The "Hey, I know that location" thread

Cafe Society
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a) “Grease” was supposedly based on Baltimore City high school, but I forget which one. I think it’s Forrest Park High. A special cartoon opening exclusive to Baltimore featured the locally-known voice of a prominent radio DJ personality, “Johnnie Walker”. (He was funny with a just an innocent hint of being suggestive. Although, he used to run a Baltimore night club, too, which turned some off. Mild by today’s standards.)

b1) Barry Levinson (I don’t like him, Sam I Am!) is a Baltimoron (sic) famous for that low-life movie, “Diner”, of which every Baltimoron (sic) can name all the places filmed… Please, is this the best he can do? Gag me!

b2) “Avalon”, a fictitious section of Baltimore City, but the footage IS real. Freaky to see your old neighborhood on the big screen!

b3) “Homocide” features real footage in Baltimore City, but gives Baltimore a black-eye as tourists ask me “Is BAltmore really that bad?” Well, no worse than any other city if you play it smart. IMHO, Levinson gave a black eye to his home town, Charm City (Baltimore).

c) “Tin Men” - (w/Danny DeVito) a dud, but with footage of a famous Baltimore landmark transformed into something else via the magic of Hollywood. A friend of mine drives a limo part-time, and got to chauffer Danny DeVito and wife, Rita Pearlman around town - he said they’re really funny, down-to-earth type people. Cool! :slight_smile:

d) Dead Poet Society: Allegedly, footage of this prestigious private school was filmed on the grounds of a prestigious Baltimore private school as a friend who attended bragged, but you never know if they used other footage. I didn’t see it mentioned in the credits.

e) Swathmore College, in PA - actual location of that forgotten movie “Eddie and the Cruisers” with a cooler soundtrack.

f) U of Md - College Park (alumni Jim Henson, Connie Chung, et al.). The golf course was the location of…? I forget!
Does anyone recall?

g) Philly: U of Penn stadium - location of some fight scenes in Rocky V, I think. Also, other shots around Philly. FYI, Stallone…you’re initial “jog” around Philly was impossible!

h) Cape Ann, Mass: Spielberg was shooting some film there while we were visiting this quaint area. Never heard anything more about it…

i) No, MAS*H fans, there is no Crabapple Cove, ME! But, there is a Penobscott (sp?) Bay (one character’s name).

j) Music: Jackson Browne recorded “Running On Empty” and others live in Columbia, MD - between Balt. & Wash. Billy Joel recorded some live songs in a quaint setting near DC.

k) Does anyone remember “Romper Room” or “Beat the Clock” These concepts started at the local Baltimore TV studios.
There was also “Hodge Podge Lodge” on local PBS, but I don’t know if it went on to national PBS, or not.

j) I’m sure I’ll think of more!

Whew! :cool:

  • Jinx
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In its final years Matlock was filmed in Wilmington, NC, so it was fairly common to see a local site standing in for the program’s official setting of Atlanta.

Also, one episode had the characters vacationing in Wilmington, so there were plenty of local shots in that one. But something that frustrated me are the scenes clearly set in the parking lot of a Food Lion supermarket, since I was never able to figure out where that particular store was located.

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A lot of the office stuff in Working Girl was filmed in the building where I work in New York. I caught it on TV a little while ago and recognized the view immediately. The lobby appeared in the mediocre Keeping the Faith.

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The hotel where the gang is staying in *Some Like It Hot[i/] is supposed to be in Florida, but it’s actually the Hotel Del Coronado, a famous San Diego landmark. In some of the scenes on the beach you can see Point Loma (where I work) in the distance.

I was also living in the Bay area the first time I saw *Vertigo[i/] which is full of San Fran locations. I remember seeing a hotel in the city that looked really familiar, and realizing that it was the apartment building where Kim Novak’s character supposedly lived.

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Oops, sorry about that.

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Great stuff, people.

Just thought of another one. I still have a photo I took of an elaborate victorian-era riverboat that I saw tied up in Iquitos, Peru back in the late '70’s. It was only years later, when I saw the movie Fitzcarraldo that I realized it was the vessel that the mad explorer played by Klaus Kinski hauls over a mountain in the movie.

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Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. Before his bike is stolen he goes into some shops. That was 3rd Street in Santa Monica before they outlawed cars on it. (It’s not “The Third Street Promenade”.) I remember when it was really run down.

