking out locations as I watched it. It did a good job of getting things right.
The original Gone in 60 Seconds (1974) has a 40 minute car chase filmed in Long Beach and LA’s South Bay. Unlike the remake and almost every film featuring a chase scene in LA, this one is 100% geographically consistent - No Nick Cage jumping a curb and ending up on the other side of town.
When I was 17 (1980) some buddies and I saw the film at one of the Laemmle’s art houses and a few days later we successfully traced most of the chase from memory. This is before we had it on VHS or any help from the Internet. Most of the route was unchanged in 1980.
Some other internal scenes with glass elevators were shot at the Plaza of the Americas on the western edge of downtown Dallas. I used to eat lunch there all the time during the first stint that I worked downtown.
I also used to take the DART train from Pearl Station, which is right across from the old Dallas High School which was used as the run-down precinct headquarters.
The scene in the movie “The Chase” where Charlie Sheen kidnaps Kristy Swanson and gets on the freeway starting the eponymous chase was filmed at the Sam Houston Tollway @ Bellaire northbound exit- I drove through that intersection constantly as a kid- it was very near my house.
Oh yeah. I lived in Toronto for over 40 years, and I recognize a lot of places.
The exteriors in Hairspray, for example, were all shot in Toronto. Lord Lansdowne school (near College and Spadina) was Tracy’s high school, and during her opening song, a PCC streetcar passes by–the TTC keeps a couple of them maintained for movie shoots.
Billy Madison’s elementary school was the same one I went to, and the school you see in the background when he’s playing with the kids in the playground, was the middle school I attended. I didn’t go to his high school, but I could have–it was one of the high schools I could have gone to aafter middle school. Still, I recognized it immediately, after taking swimming lessons there as a child and passing by so often in my car in later years.
Back to Silver Streak: Toronto’s Union Station stood in for the train stations in Los Angeles, Kansas City, and Chicago. I’ve used the washroom where Gene Wilder applies makeup, and certainly walked through the concourse many times.
I’ll think of more. There are so many.
The 2012 movie Promised Land (which sucked IMO) was filmed locally. They used our friend’s farm market for some scenes, changing the name of the business to Rob’s Guns, Groceries, Guitars and Gas.
One observation my friends noted was that Frances McDormand was very nice. Most of the others (Matt Damon) avoided interactions with them, but Ms McDormand was really friendly and hung out with the family.
bolding mine
Which is funny, because LA Union Station often doubles for other train stations.
A few movies filmed in Seattle, my old hometown, but very few shot there extensively. Most of them got some obligatory backgrounds of the Needle and the waterfront and stuff, and then decamped to Vancouver.
One exception is the grungy dark-SF thriller Class of 1999.
It filmed almost exclusively in Seattle, without trying to hide that or pretend it was somewhere else. The streets and buildings are very familiar to residents of Wallingford and Capitol Hill.
Too bad the movie’s kinda crappy.
A much better filmed-in-Seattle movie with recognizable locations is Mamet’s House of Games.
On the flip side of the premise, a few months ago I spent a week in Tunisia, and I made a point of visiting Kairouan, the old religious capital which doubled for period Cairo in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Some of the city has changed in the last few decades, but a lot of it hasn’t. It was really fun to see how recognizable much of it still was, and to realize that pretty much all those varied scenes and locations in the movie were filmed in a limited area of seven or eight blocks, just shifting the camera a bit to aim at a different door or using the same street looking back the other direction.
Toronto substituted for Chicago in Due South, which is painfully obvious if you’ve ever spent any time there. It took me a while, but I think I’ve nailed the location of the phone tower featured prominently in the background of an early episode. (Behind the Walmart at Pharmacy and Eglinton.)
Well, in fairness, the Los Angeles part of the movie does show the front of LA’s Union Station when Gene Wilder gets out of his taxi. But when he boards the train, he does so from one of the platforms in Toronto’s Union Station. Then, when the train pulls out of “Los Angeles”, the city skyline is that of Toronto–there are a number of recognizable buildings (the Bank of Montreal building particularly stands out).
There’s a cafe near where I live in the Roslindale part of Boston, and it looks like it hasn’t changed since the 40s - it’s the Pleasant on Washington street - I go there a lot.
I overheard the bartender say they had been filming a movie there, a new take on the Boston Strangler story. Looks like Keira Knightley and Carrie Coon are in it, will come out in 2023.
One chase scene in Dark Knight is very obviously Lower Wacker Drive.
Mr. Roosevelt, a relatively recent indie film, had a scene filmed and set at Twin Falls, along the Barton Creek Greenbelt in Austin. I- and many, many other Austinites- swam there a lot. As a matter of fact, I almost drowned in that exact spot.
A climactic scene in Barbarossa, a Willie Nelson and Gary Busey Western (1982) was filmed at Pedernales Falls in Texas. That was a summer vacation spot for me as a kid, and I actually filmed with a Super-8 camera in that exact location.
The part of the segment “The Crate” from Creepshow was filmed in Margaret Morrison hall at Carnegie Mellon when I was a student. We interviewed Hal Holbrook and Adrienne Barbeau for The Tartan, CMU’s newspaper.
The HBO miniseries White Lotus was filmed in early 2021 at the Maui Four Seasons. My family vacationed there during Spring break that same year. When the show aired in July of that year, it was amazing how many scenes we had been in the same locations just a few months before.
I agree generally, but I’m still going to claim Scott Pilgrim as it was shot in my neighbourhood.
It was shot when my kids were both under 6 and they closed the park, removed the play equipment, and dumped fake snow. Some unhappy faces in my house that week.
The Kevin Kline movie “In and Out” was set in Indiana but for some reason they shot it in Northport, NY where I lived at the time. It is a little harbor town and they added a fake second story to “Skippers Pub” (nautical themed) to replicate a small Midwest town.
We regularly go to Crystal Cove State Beach in SoCal, where one of the cottages is known for being a setting of Beaches, the Cher movie.
This past weekend the hurricane that hit at a full moon high tide caused terrible erosion (can’t figure out how to add a pic)
Smokin’ Aces was filmed where I grew up. I’ve been to that boat launch many, many times.
There is an old ski movie, Winter A-Go-Go, that I can identify individual trees and rocks that I rocognize. It was made in 1965.
A few from near my hometown in the UK, a small village in the south of England:
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