Trying to get a title to contain the key elements of a couple of movie and TV show questions has been challenging. Here’s a bit more of what I’m asking:
What movies or TV shows have been filmed in your area (town, neighborhood, county, whatever) that were really about that same area?
How well did the filmmakers do in presenting the geography with any care for accuracy and authenticity?
Which movies or shows could you suggest to potential visitors to your area as good examples of what it’s like near where you’re located?
With as many things being filmed in distant locations, and being disguised to represent other places supposedly near where you are located, it gets to be dishonest enough to make some people angry that their region has been so carelessly represented. A recent example might be the John Adams miniseries on HBO which had a lot of its location shooting in Hungary!
Think of all the Canadian substitutes for USA locations, rural and urban alike. Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, at least, have been New York, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco and no telling how many other places. No telling how many non-Nashville places have been “Nashville” for some movie’s (or TV show’s) purposes.
And then there are the deliberate misrepresentations within legitimate locations.
One specific case I can mention is the Harrison Ford movie Patriot Games which was filmed in (among other places) Annapolis near the Naval Academy. At the time, my son was living on the very street where some filming was done. When I visited him after the movie was out, he showed me where the cameras had been set up and how the shots (with clever editing) were arranged to give a totally unrealistic representation of that street. The end result was that it was not even close to authentic.
On the other hand, an Elvis low-budget TV movie (or maybe a straight-to-video) was filmed (at least in part) down the block from where I used to live in Nashville. If you look at it frame by frame you can pick out the houses and driveways and other features of that block, but it’s put together in such a way that it could be anywhere in the South, for Pete’s sake.
What I’m really curious about is, “are there any examples you can think of that are true-to-life in terms of the layout of the geography near where you live?” If there are, would you name as many of them as you can think of?
I hope that’s specific enough (and clear enough) that we don’t go wandering all over the movie universe.
I suppose Six Feet Under would qualify. The funeral home was located, I believe, in Pasadena. I don’t live that far from it and things looked accurate to me. There was an episode in which a character drove out to Azusa, which I am more familiar with. Other episodes sometimes showed the mountains, beaches, etc.
Driving Miss Daisy did a reasonable job with Atlanta. They had to create a Piggly Wiggly out of whole cloth, but at least they did so in a space that used to be a grocery store. And they used an actual old automobile dealership in Decatur for a scene set at the Cadillac dealership.
One of my favorite Milwaukee films is American Movie, the documentary about struggling local filmmaker Mark Borchardt. Obviously the locations are true since it’s a documentary, but in general it captures life in the Milwaukee suburbs very well (at times both depressing and comical). It’s a movie that’s very close to my heart.
About six months ago I passed Mark Borchardt walking down the street, and he nodded and smiled at me. I was too surprised to say anything besides hello. He looks exactly the same though. Nice guy.
But wasn’t the distance to Azusa portrayed inaccurately? It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but didn’t they treat Azusa as being way out in the desert?
I don’t have complaints about Boston generally, but for many years it seemed as if everyone who lived in Boston lived on Beacon Hill (Paul Sands’ Friends and Lovers, Charles Emerson Winchester on [B[MAS*H**, George Banacek on Banacek, EVERYONE on Beacon Hill). And it’s just not big enough (plus most of them couldn’t afford it). Things got better later on. St. Elsewhere didn’t require people to live there. Neither did Boston Public or Boston Legal.I think the writers were beginning to learn a little geography. But you still don’t get the sense that they really know anything about the area.
I’m looking forward to all of the Baltimore shows that have everyone live on Federal Hill. Of course, then I’ll have to tell everyone that my half-brother lives a couple blocks from Federal Hill, no really, he really does.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off for Chicago. The movie came out my senior year in high school when I was living in a suburb in Chicago.
The high school in the movie was Glenbrook North H.S. in Northbrook, Illinois. My high school was one town over, and part of the film was filmed in my town.
I’d actually done and seen almost everything in the movie before I saw the movie (including visiting the Art Institute, and looking down the windows at the Sears Tower). It was positively creepy, and it was then that I realized that the world really did revolve around me.
I didn’t know this movie was filmed in Cleveland until I started watching it, and that first scene in Public Square put me right back there as a little kid. My mom loved to do her Christmas shopping at Higbee’s every year and I remember being one of those little kids looking at the elaborate window displays.
