It might be cheating since I knew ahead of time before I watched them, but:
There is a 1962 movie called “The Intruder”, directed by Roger Corman and starring William Shatner, which was shot in my hometown of Charleston, MO. It was 20 years before I was born, and understandably a lot has changed, but I do recognize some streets and such (as well as the old courthouse).
There was also a pretty recent movie called “Killshot” which had some scenes filmed where I currently live, Cape Girardeau, MO. Very few scenes made it to the movie, but I recognize them. It was exciting for this region.
That’s the one. The lighting guy told me the title and a little bit of the plot. I anxiously awaited its release. Not only was I a little disappointed with the movie, I was hugely disappointed that I didn’t see the scene they were shooting.
I once had the opposite sort of thing happen to me - visiting somewhere and suddenly realizing I’d seen it in a movie.
Several years ago my wife and I were visiting some friends who live in the Seattle area. One day we took a day trip out to Port Townsend, and as we were driving through Fort Worden I got this really weird deja vu sort of feeling - everything looked really familiar, despite the fact I had never been there before. After a few minutes I finally realized we were driving right through the middle of where they filmed “An Officer and a Gentleman”.
Anyone who has lived for any amount of time in San Francisco has dozens of such examples.
The most specific to me is Dirty Harry. I proposed to my wife about twenty feet from where Scorpio boards the school bus at the end, (Grand View Park), and as Harry steps on Scorpio’s leg on the field in Kezar Stadium, you can see my house as the camera pans away. Also, my wife worked in the China Basin building, visible in several shots in Magnum Force while Harry is chased by the motorcycle cops at the end.
I was really surprised when I saw the movie Hawaii not that long ago to see that the New England scenes were very clearly shot at Old Sturbridge Village in Sturbridge. We’ve been there many times, and the big house and the church are pretty distinctive.
I just saw an episode of Law & Order SVU in which detectives were investigating alleged Satanic worship in Stapleton (a town on Staten Island).
I’m not sure the locations were authentic but I remember Stapleton from my childhood (I was born there) as a dark, decaying version of small-town America, complete with moldering town square.
Not bad at all for devil worship, actually. I could see a Stephen King story set in one of the old abandoned breweries…*
*in Googling this I find that Stapleton was actually the epicenter of Staten Island’s once thriving breweries, one of which opened in 1851 and was co-owned by Giuseppi Garibaldi (yep, the Italian revolutionary hero).
I’ve visited Gibsland, Louisiana where Bonnie & Clyde were executed on a country road.
It’s 75 miles from my hometown. There’s a stone plaque marking the spot that’s been heavily spray painted and vandalized. (well, it was 15 years ago).
The death car with over 180 bullet holes was a carnival attraction when I was a kid. I saw it several times at the fair. Cops opened up with BAR’s and shot the hell out of that car and the outlaws. Payback for the Barrow gangs cop killings in Texas.
I’ve always heard Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty’s movie’s death scene was filmed on location in Gibsland. But, I haven’t been able to confirm it.
For example, if I walk out on my back deck at home, I have a beautiful view of Nakatomi Plaza from Die Hard.
There’s an episode of the original Star Trek where they beam down to a planet infested with flying plastic pizzas. (“Operation: Annihilate!”). There’s one exterior shot where they show the building where Kirk’s brother has a lab. It’s actually the music building at UCLA (Schoenberg Hall ) where my wife works.
My favorite moment, however, was when I was watching the old Adam West Batman movie on DVD with my kids. There’s a scene where they get in the Batcopter and fly over Gotham City. In fact, they’re flying over my neighborhood in west L.A! You can clearly see the Occidental Petroleum building and the big synagogue on Wilshire. And the reaction shots on the ground are filmed over on The Avenue of the Stars in Century City near where Nakatomi Plaza would be built 20 years later … .
(Oh … I’ve also gone hiking at the reservoir where the intro to The Andy Griffith Show was shot. (You know, the pond where Opie skips a rock.) It still looks pretty much the same.)
The Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles appeared in nearly every upscale car commericial of the last few years. A lot of time you couldn’t really make it out unless you knew the building and the streets around it very very well.
Thunderball and Lightfoot was filmed in my hometown of Great Falls Montana. I was either not born or very young at the time. I saw it recently and recognized some of the local landmarks.
The parking garage in the season finale (or the episode right before it) of Heroes season 1 was my parking garage at work. I saw it and said “Hey! I recognize those floor numbers!”
Part of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes was filmed at UCI, where I’m a student. Here’s a picture. Much of that is a painted backdrop of course, but the two buildings in the front are my library and my computer lab. Damn dirty apes!
Well I dig razor clams right by the Peter Iredale and have lived on this beautiful coast all my life. Born in Astoria, probably die there, no place else I want to go. I can drive onto the beach in the morning and not see anyone else for miles. The salt cairns from the Lewis and Clark expedition were a few miles south at Seaside.
I haven’t seen The Road yet.
