Dyersville isn’t all that close to me, but I thought Field of Dreams nicely represented rural Iowa, exteriors and interiors, and the people.
It’s really rare for a movie or TV show to use an actual cornfield. It was critical for this movie.
Country was well done too. They paid attention to the little things, like when Sissy Spacek made Mel Gibson’s lunch to take to the field, and she put his hamburger patty between thick slices of bread rather than on a hamburger bun. Now that’s country.
The Back to the Future movies did a good job with the 50’s middle-America town square. I don’t know where it was filmed but it could have been anywhere in the midwest.
Add Tex to that as well - they filmed some in Bixby, and the basketball scene was in Broken Arrow. You could get paid to be in the gym (I didnt get there on time).
A friend of my brother is an extra in the Outsider’s fight scene - they grabbed some kids from the local Tae Kwon Do studio (Kang’s) as I recall. The father of a girl I dated told me that the greasers were well portrayed, since he had been one of them at the time.
The filmmaking Farrelly brothers are from my hometown, and have more than once set their movies in a fictional version of my hometown. They did film some scenes in town, but I remember seeing Something About Mary and seeing “my” high school and laughing because it was so obviously some Hollywood high school not our actual school… so they’re really not good examples.
The TV show Providence really didn’t capture it either. The scenes shown in the credits were legit, but the rest? Meh. Not authentic.
I think the closest true representation has to be the scenes in The Sopranos when the NJ mob bosses come down to RI to meet with the bosses and they end up being two ancient wizened old men in an old house.
The only way I can stand to watch Monk, even though I very much enjoy Tony Shalhoub’s performance, is to pretend that it takes place in some mythical unnamed city instead of San Francisco. The total wrongness of everything related to the Bay Area is just too annoying.
OTOH, I’ve been watching the first season of The Streets of San Francisco on DVD, and it’s a joy. Even though it was filmed 36 years ago, almost everything in the city, and especially the streets, is still completely recognizable and realistic. I love how they try to use all of the great San Francisco settings, from iconic ones like Coit Tower, Fort Point, and cable cars, to the lesser known everyday ones like BART, the Mission, and the Financial District. It’s one of the few shows where people drive on the correct routes from location to location, because they really were driving around San Francisco while they filmed it. It’s made me wish that they would film another show here so that I could see how they would use the current landscape. I even rode a cable car today for the first time in ages, just because the show was making me so nostalgic about them.
I lived in Toronto for years and seeing productions filming, about to film, or just finished filming, was a not uncommon sight. Yet in spite of the fact that Toronto stands in for many other cities, very few movies/shows are specifically set in Toronto. The only two that are probably best known internationally (as opposed to local productions primarily for Canadian distribution) are the movie Canadian Bacon and the Simpsons episode where the family goes to Toronto. Neither of those did a good job, but in fairness, neither set out to do so. They did show the CN Tower and that landmark is in Toronto, but outside of that, there was little else to suggest Toronto was anything like it actually is.
I live in Calgary now, and the only film I can think of that is set here is Cool Runnings. What they did show in that film was pretty accurate–the bobsled run still exists in the city, as do the ski jumps and some other Olympic sites; and in winter, it is entirely possible to exit the warm airport into subzero temperatures and snowstorms.
Hee hee hee, yeah. I laughed my ass off when I heard that The O.C., set in my lovely little hometown of Newport Beach, was going to be filmed in LA…
In college, my friend Heidi had similar fits of laughter watching Beverly Hills 90210, since that was her zip code growing up, and they missed by a mile most of the time.
Smalltown NW Ohio isn’t exactly a prime Movie setting, but there was Welcome Home, Roxy Camichael starring Winona Ryder and Jeff Daniels set in and partly filmed in Clyde, Ohio. It’s been a really long time since I’ve seen the movie, and IIRC, it didn’t really connect with me in a regional way. I mean, the story could have been smalltown anywhere… it didn’t really feel like there was any connection excepting, maybe it was the screenwriters little homage to Sherwood Andersen’s Winesburg, Ohio, possibly…
It also had a huge gaffe with a scene clearly set on Lake Erie, in Clyde. Which is impossible, unless Winona walked about 20 miles to the lake.
It’s still about twenty miles (or more, depending on what part of Pasadena they’re in). I know that in some parts of the country that is a “really long drive” even though it seems like right next door to Californians…
That reminds me of Tommy Boy, which has a couple scenes in Sandusky, Ohio, where they go out and take in the carnival-like atmosphere of … a county fair :smack: Something tells me they had Cedar Point written into the script but plans fell through for permission.
I think its interesting that Monk is so bad but Psyche does a pretty good job of representing Santa Barbara. Although I don’t think their office is any where in Santa Barbara that I’ve been.
I remember being shocked and … well… dismayed that Election captured Omaha as well as it did. They filmed at the dreariest time of year, and certainly captured the parts of Omaha that embody hopeless empty suburbia. That and I swear I went to high school with Tracy Flick. Of course, considering they were going to originally film at my high school, my level of horror could have been a lot worse!
(Really, it’s not that horrible here. But it ain’t no Paris!)
I’m not from San Francisco, but I remember finding a web site on *Vertigo * which showed the shots in San Francisco and compared them to the present day locations.
How accurate would the Bay Area dopers say *Vertigo * shows San Francisco?
For a real Calgary movie check out WayDownTown. Basically it’s a bunch of young business people bet a months salary that they can not go outside for a month, made possible by the +15.
Hmmm… it features both CJAY 92 and Don McKellar. Gonna have to think hard about seeing this one.
Seriously, thanks for the tip. In spite of my aversion to both CJAY and films with McKellar in them, this sounds like one I might actually enjoy. Thanks again!
Aside for those not in the know: the +15 (“Plus Fifteen”) that Ludy is referring to is a system for getting around downtown Calgary. It consists mainly of enclosed bridges crossing streets between buildings. The bridges are about fifteen feet above street level, hence the name. The system is quite extensive, connecting through such places as hotels, malls, and office towers, allowing one to go pretty much anywhere and do nearly anything in the downtown area without going outside, making it handy in our cold, snowy winters.
The New Jersey locales in Dogma were filmed on-site. The film Being John Malkovich has some scenes where people get magically dumped by the side of the NJ Turnpike, and if that wasn’t filmed on-site, it sure looks like it.
