It is still there: Potter School House, Bodega CA
Here’s the map —
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This is more second hand…Part of The Green Mile was filmed at a house very close to friends of my wife. I’ve driven by several times. The story is that when she went to visit her friends they held up traffic during filming. She could see cast and crew, including Tom Hanks.
Dredd and Avengers:Age of Ultron both had scenes set in parts of Johannesburg that were instantly recognizable to me. Standing in for Mega City One in the former, and some completely fictional African city that a) has ship-breaking on a beach one Hulk-leap away (that’s an Asian thing IRL); b) uses SA Police vehicles and uniforms; and c) has an awful lot of White people in it, for the latter.
I visited Cardiff on my first trip to the U.K. as I’d become a Doctor Who and Torchwood fan that year. I’ve been back multiple times; it’s easily one of my favorite places in the world. It’s fun enough spotting all the locations in the city centre used in the flagship show (often doubling for London), but Torchwood is actually set in the city, and rewatching the series after spending a lot of time there, I realized just how much some episodes play like a tourism montage. Not complaining, if it gets people to visit, so much the better. I think Doctor Who still films there but I guess it’s mostly on soundtages, as I recently rewatched the first Whittaker season and didn’t spot a single location I knew.
The King of Staten Island has scenes from multiple locations familiar to me when I was growing up on the Island. In particular there’s Ralph’s Famous Italian Ices in Port Richmond, where my father and I used to go.
I remember Ralph’s not only for great lemon ice, but also for the time we were waiting on line and somebody’s three-year-old wandered over, stumbled against my legs before I could see him, and fell to the ground, wailing. His mother screamed at me like it was my fault. My father thought it was hilarious.
A few scenes from Hocus Pocus were actually filmed in Salem, Massachusetts – but not many of them. Salem is a tight, little congested town, and I can understand their wanting to film in a more open and controllable area (the people at This Old House on PBS were actually sent off the lot at one Salem house they were renovating for taking up too much room). They also filmed parts of two episodes of the 1960s TV series Bewitched here – a rare thing for 1960s TV 9and which gave a justification for TV Land to erect a statue of Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha Stevens in Salem.)
The obscure film Three Sovereigns for Sarah was filmed in Salem, too. It was about the witchcraft trials, and it had Vanessa Redgrave and Patrick McGoohan in it, but it’s still not well known (and not listed on most lists of Filmed in Salem movies)
There have been other movies that filmed in Salem, I see by a quick internet search, but i haven’t seen them.
A Christmas Story was shot in Public Square and on the near West Side of Cleveland. I remember going down to Public Square around Christmas myself as a kid. Higbee’s and Halle’s would have those elaborate window displays, and I would think about what a cool job that would be, to set all that up. The house in the movie is now a museum.
The wedding scenes from The Deer Hunter were shot at a Russian Orthodox church in Tremont.
The live scenes in American Splendor were shot entirely in Lakewood and Cleveland.
Draft Day went all over Northeast Ohio - Browns Stadium, DiSanto Field at Case Western, Kent State’s football stadium, one of the Cuyahoga Community College campuses, the old SeaWorld location in Aurora, which became a water park until it closed for good.
I haven’t seen The Avengers, but I’ve heard there are shots in it from Public Square and the old bank building which now houses a Heinen’s grocery store (coolest looking grocery store ever).
A buddy of mine was traveling and stopped at the museum. He sent me a picture of the lamp and said he bet I couldn’t guess where he was. I’d just read something about the museum, so I answered immediately.
A lot of the exteriors, including the house, were filmed in Cleveland, but much of the film was shot across the border both in St. Catherines (the school scenes) and in Toronto. The house interiors were on a soundstage here, and the Chinese restaurant and the tire-changing scene are both TO locations. No big surprise, as director Bob Clark was a Canuck (people sometimes forget that Porky’s had oddly Canadian origins).
I tried it for my hometown and got 272,442 hits. Shoulda known better.
Did you live in FW or just visited a lot? I’ve lived in FW all my life, so I’ve been to the gardens many times
I’ve lived in the DFW/Denton area all my life. Been there many times, myself.