The Goonies was filmed here and Kindergarten Cop. And several other movies have scenes showing the area. Although it tends to be a little confusing to see a site in San Francisco change suddenly to the Oregon coast.
Twelve Monkeys has a lot of shots in Philadelphia (including one where they try to pass off Centennial Hall as being in Baltimore) but it results in an amusing ‘error’ that they can’t really be blamed for: At one point a character backs up against the Wanamaker Building, with its prominent brass logo and all. But mere months after they filmed Wanamaker’s went belly-up and the building was filled by another department store. No big thing except that they movie time is supposed to be taking place a few years in the future.
Not me, but my fiancee, while watching No Country for Old Men. During the motel scene she said, “Hey, that’s Central Ave. I used to work in that building.” Albuquerque, New Mexico apparently being Hollywood for “Texas”.
Oddly, we saw pretty much the same shot (though taken decades earlier) in a framed still at a local Red Robin. I didn’t know that block or two of Albuquerque was so famous.
The Matrix was largely filmed in and around Sydney, and I particualrly recognised the building Neo & Morpheus are walking past in the scene with the ‘woman in the red dress’. It’s the main branch of Australia’s biggest bank, who I was working for at the time.
A bit of a doozy though is a very forgetful WWE movie from a few years ago, The Marine (?) or something like that. It was shot in Brisbane, which is my home town, and the entire movie was one long game of ‘pick the location’. That’s actually the only reason I wanted to even watch the movie, you could just tell before even seeing it that the movie itself would be bad.
I don’t know if this counts but on my honeymoon to Hawaii a couple of years ago, we did a Hummer tour of Kualoa Ranch, with locations for Godzilla, Jurassic Park, Windtalkers, Pearl Harbour plus the TV show Lost.
Beautiful Girls, ostensibly set in upstate New York, was filmed in Stillwater, MN, not far from my wife’s hometown. I’ve been in a bunch of the buildings that showed up in the movie.
A Serious Man used a bit of Interstate Park in northwestern Wisconsin as a stand-in for the US/Canadian Border; it was just a brief shot but I recognized the section of road from having biked on it many times. Again, it’s only a few minutes from my in-laws’ house.
A Simple Plan was shot in Ashland, WI a few weeks before I rotated through there in medical school. The back of the clinic building where I worked was filmed as the place that Bob Thornton’s character, Jacob, lived; they also used the hospital for some scenes - I lived in the basement of that hospital for six weeks! The movie was set in Minnesota, and was supposed to be shot there, but there wasn’t enough snow at the original location so filming was moved to Ashland.
In Chain Reaction the capitol building in Madison stands in for the US Capitol building.
There were a bunch of films set in Portland, OR that had recognizable locations - The Hunted, Foxfire, and Drugstore Cowboy. I rotated through Good Samaritan Hospital, which Matt Dillon breaks into in that last one.
I forgot a rather recent example: “Julie and Julia” was filmed in and around my old neighborhood, and in one scene, Amy Adams buys meat at the K & T Butchers, a store right around the corner from my old house, where my family bought all its meats for years.
Thinking about Toronto, I realized that I recognized many of the places in the recent Hairspray (the one with John Travolta). The school that the kids go to is a real school in Toronto; I used to go by it quite often. Also, the busy intersection with the streetcars in the background (I think this is one of the places the kids get on their school bus) was recognizable as a Toronto intersection (Dundas W and Roncesvalles?).
Still with streetcars, any time you see them, chances are it’s Toronto. The Black Stallion had one brief scene where the Boy is at home after the sea rescue. It is a leafy, tree-lined street, and a PCC streetcar in Toronto Transit Commission livery crosses the street in the background. This was in Forest Hill, a wealthy Toronto neighbourhood–thus, the streetcar must have been a St. Clair Avenue car.
Blues Brothers 2000 had many scenes familiar to a Torontonian. Willie’s strip club was just down Front Street from the Canary Restaurant (east end of Front, near Bayview), which is a (somewhat dubious) Toronto landmark. And when the Bluesmobile crossed the suspension bridge on the way to Queen Moussette’s place in Louisiana, it was actually crossing the small suspension bridge on Finch Avenue in Scarborough (east end of Toronto). And of course, the band played “Ghost Riders” at the fair–which took place at Markham Fairgrounds, just NE of Toronto, with the Markham Fair’s logos prominently displayed but unrecognizable to anyone but local residents.
Finally, Silver Streak. The train stations in LA (where Gene Wilder boards), Kansas City (where he and Richard Pryor fool the police looking for Wilder), and Chicago were all actually Union Station in Toronto. I’ve boarded trains at the same tracks and in the same sheds as Wilder, I’ve certainly used the Men’s Room where he puts on blackface, and I’ve been in the Great Hall (where the train finally crashes at the end) more times than I can count. Kind of fun to see Union Station stand in for three different train stations.
Rushmore, by Wes Anderson & co. The school is St John’s School in the River Oaks neighborhood (the posh part of town), and the public Grover Cleveland High School he attends is Lamar High School directly across the street. The cemetery is Hollywood Cemetery off main street.
