I live in L.A., so I see stuff like this all the time. The coolest one recently was realizing that I work at the Vulcan Science Academy from the new Star Trek movie. It’s really SkyRose Chapel at Rose Hills in Whittier.
The weirdest though is watching something really old and recognizing some landmark, like the steps of the Art Institute of Chicago in I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang.
There’s a scene in the 1993 film, Sniper starring Tom Berenger which features him getting off a train in the middle of nowhere in Panama… no doubt off on a sniper mission in the rainforest.
Problem is, that train is well-known for the locals of Far North Queensland who would immediately recognise it as the train from Cairns to Kuranda.
Photos of aforementioned train and near the location of the scene.
Which, aside from being an awesome heist movie, also gets bonus points for being set in the then-brand-new Eaton Centre. It’s kind of interesting to see just how much the mall has changed over 30 years, and how much of it has stayed the same.
AS it happens, the book A Simple Plan is set in the NW Ohio rural flatlands near Toledo.
The Virginia State Capitol in Richmond stands in for the U.S. Capitol in both Dave and The Contender: Virginia State Capitol - Wikipedia. There’s a famous statue of George Washington that Gary Oldman’s character in the latter movie walks by.
As a Canadian, I see my country on display in movies all the time. When Hollywood wants to film an American metropolis they often choose to go on location in Toronto: usually the film is depicting New York (X-Men) or Chicago (interestingly enough, the movie Chicago was filmed in Toronto).
Vancouver is also often passed off as American cities, too; the new Twilight movie was filmed there, for example. Not to go off on a rant, but I recently saw “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassis” and noticed that the last scenes of the movie were very obviously filmed in Vancouver (anyone who has been there will immediately recognize the public library).
Montreal is another Canadian location for Hollywood, and I was really happy to see that the movie “The Score” with Robert De Niro and Ed Norton was both filmed in Montreal and actually took place there too!
Any other Canadians notice any other cities?
I stil haven’t seen that but I remember them filming there for several weeks.
Oddly, it was also featured in a scene in Iron Man but I have no memory of them filming that at all.
Speaking of Iron Man, the scene where Tony Stark shows off his latest weapon was filmed in the Alabama Hillsnear Lone Pine California. It’s a neat area filled with piles of rocks and scraggly deserty vegetation in the foothills of the eastern Sierras. Great place for photography and camping in the shadow of Mount Whitney. Hundreds of movies and TV shows have been filmed there; Lone Pine has a film festival every year, and it’s also home to an excellent museum.
So that you dno’t have to endure watching it yourself, Body of Evidence has a couple of Portland shots. The wealthy man murdered in the beginning apparently lives in the Pittock Mansion. Madonna lives on a houseboat somewhere, but wherever it is Willem Defoe has to take the Hawthorne Bridge middle lane Eastbound to get here there.
Which cracked me up, since the street names in the first movie are all Chicago streets (the Wachowski Brothers are from Chicago).
I’m another one from L.A. so obviously too many to mention, but the one I get a special kick out of is the German restaurant in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” where the nerdy guy takes Jennifer Jason Leigh and he forgets his wallet. It’s actually called Alpine Village and Oktoberfest there is epic. And yes, the waitresses do indeed look like that (well, they did 20 years ago anyway).
As I mentioned in another thread about dirty celebrities (see “Pitt’s pits”), my current city holds the dog track that was featured in “Oceans Eleven”.
I went to grad school at Caltech, which has been used as a filming location for quite a large number of movies and TV shows. Popping to mind immediately: The opening scenes of Legally Blonde were filmed on campus; and in Beverly Hills Cop the Athenaeum (the faculty club) stood in as the Beverly Hills Gun Club.
I grew up in a suburb of Fort Worth, Texas, and was very familiar with the Fort Worth Water Gardens when they appeared in Logan’s Run.
There’s a scene near the end of Cast Away where Tom Hanks is taking the box back to Butterfly Lady (never understood why he didn’t go ahead and deliver it for her, instead of returning it to her…anyway) and he’s driving along and takes a drink out of a bottle of water.
That stretch of road is directly between me and the lake I was heading to the day that scene was shot. The road was closed and I had to detour down miles of dirt road, pulling a boat. A boat that ended up fairly full of that same dirt. All for maybe 5 seconds of footage. All the other road shots that follow are taken miles away, near where Butterfly Lady’s house was located, but not that 5 seconds.
Pretty much every John Hughes movie, since I grew up in the Chicago suburbs.
The Sopranos was regularly filmed about a block from my house in New Jersey. Never cared about the show though.
I totally forgot this one: the building that gets blown up at the end of Terminator 2 is located in Fremont, CA, right off I-880. I used to drive by it every night on my way home from work.
As will the continuity of the all around the town car chase in the execrable Bruce Willis movie Striking Distance. Great views of Pittsburgh, though.
The house where Hannah, the elderly lady mentor of the main character in Flashdance lived is still standing on Pittsburgh’s South Side, about five minutes from my house. It’s undergone some renovations, the roof and columns of the porch were recently taken down and haven’t been replaced. I think of the film every time I drive by, though.
Not a show or a movie, but I just saw this commercial and I recognized the building instantly. (It’s for Cisco, with Ellen Page visiting a school that has a video link to another schoolroom in China.) “Holy shit, that’s Lunenburg!” As some might remember, I spent a couple weeks there a few years ago. It’s a little town down the coast from Halifax, and just about the last place I expected to see on my TV this morning.
Looking it up on youtube, there are at least two more (one at the town hall, one at the doctor) with some lovely shots of the town.
Another good Chicago-based movie is Hell Cab. The cab driver is all over Chicago in tha movie, driving around the Loop, up Lake Shore Drive, down to Hyde Park, over to O’Hare, to the South side, and several other places.
Any New Yorkers here?
Marty (Earnest Borgnine) was filmed in the Bronx. Gun Hill Road and White Plains Road.
I’ve always wondered if the EL Train is still there. That’s one of Marty’s more famous scenes.
My sister lives in the apartment building that was used for the exterior shots of Rhoda’s NYC apt. in Rhoda. (The building does NOT have a doorman.)
I only occasionally watched Sex & the City in reruns, but I’ve caught an episode where the four gals are on their way to a Yankees game and pile into a cab. They catch the cab on the very block I used to live when the series originally aired. The funny thing is, I can’t imagine when they could have filmed that scene, since I lived in that apartment for several years before & after the series aired, and never once did I notice a film crew on my block, two doors away from me.
I currently live in Brooklyn, in Bay Ridge, which is well known as the setting for Saturday Night Fever. I rented it specifically to see locations I know, but I did get a jolt when I saw the hardware store that John Travolta worked at - it’s the same one I’ve gone to. It looks pretty much the same inside as well. From what the longtime Bay Ridge residents tell me though, the whole Italian disco culture the movie depicts actually took place in Bensonhurst (another Brooklyn neighborhood) and that Bay Ridge in the late 70s was more of a ‘rock & roll hippie druggie’ neighborhood.