I have a book which consists of the locations various monster and science fiction movies were filmed, mostly around LA. The most interesting to me was “Robinson Crusoe on Mars” which was filmed in Death Valley, mostly up on the hills so the locations wouldn’t look so familiar. It also filmed in the crater, but it used color filters so the place did not look familiar.
The Shining has some nice cinematography. Jack Nicholson’s yellow VW Beetle going up the Going to the Sun Road in Glacier National Park in the opening scenes. And the outdoor shots of the Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood looked like a beautiful building. So, 20 years ago on our honeymoon we stayed in that lodge. It’s a beautiful place. We’ve returned a couple more times.
Just visited quite a lot. I have been to the Water Gardens several times.
Another one from Toronto here.
The 1999 comedy “Dick” about the Watergate scandal is set (go figure) in the Washington D.C. area. Some scenes were filmed in Toronto. In the spring of 1998, I was a senior at Lawrence Park, a Toronto high school in an upper-middle-class neighborhood of the same name. One fine day, I came to school, and saw all these classic cars on the North parking lot. I then walked into school and saw a movie set around one of the classrooms. There were all these young people dressed in hippie fashion. The classroom itself would have had some organic-looking chalk drawings on the blackboard. This would have been for a minor scene in the film where one of the two girls that are the protagonists of the film (Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams) gives a report to her class truthfully claiming that she met Nixon on their field trip to the White House, and the hippie teacher praises her creativity (while implying he doesn’t believe her), whereas the other girl makes the same claim of having met the President in her report to her class, and her teacher, a stern old crone, tells her that falsehood is on the road to Hell. I believe I recognized other parts of the Lawrence Park neighborhood in the film. It would have stood in for where Dunst’s family had their house.
The 2019 film “In the Shadow of the Moon” is another good example. Toronto’s downtown core was a stand-in for Philadelphia. Watching that film, everywhere I could recognize Toronto. Moreover, there are scenes which happen near/on the edge of town and even these I thought I could recognize. Philadelphia is on a river (the Delaware), yet the body of water used was clearly Lake Ontario. I suspect the relevant scene was filmed around the Scarborough Bluffs, an escarpment of sedimentary cliffs on Toronto’s Eastern shore.
Final example from Toronto: not a movie but a TV series. “Kung Fu: The Legend Continues” (1993) was set in an unnamed “anytown USA”, but filmed in Toronto (and in a soundstage just outside town). I was an extra in two scenes of the episode “Reunion”, filmed end of 1992. One scene was filmed at the Westin Harbour Castle, a nice hotel on the lakeshore, and set in real time. The other was filmed at the soundstage, on a set that represented a Shaolin temple, and set in a flashback to, I think, the 1970s. Anyway, there are in this series locations that are very recognizable to me as a Torontonian. For example, Toronto’s Chinatown along Spadina Avenue. Or the City TV building. Or some of the biggest skyscrapers (e.g. the Scotia Plaza). They didn’t do much to hide the Toronto location. In the episode that I’m in (I think), there is even a radio broadcast referencing the Gardiner Expressway, a local landmark.
One more example, this time from Prague, where I live now. This is another city that film makers like to use as a stand-in for other places. The 2017 film “The Zookeeper’s Wife”, a historical film set in Warsaw at the time of World War II. Old Warsaw was largely destroyed in the War, whereas Prague’s historic parts were (largely) spared. In this film, the Prague park Stromovka, which contains several elegant old buildings (e.g. a planetarium) and is near the city exhibition grounds, was a stand-in for the Warsaw Zoo/the immediate area. I recognized this shortly after starting to watch the film; the landmarks were unmistakable.
Speaking of Toronto, “Fly Away Home” was filmed and set near there. The farms northeast of Toronto, around the Kawartha Lakes area. On a business trip there years ago I crossed the area and it’s beautiful farmlands and lakes and streams.
I like when they pretend to be Chicago/New York and the big BMO logo shines at the top of First Canadian Place.
That said, one of Chicago’s home town banks (Harris Bank) now goes by “BMO Harris” (they were bought by Bank of Montreal in the '80s), and uses the BMO logo now.
I’ve only ever been to New Jersey once (and I thought it was pretty), but if I ever got to Holmdel, I’d definitely try to find the Bell Labs, just to see where Penzias and Wilson discovered the echo of the Big Bang.