The opening of The Hunter and the later airport scenes were filmed in the area where I spent my first 11 years. LeVar Burton’s character gets captured in Herscher, Illinois; all of my siblings went to Herscher High School there at some point. Dad and I went to a barber in Herscher after the one in the our tiny town permanently closed; McQueen and Burton pass by a pair of billboards that I recognized as being on the way between the two towns.
I recall a group of people who had something to do with the movie visiting our tiny town; I don’t remember if they were there to film or were location scouts. I stayed home, figuring I’d just get in their way. The payphone scenes were supposedly filmed at the pair of phones in front of Jim Buckman’s Enco station.
I was going to say, are you sure it was filmed in SLC? Because I was pretty sure it was filmed here in Lawrence KS, it’s part of the local lore. Looks like it was both!
I’ve never actually seen the movie. I wonder how much of 1962 Lawrence KS is still recognizable.
(According to the Wikipedia article, Herk Harvey worked in Lawrence at Centron Films, which made educational films. In college I lived in an apartment across the street from their studio.)
Yeah. I didn’t say it was all filmed in SLC. It’s pretty obvious that a lot of the scenes are filmed somewhere other than Salt Lake. All of the Utah scenes are either indoors or at Saltair, so you don’t have the jarring contrast of Utah mountains with Kansas flatland.
The made for TV movie Birds of Prey (nothing to do with DC comics) started with a bank robbery at a SLC bank where my aunt worked. I’d been there and recognized the location. I think they picked it because it had a helipad on the roof (Zion’s Bank by Air, it was labeled. Wonder how many fly in customers they got. )
If LA is open for mentioning, there was an Emergency! episode where a VW went into the Marina Del Rey channel at the exact spot where I would park and watch the boats come and go.
There was a CHiPs episode where Ponch moves to Marina Del Rey. It made an impression - at the time, MDR had this reputation of a hip happening place. When I moved to LA I lived in MDR. I finally saw that episode recently, and it sure looks like he moved into my apartment complex. The episode never had a great establishing shot, but the apartment interior looked right.
Back to Utah: Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid used locations around Zion National Park, including the site of Grafton. (If you want to avoid the crowds of Zion and still experience being surrounded by beautiful red rock cliffs, take the drive across the bridge and down the bumpy road to Grafton. Chances are you might have the place to yourself.)
I think that was probably the best use of it. It was also memorable in Five Hundred Days of Summer and was the site of Robert Forster’s office in the detective TV series called Banyon.
Ray Bradbury had a short lived series which did some of his stories. The opening had him going to his supposed office - inside the Bradbury building. Fun little joke.
I was living around Princeton when this came out. The gas station was in Hopewell. The producers redid it to look like a 1950s station. Fun to drive past. But them riding around Palmer Square, since there were stores you could see that came even after I moved to Princeton in 1980 - like Thomas Sweet’s, which started on Nassau Street and moved to the square.
If someone already mentioned this, I apologize, but I used to go to a workshop in Bodega Bay, right where the Birds was filmed. Except the schoolhouse was not in Bodega Bay but in Bodega, a few miles inland.
The corporate headquarters in Brainstorm (1983) was the Burroughs-Wellcome building in Research Triangle Park, NC. (Well, they used the exterior, at least.) The building was notable for the many 22.5-degree surfaces…both inside and out.
I knew it well, from top to bottom. It required asbestos abatement, as well as having ongoing problems with water leaking in from the oddball panel joints.
For me it is Dogma by Kevin Smith. The scenes in Red Bank I know well and Asbury Park (The Ski Ball/beating).
The Wrestler for a lesser degree. A few scenes are in Asbury Park.
Clerks by Kevin Smith: I know the area, but not super well. Clerks II showed many little bits of my county, most note worthy was the Evil Clown of Middletown. But Clerks II was filmed in Southern California. BTW: The Scary Clown is outside a really great supermarket size Liquor Store. It started as a Food Circus Super Market. It is a relic of the 50s.
Star Trek IV, The Voyage Home (The Whale Movie). All scenes shot on the USS Enterprise CVN-65 (Aircraft Carrier) were actually filmed on my Carrier, The USS Ranger CV-61 while I was onboard. I’m almost definitely in the Hangar Bay scene. The Nuclear Power Plant was actually my Machine Space (we were not Nuke).
Parts of Top Gun where also filmed on the Ranger, but not while I was aboard.
The Beniker Gang (1984): I haven’t seen this movie since the mid-90s. It is a largely forgotten film starring Andrew McCarthy. Part of it was filmed at the old and now abandoned Moon Motel in Howell, NJ and a few shots along Rt 9 were included as I recall.
The Apple TV Show Severance is filmed at Bell Works, the old Bell Labs in Holmdel, NJ. I know it really well and many friends and my wife use to work there.
I forgot, parts of Annie was filmed at Monmouth College (now Monmouth U) in West Long Branch. As was one scene in the Godfather. A chapel my sister got married in, in fact.
**Great IMDB feature for this:** https://www.imdb.com/search/
*Set the first advance search field to* Filming Locations
Speaking of that, while set in San Francisco, the scenes at the aquarium were filmed at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I instantly recognized it the last time I re-watched the film.
I forgot… “Best Little Whorehouse In Texas” has some scenes that were filmed at Texas A&M’s Kyle Field, a place I’ve probably seen 100+ games over the past 30 years.
So were some scenes in “Revenge of the Nerds”.
Not sure if this counts exactly, but the actual real-life Dallas Cowboys practice field namesake for the movie “North Dallas Forty” was located about a quarter mile from where my house is.
Cool. I need to see this sometime. I never worked there, though I was offered a job there, and visited many times while I worked at Bell Labs.
I’m pretty sure the aquarium with the whales was really the Monterey Bay aquarium. In 1985 I had a conference in Asilomar and we rented the place for dinner. It was before they expanded.
In “Spies Like Us”, they go to the Lancaster Drive In. I was still living in Lancaster at that time and saw “Spies Like Us” when it debuted When the Drive In appeared on the screen, everyone in the movie theater reacted.
I’m pretty sure that Drive in was where I saw the first Star Wars film. But there were several drive in theaters in Lancaster in the 1970s, so it might have been a different one. I was probably too young to have gone to that movie as I remember being absolutely terrified of Darth Vader.
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