My favorite one, and it is in a thousand movies of DC big wigs, in their offices, is the view out the great man’s window. Everyone has a nearly straight on view of the Capitol, just off center to the right, and including all the steps and such.
It’s amazing just how many secret offices there are at the Mellon Gallery, which is the only place not actually on the grass of the Mall itself where you can get that view.
Another one I love is the scene in Contact, where they are leaving the Senate Hearings, and are being interviewed by the press, on the marble steps, in front of the graceful white columns . . . of the Lincoln Memorial!
Oh, and by the way, the CIA, in Langley, VA, is not a quiet farm in the countryside. It’s a chain link fence between two highways, and the only thing left of Langley, which actually was a small village, long ago, is a shopping center, which is now part of McLean.
Tris
“People are difficult to govern because they have too much knowledge.” ~ Lao Tzu ~
My personal favorite has always been the mostly forgetable Bird on a Wire which featured a full-fledged “Chinatown” neighborhood in Racine, Wisconsin. Actually Vancouver, BC…perhaps the smallest town Vancouver has ever “stood in” for. To top it off, they also threw in a “Detriot-Racine” ferry. That’d be one long boat ride.
Back in 1986 there was a TV movie “Penalty Phase,” much of which was filmed in the small Oregon town where I live. It starred Peter Strauss and Melissa Gilbert (of Little House on the Prarie fame) and is actually quite a decent little flick about a judge up for re-election who discovers corruption in the court and that the big show trial which just concluded with a guilty verdict may be because of an illegal search. (See IMDB for more).
Our town was picked because we’ve got a fine looking circa 1910 classic courthouse and at the time of the filming, some huge old trees across the street which made for a great opening shot.
Continuity wouldn’t matter to anybody but natives, but at one point, Strauss goes down to the river (a matter of several blocks) and suddenly is standing beneath a picturesque bridge in Portland, Oregon over 90 miles away. Wish I could do the same - would sure save on gas when visiting the big city.
When they set off the one missile and they’re tracking it on the screen, they say it’s heading for the football game. If you watch the radar screen, it veers east across the Bay, and appears to be approaching the Oakland Coliseum (roughly). However, when they show the view from the missile, it approaches Candlestick Park from the west (initially over the press box).
In “The Snapper” (one of the Barrytown Trilogy from which The Commitments also comes), when it’s time for the babby to be born they rush through the doors of the staff entrance to the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin, drives me mad every time I see it. They mysteriously manage to part their truck in the staff parking lot (that you need your security card to enter) and in through the (again card-locked) staff entrance.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade opens at Courthouse Towers in Arches National Park (I’d spent the two previous summers hiking through it). The mule train goes through a series of places that aren’t near each other. When they get to the train chase sequence, they’re clearly in another state altogether (it’s flat, with the mountains way in the back).
In the James Bond film Diamonds are Forever the Vegas car chase sequence goes all over the city in an impossible way. And they had the car standing on the wrong two wheels when it exits the alley (something they tried to cover up with an unexplained shot of the actors roating by 180 degrees).
Oh, yeah – one of our favorites. In The Adventures of Buackaroo Banzai, Yoyodyne Corporation is supposed set in Grover’s Mill, N.J. (where Orson Welles’ Martians landed). Pepper Mill grew up in Grover’s Mill – it’s nowhere as big as depicted in the movie. And there aren’t any palm trees there, either. It’s in New Jersey, fer cryin’ out loud! That’s what you get when California filmmakers base their impressions of defense contractors on L.A. factories.
Another Washington DC error, from one of my favorite Hitchcock movies, Strangers on a Train:
Near the end of the movie, Bruno (Robert Walker) goes from his home in northern Virginia to Union Station in downtown DC. As his car goes over the Memorial Bridge into the city, the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument are clearly visible out the rear window. In other words, he’s headed out of DC and into Virginia, going the wrong way on the bridge!
Canadian Bacon has HUGE geographical inconsistencies, but I think it is meant to poke fun at them.
For example, it takes John Candy and his partner 2 days to drive from Niagara Falls to Toronto. In actuality, this maybe a 2 hour drive. And the QEW is not lined with trees as the movie depicts. It is much more industrial than that.
Also, it takes a shorter time for Rhea Perlman to get from Ottawa to Toronto than it took for John Candy to get there. Ottawa to Toronto is maybe 5-6 hours.
And then there are the numerous inconsistencies about the CN Tower’s surroundings, but I won’t get into that.
The funniest part though, was at the end, the look across the lake towards what they believe is Detroit (again, another 3-4 hours), but is actually a shot of Hamilton’s factories. This is really funny, but I’m not sure if it was an intended joke or what. As a Hamilton native, I’d like to think it was poking fun at my city’s dirty reputation.
sidenote: Many movies, such as Exit Wounds, have
been filmed in Hamilton yet set in Detroit.
Congo–love the shot of “Houston, Texas” with the mountains and desert in the background.
Rocky–Rocky’s famous morning jog is so all-over-the-map (City Hall, Fishtown, South Philly, Art Museum, etc. To run to those spots in the order Rocky passed them, he’d have to cover about 50 miles.
Houston Knights–an old, short-lived cop show. I loved when they drove an evil Mexican crime lord from Houston back to Mexico. First, they start off driving east on the Allen Parkway. Then they randomly cover all the highways around downton Houston. Finally, after reaching the Tex/Mex border (about an 8 to 10 hour drive in the real world), they come to a 2 foot wide stream, which I suppose was supposed to be the Rio Grande!
