I’m interested in how often Dopers find themselves sitting bolt upright while watching a film or TV show, thinking “dang, I’ve been there”. I’m not talking about scenes of, say, the Eiffel Tower, Grand Central Station or the Los Angeles River basin, which feature in any number of films, but more obscure locations which are likely not to be known to the general public. I always get a kick out seeing one of these places while watching a film.
A couple of examples:
I’ve always enjoyed Slap Shot as much for the fact that it was filmed in and around my boyhood home of Johnstown, PA as for the film itself; it really seemed to capture the crumbling ambiance of the place circa mid-'70’d. In particular, most of hockey games portrayed in the film were shot in the smoky confines of the War Memorial Arena, where my father used to take us to see ‘old time hockey’ when we were kids. One shot even shows an advertising sign for Mafex Associates, a company I worked for briefly just after high school.
I was in there last year, they still play hockey there and it still looks pretty much the same as it did in the film.
One time I was overnighting in Paris, on the way to somewhere else. I’d been there several time before on business, and each time the company would put us up at a shabby little hotel called the Kuntz, overlooking the Gare de L’Est.
Anyhow, this particular time I idly flicked on the TV, and the first thing I found was a French detective flick of some kind. Pretty soon there came a fairly standard scene where the hero goes to a fleabag hotel for some sort of clandestine meeting. What do they show? Yup, we see him stepping into the Kuntz, plain as day.
Some of the scenes in Stripes were filmed in Louisville, Kentucky. I remember when they were shooting. Who knew it would become such a “classic”? Anyway, I enjoy watching for tell-tale scenes when it comes on TV on Sunday afternoons.
In Planes, Trains and Automobiles, a lot of the second unit exteriors, particularly of the car driving, were shot on I-90 and Rt. 2 outside of Cleveland. One shot in particular is a stretch of 2 near Chardon, easily recognizable to residents.
In Light of Day with Michael J. Fox and Joan Jett, their band appears in one scene at the Euclid Tavern in Cleveland, a club where one of my old bands played many times. In addition, one of the extras in one scene (the band’s keyboard player) is Jeff Harmon, a drummer who played with another of my bands.
Honey, I Blew Up the Kid was filmed in Las Vegas (no big whoop there—a million films have been shot there), but Wayne’s work (the building used for the exterior) was a place I remember driving past many a time.
I’ve been to the video shop from Muriel’s Wedding, and one of my friends at university lived in a flat just round the corner from the (very nice) flat in Shallow Grave.
It probably doesn’t really count, but I’ve been on the Universal Studios Hollywood backlot tram tour enough times that I can often spot when part of their backlot’s pre-built city/suburb/rural sets is used in a movie. I distinctively remember watching parts of Deep Impact and Sliders and going “Hey, that’s the Universal backlot!”
Large parts of “The Sixth Sense” were filmed in my neighborhood. I can recall one scene when they are travelling by bus to the girl’s funeral and they look out the window at a large mansion. I know where this place is and all I could think of was “Gee, there going the wrong way down the street and there’s no Bus that goes down that street to begin with!”.
In the Simpsons when they’re in downtown Springfield you sometimes see a pizza shop called Zesty’s in the backround…one of the animators is/was from Chelmsford MA where Zesty’s is…and my friend used to work there…also from Chelmsford…Springfield City Hall( I think…not sure what the building is used for) is acutally a drawing of the Chelmsford Library.
I can do the exact opposite. I’ve seen “Big” a millions times. Love it. Well, my ex-girlfriend and I were driving from Indy to a wedding in Rhode Island last fall. We didn’t get the skinny on the fastest route to use, so we drove up the coast. At one point outside New York City, we really had to make a pit stop. We took the next exit, which turned into a residential area. We took a few random turns, and WALLA! We’re at the amusement park where the fortune teller machine was moved to at the end of “Big”!
And if you need to go to the bathroom there, just go into the ice skating arena, and the bathroom is at the bottom of the stairs. Nice and clean.
Also in The Sixth Sense, the Acme where the little boy and his mother shop (and buy a pumpkin, I think), is the Acme on Lancaster Ave. in Bryn Mawr, PA, where I shopped when I was in college.
The movie Fallen was filmed in Philadelphia (at least some parts). There are some easily recognizable locations like City Hall, but there was a scene where Denzel goes to visit the female costar at her apartment. They used the intersection of 35th and Powelton (in University City). I used to live two blocks north of there when I went to Drexel, and I walked past that intersection every day. Kind of freaky, especially becuase I didn’t notice it the first time I watched the movie.