San Francisco is almost always done wrong, simply so they can get the money shots (Coit Tower, the bridges, etc). Monk is the absolute worst offender of this (why are the SFPD involved in a case that’s clearly way down the peninsula; how are they drinking at some downtown SF bar that is still open at 4am; where the hell is THAT house / neighborhood?)
But one of the better ones is Dirty Harry. Not just for the feel of the place and neighborhoods, but also b/c they don’t play fast and loose with the geography - Scorpio gets stabbed on Mt Davidson, and limps down towards Kezar Stadium - totally conceivable. Bullitt - not so much.
The Straight Story is the best example of a Midwestern movie I’ve ever seen. It portrays us as a little quirky, but without all the Fargo cheap shots. It has the added bonus of great country landscape shots that couldn’t have done a better job of showing just what it really looks like here.
Dude! I was processing magazines here at the library and by COMPLETE CHANCE opened up a copy of “Fate”, which is one of those woo-woo magazines with a large section where you send in letters about seeing Bigfoot or whatever, and there was Mike Schenk! Telling some story about deer! Just out of the blue!
I only watched the show Santa Barbara a couple of times, but according to IMDB, none of it was shot in Santa Barbara.
I’m disappointed to find out that the hotel El Pollo Del Mar (Chicken of the Sea) in L.A. Story was not actually in Santa Barbara.
I just got done watching Cutter’s Way, which was definitely shot in Santa Barbara. I was rewinding it to try to figure out where on State Street the coffee shop was, which building at the harbor was included, and which neighborhood they lived in. It looks like they restaged the Fiesta parade and shot it passing through De La Guerra Plaza, but I’m sure it was shot right around Fiesta. I’m guessing that the polo scenes were shot at the polo field.
I’ve actually watched Dirty Harry from a condo complex called The Quarry which was built right on the site of the shootout at the quarry at the end of the movie.
Francis Ford Coppola filmed The Outsiders and Rumble Fish in and around Tulsa. The films are set in the 1960s, and were filmed in the 1980s. A few anachronisms are present, but there’s a real feel for what Tulsa was like.
I only know of a couple of very minor TV dramas which have been both based and filmed in Suffolk. I’ve seen other programmes where there’s been a scene or more here. But they never get the accent right, substituting some generic West County nonsense. East Anglia just isn’t on the radar of the London drama colleges, too busy making sure people can produce a variety of Yorkshire accents with supposed particular political connotations (I wish I was joking), and clearly casting directors just can’t be bothered to do their research.
Other than that, they do the place justice, as far as I know. I’ve not seen anything attempting to recreate either the contemporary Suffolk, or any other time I would be familiar with! (Location-spotting in historical dramas, though, is quite good fun. I’ve spotted some of Little Britain as being filmed here, too, although I’m not going to give it all away
One movie that has a location that I’m familiar with and which presented that location faithfully was At Close Range (1986) where the Franklin, TN, town square was used several times for kids’ hangout and cruising zone. There were a few set dressing gimmicks that renamed some of the businesses but the layout of the square was realistic. It was shot at night mostly so that may be how the filmmakers felt they could get away with leaving it pretty much as it is.
There’s one little scene in Starman (1984) that’s not over two miles from my current location and (except for the fact that there’s now a CVS drug store on that spot) it looks pretty much the way it did in the early 80’s. The only real problem with this as an example of what this thread is all about is that the location was supposed to be somewhere totally different, out west or somewhere. The movie made no pretense of the scene being in the Middle Tennessee area, but it jumped out at me when I saw the movie the first time. It was like, “Damn! That’s just down the road!”
I suppose I ought to go through this list to see how many of these things I’ve seen and which, if any, are close enough to real life for me to mention. But I’m working off memory for the time being, in hopes I can spin off other comments in the thread to see what else might come to mind.
I’m in Chicago and some of the top films I’d list on this topic are The BreakUp, High Fidelity, and the Gwyneth Paltrow drama Proof.
*The Break Up * and *High Fidelity * are both almost love letters to the city, and felt very natural.
Proof takes place mostly in Evanston or one of the other north burbs, and I thought it was very realistic when they would drive from one place to another - the areas they’d drive through between locales were accurate. Also, they got a lot of the street names and intersections in the city correct.