Money for Nothing–the story of Joey Coyle. Set in South Philly, but shot in Pittsburgh, which really doesn’t look all that much like the real thing. For one thing, SP is mostly flat, while most of Pittsburgh is at a 45 degree angle.
I think the funniest one is in Silent Movie, in which there’s a shot of the Empire State Building and the music is an instumental of “San Francisco”! :eek: (Then you hear the scratch of a needle on a phonograph record and “I’ll Take Manhattan” starts to play.)
More seriously, a recent movie was panned by a local newspaper, apparently The Beach Reporter in Redondo Beach, CA. Some Hermosa Beach locals watched the beginning of a movie, with an opening shot they recognized as having been taken from an aircraft flying along the shore and the camera pointing down, several hundred feet up, to show the beach, The Strand, and recognizable–to the Hermosans–local landmarks. And what did the on-screen caption say? “Fort Lauderdale, 1953!”
For Emergency! fans: Remember how Johnny and Roy drove all over L. A. County, visiting beach areas (including the cliffs in San Pedro); the mountains; the desert (brush fires); sites in the San Fernando Valley (20 miles or more from San Pedro), etc.? Amazing how they could reach all those areas from Station 51 (a fictiious station. The exterior shots for that station were made at L. A. County Fire Station #127, in Carson)!
Jackal has a sequence in the DC Metro (which looks nothing like the real Metro). It has Capitol Heights as the next station down from Metro Center, when it’s actually the end of the line.
What are the geographical boundaries of the precinct in “Third Watch”? They seem to be responding to calls from all over the city!
The only major movie I can recall (aside from Japanese movies) featuring Osaka was Blak Rain (the Yakuza one, not the Hiroshima one). Lot’s of errors, and it was even filmed here. It’s been years since I’ve seen it, but the error that stands out the most was SPOILER the scene where Andy Garcia gets killed. It was filmed in the Hankyu Department store/train station. There is a parking garage, but no way the guy on the motorcycle could have gotten inside like he did in the movie. Even funnier as that the place was dserted. In 8 1/2 years in Osaka I’ve never seen that place deserted (even at 3:00 am!).
In the MST3K hit, “The Beginning of the End” we are also treated to a central Illinois with mountains.
Of course, having grown up in New Orleans, I can assure you that not only is it not Mardi Gras every day there, but you don’t go from Bourbon Street and walk over to where the swamps and Cajuns are.
There was an issue of X-Men in which not only are they there on Mardi Gras (natch) and not only do they park on Bourbon Street (pedestrian traffic only, and you can’t park anywhere NEAR the French Quarter on Mardi Gras), but they then have a battle in the “miles of underground caverns beneath the city”. The city, of course, lies at 6 feet below sea level, so those would be miles of SUBMERGED underground caverns, if they existed.
When I was at LSU working on their literary journal, someone submitted a short story set in New Orleans (and, of course, the French Quarter, since we all live and work in that small area). Full of “local flavor” except something took place on the intersection of two streets that actually run parallel to each other.
Let’s see here, the TV series Family Ties was supposed to be set near Columbus, OH, and in one episode Alex get’s a ticket for running a stop sign at a particular intersection on High St., the only problem is: There’s no stop sign at that intersection!
The movie Road Trip has the characters driving through TN and places the BellSouth Tower (which is in downtown Nashville), somewhere around Knoxville, which is about 400 miles away!
Anyone who has been to Indiana knows it’s flat as a pancake!
The biggest error of this type I’ve ever seen was in “Taffic.” Michael Douglas plays an Ohio Supreme Court justice appointed federal “drug czar.” In his first scene he is supposedly sitting on the bench in Columbus, but that courtroom is pure Hollywood. I’ve been in the real thing, and it is much more boring, with no exterior windows.
But even worse, it shows Douglas supposedly leaving the state courthouse and being besieged by reporters. First of all, the building he’s walking out of is the State Capitol building. The real Supreme Court building is a small, plain-looking office building across the street from the capitol. (I can see why they used the State Capitol; if you edit out the center rotunda, it looks a lot like the U.S. Supreme Court building from the side.)
Even more laughable is the notion that justices of the state Supreme Court would simply walk out the front door of where they work! The Courthouse is downtown; are they going to take the bus home?!
How could I forget about The Game? One of my favorite scenes is when the cab he’s riding in drives off the Embarcadero into the bay. Then he’s trying to get out as the car slowly fills up, manages to escape and swim to the surface, climb out and slowly run away and the streets are deserted!! The way the cab craeens into the water is also not possible. Nor could he have been so unaffected by the water temperature in the Bay.
I’m also not too sure where that mansion was suppsoed to be exactly…
i think people would be surprised if they visited south-southeastern indiana. no mountains, of course, but some pretty big hills and (dare i say it) cliffs right before you get to the ohio river.
but kokomo is damn near 2 dimensional.
close encounters of the third kind was partly set in muncie, indiana. i went to college in that magnificent town. anyway, they show a scene with hills, and muncie has no hills. the highest point in muncie is the pile of dirt left after digging the foundation for the mall. they laso mention crystal lake and some other place names from the area, all of which i’ve never heard of.
Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman had so many historical errors that I couldn’t even stay in the room while my kids were watching it (even if it had had decent scripts and acting), but how in the world could they set a show in Colorado Springs, CO and never show that massive wall of Rockies that dominates the western skyline?
(Then you hear the scratch of a needle on a phonograph record and “I’ll Take Manhattan” starts to play.)