I live in a picturesque town. Many films and commercials have been and are filmed here, especially movies that take place in the 1950s. (Not sure about why this is, as most of the buildings in the downtown area were built are considerably older than that.) The most prominent ones are probably American Graffiti and Peggy Sue Got Married. They used my high school in AG, and watching that was quite surreal. The commercials are weirder, though, since I usually know when movies are being filmed, and expect it. I have often been surprised to see a familiar spot in an ad.
I went to school in Santa Cruz, California, which is another familiar background, especially the Beach Boardwalk, which I’ve seen in The Lost Boys (which makes good use of the general strangeness of Santa Cruz) and Dangerous Minds. On a particularly weird note, there’s an old movie theater in Santa Cruz that was going out of business, and the marquee read for at least a month “The End Is Near”. I thought that was a strange way to announce going out of business…until I was channel surfing a while later and caught the Smashmouth video for “And Then The Morning Comes” - they filmed a scene of the video at the theater, and if you know the song, you’ll remember that “the end is near” is part of the refrain.
A bad Ben Affleck movie School Daze is filmed at and takes place at UCSC.
I’ve lived in Seattle, Honolulu, the Bay Area, and the Portland, Oregon, area, so it isn’t unusual to see locations with which I am familiar.
One of the more interesting ones for the Bay Area was True Crime with Clint Eastwood since it was filmed heavily in East Bay locations rather than San Francisco. Saw many locations that don’t tend to show up in movies. (Though being very familiar with the location of a film can cause problems when you see the hero make a 5-minute drive from downtown Oakland to Richmond, for example).
Another fun thing is when a film is set in a certain city, but the exteriors are obviously not of that city. Romeo Must Die being a good example. Set in San Francisco/Oakland, but most of the exteriors were Vancouver, British Columbia.
I like to play spot the Vancouver location when I watch TV and movies. Most recently was the Ah-nuld movie The Sixth Day, large portions of which took place at my old university and the Vancouver Public Library. There was a car chase down the steps where I used to sit and study on nice days. Sliders, Viper, and X-Files also used the University for shooting. I liked seeing Scully and Mulder shoot at creatures in my old chemistry lab. Cool.
I live in Orange, CA, which is Hollywood’s idea of middle America. Both the town and my college get used in lots o’ stuff, such as That Thing You Do, Rocky and Bullwinkle, and one of those annoying Sprint PCS commercials.
I live in Orange, CA, which is Hollywood’s idea of middle America. Both the town and my college get used in lots o’ stuff, such as That Thing You Do, Rocky and Bullwinkle, and one of those annoying Sprint PCS commercials.
Seattle’s a good place for that, too- like in Little Buddha, where they drive from the airport north to Queen Anne on the upper viaduct (i.e., southbound); or in Sleepless in Seattle, where Tom Hanks rows from Lake Union to Alki and back- sure, if you’ve got a couple days to kill.
You hear a rush of murmuring through the theater, people looking around in surprise, laughing. Prolly not the effect the director wanted…
In the Gary Busey film Foolin’ Around there’s a scene where Gary’s character strings up some snob’s sports car. The tree used was the one in the front yard of my cousin’s apartment. I about tipped over the first time (hell, the only time, it wasn’t that good a movie) i saw it.
Enemy of the State had a serious geographical continuity problem, too. The whole chase scene when the video is dropped off in Will’s bag - Smiff enters a lingerie store in one neighborhood and comes out the back door in a neighborhood that’s a good 20-minute walk away. Got plenty of mileage in the Post out of that.
Of course DC seems to get the geographical short shrift anyway - in every political thriller I’ve seen, the Pentagon has a nice view of the National Mall with the Capitol in the background.
Only “Hey, I know that place” I can think of myself is from GoldenEye - the scenes from St. Petersburg had shots of places I’d hung around. (No, the Lenin statue “graveyard” was not one of them.)
I went to University of Arizona and often hung around the place where the parents dropped off there kids in Revenge of the Nerds. Although that really went the other way around. Saw the movie, then was at the place when a friend mentioned it, from then on I couldn’t not see it.
Living in Honolulu I am very familiar with all places that Magnum, P.I., Hawaii 50 etc are filmed. Ooh ooh, last year we were driving the back roads of Kauai when I saw the hill where Indiana Jones ran away from the Indians at the beginning of Raiders. There are many movies that you’ll recognize from there but that’s the coolest.