The Right Stuff. Okay, I’m cheating. I worked as an “extra” on that movie. I worked at Edwards AFB at the time.

Lots of shows/commercials with the French Quarter in New Orleans in them.

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The film version of A Soldier’s Story includes exteriors shot in Clarendon, Arkansas, where I lived as a child, particularly along the single-street business district (which is Madison Street, not Main – I lived on Main, and it’s strictly residential).

One False Move, Billy Bob Thornton’s screenwriting breakthrough film, was shot entirely on location around Brinkley and Cotton Plant, Arkansas (according to the credits). Brinkley is “next door” to Clarendon, about 15 miles away, and Cotton Plant is a little farther but is almost exactly halfway between Clarendon and Augusta, where my grandparents lived, so I know them both extremely well. There’s barely a shot in the movie that I can’t pinpoint the location for. Which brings me to the scene where the L.A. cops arrive in Star City, Arkansas (which exists, but is nowhere near the locations used). They’re driving along a seemingly endless causeway-type bridge with concrete guardrails and a solid wall of trees on either side, when the local sheriff pulls up beside them. There’s only one place in all of eastern Arkansas that looks like that: the western approach to the White River bridge at Clarendon, on the way to Stuttgart. It’d be quite a stretch to consider that location “in and around Brinkley and Cotton Plant”, as the credits claim.

Speaking of Stuttgart, Percy Adlon’s “Rosalie Goes Shopping” was both set and filmed there; every time I got sick as a kid (i.e., frequently), we schlepped over to Stuttgart to the doctor’s office. So I recognize nearly every location in the movie, except for the church in DeVall’s Bluff, which I don’t know as well.

I was one of about ten people who actually saw Three for the Road, mainly because it was shot entirely in Arkansas, including several spots on campus at Hendrix College, my alma mater. Apparently, most or all of the Hendrix scenes were cut, however, since I didn’t recognize any. There were lots of other locations I did know, however, including lots of places along I-430 on the western side of Little Rock (at one point, a car pulls off on an exit ramp, hangs a left at the end of the ramp – at a location miles from the original exit, crosses the freeway at yet another location, and gets back on at another exit, again many miles away).

End of the Line, with Mary Steenburgen, Kevin Bacon, Wilford Brimley, Holly Hunter, and Levon Helm, was another filmed-in-Arkansas effort no one saw, with plenty more locations familiar to me.

There’s an early Jonathan Demme film starring Peter Fonda, Fighting Mad, that includes scenes shot on Dickson Street in Fayetteville, Arkansas, including the infamous Swinging Door (no longer extant, alas).

In the Atlanta area, there’s the Hurt Building downtown, where I worked briefly in the 1980s, that appears in establishing shots in the TV series Matlock as the location of Matlock’s office. There’s also the Druid Hills neighborhood that’s the setting for much of Driving Miss Daisy, where I lived for my first nine months in Atlanta. The tree-lined street that Miss Daisy is walking along in defiance of Hoke’s attempts to get her back in the car isn’t the street her house is on, but the next street over. The grocery store that’s used in the film was, at the time of filming, the Sevananda natural foods grocery store in the Little Five Points neighborhood. The scene where Hoke and Daisy arrive for services only to find that The Temple has been bombed is, in fact, on the street that runs beside The Temple.

And, probably best known of all, there’s the mill that’s seen during the opening credits of Gone With the Wind. Despite the film’s setting in my adopted hometown of Atlanta, the mill is actually a WPA sculpture located in a park in North Little Rock, Arkansas, a block from my college girlfriend’s house.

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ooh ooh, We recently went to England and stayed in a lovely little place called Castle Combe, where they filmed Doctor Doolittle, the Rex Harrison one.

Anyhoo in the beginning of that movie they sing and dance around a little village where the Doctor lived and that was Castle Combe. We stayed in the B&B located right behind where the guy takes the wounded duck. Funny thing is this is all supposed to be at the sea but this place is nowhere near the sea. It’s all creatively edited. It was also most amusing to see how many times the guy kept coming into the main road from different directions to make it look like the town was a lot bigger then it really is. It really only has 2 roads, but only 1 is ‘picturesque’ and some driveways.

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Parts of the beginning of Dumb and Dumber were filmed in Providence, RI, including the scene of the big fluppy dog van going past our own Big Blue Bug.

