The Middle also had the family take a passenger train trip from Indiana to South Dakota. The only passenger train service since 1970 is Amtrak, and they have no train that runs anywhere like that.
Like Under Siege Dark Territory they are on some fantasy passenger train. I know - trains are very photogenic and have a romanticism, but only a few routes exist, no one who wants to get anywhere in a reasonable time takes them. This isn’t the 40s. There are few scheduled passenger trains, and if Hollywood writers would do the absolute minimum research they’d know that.
If you want to remake Double Indemnity, you’ll have to find some other way of offing the husband,
Glad they got it figured out, for a while there the whole street was designated “no parking” and they diverted traffic away from the house. I think I’d definitely avoid moving into a movie-famous house myself, who needs to be scraping pizzas off your roof constantly?
Justified and The Dukes of Hazzard. Justified was supposed to be in Kentucky, the Dukes of Hazzard was supposed to be in Georgia. The first 5 episodes of Dukes were filmed in GA, the pilot of Justified was shot in PA. The filming of each show then moved to California, and you can tell with the dry scrubby mountains and lack of weeds and undergrowth. The Appalachian mountains are green and the landscape is a lot more lush.
The Muppet Movie was pretty obviously filmed entirely in California as well. I don’t remember if they specified exactly where they started from, but Kermit and Fozzie are supposed to be driving across the country to Hollywood from somewhere in the East. Shots of them driving past farm fields, which I assume were supposed to represent the Midwest or Plains States, are pretty obviously California. The mountains in the distance are a dead giveaway.
This weekend I watched a movie called “Wild Hogs”, where four Harley riding buddies decide to take a road trip from Cleveland to the Pacific. There are scenes of them in what looks like Colorado or further west - scrubby hills, curvy roads, etc. Then all of a sudden there is a shot of a sign that says “Welcome to Missouri”. So all of that western looking scenery was Illinois? (Plus, if you’re entering Missouri from Illinois, you’re going to be crossing a bridge over a rather large river.)
But what made it even more WTF was that not more than a minute later, they’re suddenly in New Mexico.
We were at the Oregon Film Museum when we saw their display about the Goonies movie. Their suggestion was to park across the highway below the house and walk the 3 blocks to get there. That is where we parked, there looks to be a closed down RV park. Going back to Astoria next week, meeting up with some friends.
Look them up on Facebook, they keep their schedule there. Not a big problem right now, but it is deep fryers on a landlocked boat so when the weather kicks up bad they stay closed for the day. They also close when they run out fish, and this does happen. The Bowpicker is unique–they only serve one kind of fish, fresh albacore, and your only inputs are do you want a half or full order. After you get your order you can pick from a large array of condiments to suit your taste. There’s usually a line but if you’re there during the week either a bit before regular lunch hours or between lunch and dinner it’s not generally onerous. Man, now I’m hungry for their fish, dammit!
A recent tv movie had a scene that was allegedly in Chicago’s Millenium Park. Problem was, there were tons of trees that appeared to be 70+ years old. Um. No. Millenium Park is less than 20 yrs. old. Before that, it was parking lots and a railyard.
The show Happy Endings also took place in Chicago but was pretty obviously not filmed there. The outdoor scenes all looked like generic city in a studio lot. It was close in some cases but otherwise the difference was very obvious.
These are literary, rather than TV or movies, but they bothered me a long time.
Mystery writers, as a class, seem to get Salt Lake City wrong.
Arthur Conan Doyle started it off with the first Sherlock Holmes novel , A Study in Scarlet. After Holmes and his detective work solve the crimes in the first half of the book, they second part of the book goes back several decades to describe how the circumstances of the crimes arose. It starts with a group pf Mormons – Brigham Young’s original troupe, IIRC – en route to what would become Salt lake City and rescuing some people stranded out “on the Great Alkali Plain” along the way.
The only problem is that the Great Salt Desert is to the west of the Salt Lake valley. You don’t walk through it on your way from the East to SLC.
Thomas Cook’s Tabernacle (1983) also managed to screw up SLC geography.
Most of the books about the Hoffman Documents affair (Forgery and murders) were written by out-of-towners, who proved it by not getting their geography straight. The Salt Lake-based reporters didn’t screw up.
Of the fictional mysteries, only Robert Irvine’s “Moroni Traveler” mysteries appear to be correct in their descriptions of the city.
In one of the Austin Powers movies, there’s a scene set in London during the Swinging Sixties. As they cross the street, the mountains of southern California are clearly visible in the background.
Most of the Arrowverse shows are filmed in Vancouver, as was Smallville back in the day. The dead giveaway is the Scotiabank logo on top of a skyscraper that shows up in pretty much every show at one point or another. Logos in the skyline plague Toronto-shot productions as well.
