A major irritant with movies about small Southern towns in general (and I suspect the same is true about small towns everywhere else in the country) is the way they tend to portray the locals as people who have no idea there’s a whole other world out there and who still shop at little Mom’n’Pop stores or sit around the cracker barrel at the feedstore. In reality, people in these communities probably spend more time surfing the net or watching cable/satellite television than their urban contemporaries, the Ma’n’Pa Kettle grocery was long ago replaced by mega supermarkets and Wal-Mart strip malls that are tragically indistinguishable from the ones in Des Moines, Sacramento, and Virginia Beach, the town squares are usually abandoned except for a courthouse, the mandatory statue of a dead Confederate, and some junk shops, every place with more than 500 people has a Mexican restaurant and a Waffle House, and except perhaps for their accents the people could be in Anytown USA of similar size. Homogenization has killed most of the flavor of the old towns, though Jim Crow went with the Mom’n’Pops, so who’s to say whether its for good or ill, I suppose.
Die Hard II: They have Dulles Airport patrolled by DC policemen. Dulles is a good 30 miles out in Virginia, on the Loudon/Fairfax counties line.
Wonder Woman (TV): The streets of 1940s Washington are lined with palm trees.
All comic book depictions of Washington, DC: We don’t look like Manhattan, not at all. Most buildings are only 3 or 4 stories high. By law, none are taller than 12 stories. This makes it possible to see the Capitol and the Washington Monument from most of the city (These buildings are specifically exempted from the law). Supposedly, this is for security of the President, but I suspect it has more to do with buouying real estate values. Houses and rooms with monument views are worth significantly more. Spider-Man would wither and die in Washington, or pay taxi fares out the wazoo.
Trains were taken off the bridge in about 1958 (cite), so it still counts as a goof. (It’s been a while since I’ve seen the movie, but isn’t it obvious in the shot that there’s only one-way traffic anyway?)
In addition, I’m pretty sure that he heads over to Berkeley, finds out where the wedding is, and goes down to Santa Barbara to stop it all in one day – it’s just possible (about a 4 hour drive at high speed), as long as the wedding wasn’t too late in the day.
wasn’t too early, that is.
Actually, when he visited DC in the comic strip, he took to riding on the tops of buses.
Samprio:
Most TV producers still come from either LA or NY. LA developed in a way so that it never had the ethnic populations of most other large cities. As for the NY producers, they tend to work under the assumption that the people of other cities are exactly the same as “back home”. Since NYC traditionally has a large Italian population, they imagine every other big city as having one. On the other hand, since NYC wasn’t the settling ground for Eastern Europeans in quite the same way as say, Chicago was, they tend to ignore Poles, Czechs, and Ukranians.
I come from Sacramento, which is used a lot in filming, but, because we don’t have films set in our city, our landmarks don’t show up that often, thought it is amusing to recognize the interior of our State Capitol used to represent the U.S. Capitol.
(For the record, the chambers are smaller, and use color schemes not in place with the real Capitol.)
The earlier mention of “The Lost World” reminded me of another mistake it had about San Diego.
In the movie, the T-rex, pretty quickly after breaking out of the ship is wandering around detached single-family houses in an upper middle-class type neighborhood. At one point it stops to drink from a backyard swimming pool.
Well, housing in San Diego city that is that nice is simply nowhere near that close to the port!
Much of the bus ride in Speed takes place on the incomplete 105 freeway, which really was under construction at the time. However, the freeway is only 4.4 miles long, and they spend at least 15 minutes driving at 50mph!!! (Many shots of overpasses can be seen multiple times.) It’s actually worse than that, since they entered at Western Ave., a mere 1½ miles from LAX, and then pass the 110/105 interchange, which is the other direction entirely!
Plus they refer to it as the “Century Freeway”, while I’m pretty sure it had been renamed as the “Glenn Anderson Freeway” by that time (after the city councilman who secured funding to finally complete the damn thing.) The locals still call it the Century Freeway, though, so I guess that’s not really an error…
San Francisco isn’t my town anymore, but they never shoot films in Maine.
I recently watched Sweet November (the 2001 version with Keanu and Charlize) on some movie channel … sue me, I kind of liked it.
But Charlize Theron’s character’s apartment was on Protrero Hill and on several occasions, they would walk out the front door, turn the corner and wind up at Dolores Park which is half way across the city.
That irritated me because I loved Dolores Park. That was right in my neighborhood when I lived there.
I’m sure you meant "Happy Days"
This isnt exactly what your looking for…
But in Independance Day, they want to get the “Australian Capitol Territory” on the phone… so who do they call? SYDNEY!!!
For what it’s worth, EVERYBODY in L.A. calls the 105 ‘The Century Freeway’.
The joke was that it was going to take 100 years to finish, and the name stuck.
My favorite is sort of old, not to mention obscure. Toward the end of Wargames Matthew Broderick and his girlfriend (Ally Sheedy?) are shown running to catch the ferry to the island where the computer designer has retired. Assuming they catch the ferry, they’d have to find a couple of towels to dry off: they’re running down a boat ramp, and they’d have to swim (the actual dock is on the other side of the trestle).
But it feels like 24 miles because all jogging in the Baywatch area must be done in slow motion.
Thi is from a book. In “Star Light” Anrew Greeley has the protaonist say that it is a nice October day and the go from Harvard Square to Boston College via the Red and Green lines.
Hey guy use the bus! It will be faster and less crowded.
This is from a book. In “Star Light” Anrdew Greeley has the protaonist say that it is a nice October day and the go from Harvard Square to Boston College via the Red and Green lines.
Hey guy use the bus! It will be faster and less crowded.
This is from a book. In “Star Light” Anrdew Greeley has the protaonist say that it is a nice October day and the go from Harvard Square to Boston College via the Red and Green lines.
Hey guy use the bus! It will be faster and less crowded.
This is from a book. In “Star Light” Anrdew Greeley has the protaonist say that it is a nice October day and the go from Harvard Square to Boston College via the Red and Green lines.
Hey guy use the bus! It will be faster and less crowded.
I also loved MWC, but I was dissappointed in how little they used their Chicago location. E.E. Bell, who played Bob Rooney, was an authentic midwesterner and has mentioned that the producers would sometimes put in jokes because “that’s what they do in the Midwest!” despie he and Ed O’Neill (who’s from Youngstown, OH) protesting that they really hadn’t seen that.
I liked how Wisconsin was portrayed as this wild and wooly frontier. Peg’s family was supposed to be from the Milwaukee area but were portrayed as Ozarks-style hillbillies. Steve and Al went to Oconomowoc to visit Francine’s of Hollywood lingerie store, and Marcy and Jefferson’s honeymoon was spent escorting Peg around “Wisconsin’s Cheese Country”.
And I think the infamous Lake Chicamacomico was also there.
MWC would also sometimes have “road trips” wherein a little car would plow a red line down a map. Once, when they were really acting cheap, they had Amanda Bearse’s hand moving the car from IL to FL.
But I wish they’d shot some actual footage in Chicago so that there’d be mistakes to spot. Only locations I can think of were the England shows, and since I don’t know where Lower and Upper Uncton really are I can’t quibble on the geography 
Doh! That I did:smack:
Though LaVerne and Shirley on a blind date with JJ and Bookman might have had more comic potential than any of the shows involved combined…