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I grew up in West Los Angeles. Seeing film crews was almost a weekly occurance. I hated those disrepectful of the neighborhood assholes. My Elementary School, Jr. High and High School was frequently in movies and T.V. shows (Grease was mentioned, most of the school scenes were actually shot at my High School for example.) They filmed some crappy T.V. movie at my buddy’s house around the corner. The front of my house was on CHiPs. I could go on forever.

Haj

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Two more: Guildford Cathedral (ugly but sinister), where a leading character in The Omen met a pointy end, and some woods outside Farnham in Surrey where the ‘Germanic’ battle scenes from the start of Gladiator were filmed.

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every morning, as a kid, my school bus rolled past the big open meadow with a view of the landslide on the west shore of Tahoe from the opening scene of “Bonanza”

i now live on the freakin’ dry lake where the horrible Marilyn Monroe/Clark Gable movie “The Misfits” was filmed, and one scene specificly looks like you are gazing right out my back window, up a wash and into a canyon. (scene where some nut is herding horses with an airplane) i had to watch the film since i had some sort of connection with it, and i can tell you, what a stinker! (and there ain’t no more trees around, either! i wonder what happened to them?) MM is a shitty actress!

i lived in LA and Vegas, so i saw a lot of shit there, too.

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just remembered! wife has a shot of said canyon on her website! care to see? (background, 4th picture down)
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don’t click under arrow! click on red house!
god i suck!

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In “What’s Love Got to do with it”, the Tina Turner Bio-pic, there is a big fight scene in a Diner. That was filmed in Johnnie’s Broiler, a 50-style diner that has been around since the '50s. It is also right around the corner from me on Firestone Blvd in Downey, California.

This restaurant is used for a lot of film shoots, and last year they changed it into a Bus Station for “Continental Buslines” for what I think was an X-Files episode.

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… as well as a river and a county, but I digress.

I recall the big hoo-dee-doo when they chose Portland Maine’s Deering Oaks Park for location shooting for The Preacher’s Wife with Denzel Washington and Whitney Houston. I wasn’t so star-struck as to stand around watching them film it, but had they not doen shooting about three blocks from my apartment, I would have never even watched the film.

A little more obscure one. I now live in the Bay Area (Oakland - work in SF). Not too long ago I watched an old movie on Cinemax called Time After Time. It’s about H.G. Wells chasing Jack the Ripper to present day San Francisco (I’m sure I mentioned in some thread about how I can’t resist watching any movie filmed in San Francisco). Any way, there is a scene where H.G. is literally chasing Jack and they end up on two separate pedestrian bridges. I recognized the whole chase scene as starting at the Embarcadero Regency and those bridges are between the Embarcadero towers. I know it’s not much, but it’s a lot funner than pointing out the TransAmerica Pyramid, which I think is required by law to be shown on any location shot filmed in San Francisco.

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I lived for a short while in the Victorian block between St Pancras and King’s Cross stations in London. I’m pretty sure the scene outside the nightclub at the start of the film about the 5th Beatle “Backbeat” was filmed there. There was a Mike Leigh film (“High Hopes” or something) that was definitely filmed there, and the BBC version of Dickens’ “Hard Times” (I know because I saw them filming it).

These lanes get used a lot but even more prominent on the screen are the old gas holders just to the north, next to the Regent Canal. Anybody who knows north central London will agree that you see them in everything; adverts, pop videos, documentaries, dramas, the lot. It doesn’t even have to be set within 150 miles of London to get filmed there. Can anyone confirm whether the whole area I’ve mentioned is still going to be flattened for the Eurostar station? I don’t know what filmmakers will do when it’s gone.

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Also;
You may have seen a scene in Monty Python where John Cleese is reading out a very boring BBC news bulletin. He and his desk get taken away by some men and put on the back of a small truck. The truck drives away, with Cleese still droning on with the news. When the truck joins a dual carriageway (freeway) I recognised the junction as being what’s now the Hanger Lane Giratory System and the A40 in West London. The road layout was completely different then.

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I get the bus to work that way every day. Which block do you mean? I know the railway arches alongside St Pancras, and the pseudo shopping village alongside Kings Cross, but I don’t know that block off-hand.

As far as I can tell, the Eurostar work involves flattening the land behind Kings Cross (the old gas holders).