Columbo! :smack: How could I have forgotten Columbo?
One of the fun things about Columbo vs the earlier shows is the bad guys were always fat cats. So we got to see a different, and much more fancy-pants slice of greater LA than we did on Dragnet or Emergency. As well as hear what passes for a patrician accent in LA-speak.
Which reminds me of Quincy, M.E.. (Whose wiki url Discourse’s Onebox won’t parse, so you’ve got to click.)
And then of course there’s the finest movie ever made. Filmed right where it’s set:
The Clint Eastwood movie ‘Gran Torino’ was filmed and took place in the Detroit area. The ‘Gran Torino’ movie team set up headquarters in a vacant lot across from my wife’s friend’s house in Grosse Pointe. That was in the brief period when Detroit was becoming a favored moviemaking location, before incoming Governor Snyder shut down the party, saying it wasn’t cost-effective for Michigan to offer tax breaks to Hollywood to use Michigan as a filming location. What a buzz killer.
My first car was a '73 Gran Torino, so it was fun to see Clint’s character’s prized vehicle, although his was a '72.
Three Fugitives (Nick Nolte, Martin Short) was set and filmed in Seattle. Mostly. Of course, there are some severe geographical errors, like a car chase down a street in Tacoma turns a corner and is 30 miles away in downtown Seattle. Or the scene near the Canadian border where they are clearly on the Sumner-Buckley highway with Mt. Rainier in the distance, which is well over 100 miles from Canada.
My sister recommended to me a BBC detective show that’s now on Netflix called Hinterland, that takes place in Wales in and around Aberystwyth, near where our Grandfather was born. The show makes great use of the beauty and bleakness of the Welsh countryside; it’s practically a supporting character.
Portlandia was indeed filmed here in Portland. Some of it was right down the street in my neighborhood. They used local businesses (changing the signage sometimes) and local actors, and paid homeowners to use their houses.
Movie locations for “The Godfather”, some of which were the real thing. Others such as the Corleone compound which is supposed to be in Long Beach, NY is actually in Staten Island.
A friend of my wife lives in Portland – she’s not a professional actress, but as she’s done a little acting, and is in a wheelchair, she was cast in a season 6 episode in which Kath and Dave were temporarily disabled.
Me, too. I love the Bradbury building. Some very good TV episodes and movies were filmed there.
We must not be the only one - the recenter Bosch novels have characters that have offices there. So I guess it wasn’t a rain soaked abandoned (30 story!) low-rent district hell hole in 2019 after all. (but the Million Dollar Movie house is not doing so well as a theater.)
Most of The Sopranos was filmed in Northern New Jersey.
There was at least one notable exception, however. The episode “Pine Barrens” was not filmed in the Pine Barrens, because they couldn’t get permission to film there. It was instead shot at a state park in New York.
Forgive me if this is a stupid question, but why wouldn’t a Santa Fe locomotive be in New Jersey (where a scene in a railyard with the Twin Towers in the background would most likely be shot?) Don’t locomotives travel all over the place?
Freight cars do; locomotives generally don’t. The Atcheson, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway was strictly a western railroad, and didn’t have tracks any further east than Chicago. While it’s not uncommon to see a freight car for a railroad that’s far away from “home,” locomotives nearly always stay on their home railways. If a set of train cars needs to move from one railroad onto another, they’ll usually be switched to a different set of locomotives (with a different crew) when they are moved onto the second railroad.
An exception would be if a railroad is temporarily renting some locomotives from another system, but that would be fairly unusual.
Below is a route map from the mid-1990s, showing the trackage for the Santa Fe (blue) and Burlington Northern (green) railroads before their merger. I couldn’t find one that was specifically from the 1970s, but older maps also show Chicago as the ATSF’s eastern terminus.
I completely lost interest in Stumptown after initially appreciating the Portland location use–but then they showed the Aloha Motel (still okay, Aloha {pronounced a-LOW-ah} is actually a Portland suburb) and it had PALM TREES all around it and the sky had nary a cloud in it while people were dressed in long sleeves. Sorry, Cobie, I get it you didn’t want to have to film outside of LA but that was egregious. Yucca plants grow here, but palm trees outside of a skeezy motel? Never happen in the REAL Stumptown!
