I’ve seen & been to many of the places in San Francisco, but I suppose most of them count as ‘famous’. The most obscure that I see rather often is the baseball diamonds in Golden Gate Park that I recognized in Bicentennial Man. Another “the topside is more photogenic” along the lines of the viaduct in Seattle : In The Graduate, Ben is seen traveling on the Bay Bridge on the top of the bridge to get to Berkeley (eastbound, which is the lower deck). And he also makes excellent time getting to Santa Barbara (where the wedding is), which is at least 5 hours at speeds well in excess of the speed limit. It’s over 300 miles distance, through rather hilly terrain, but I suppose it is possible.
I remember seeing the (TNT? Some Turner network) movie about George Wallace (Gary Sinise had the starring role). I was watching a simple scene set on a streetcorner and it looked really familiar. Then I rembered that it was filmed in Sacramento, and the streetcorner was somewhat south of downtown. (Had I not had a midterm, I would’ve been an extra in it – they needed white males).
SPOILER WARNING (Lola Rennt/Run Lola Run)
One other spot which is semi-famous, but interesting in how it was shown. In Lola Rennt(Run Lola Run) she is seen exiting the bank where her father works. Each time you only see the front of the building, which looks pretty unremarkable. However, the last time around there is finally a shot from the other direction (Lola’s POV as she comes out) and you can see that it is the Bebelplatz, with Humboldt University across the street in the background. At that point I suddenly recognized the front of the ‘bank’, but if you just showed me the picture of the front I would’ve had no idea where it was.
(The Bebelplatz is most famous, or rather infamous, as the site of mass book-burning in 1933. The ‘bank’ building is some government office, I’m not sure which).
You know the scene in Repo Man where Otto drops a corpse off on a bus bench and later, they come and incinerate the body with a flamethrower? That was right in front of my former artist’s loft, the Starkman Building.
Remember the final scene in “Rising Sun” where the woman leaves the door open, saying something about leaving the cage open so the canary can escape? That was my front door, the Starkman building again.
I could name about 30 other movies at this location, but I’ll move on. Come to think of it, they made so many movies around there, that’s why I moved on.
Remember the scene in Robocop where Robo gets ground against a wall by an armored car, and then plays chicken with a motorcycle vs. the armored car? That was Traction Avenue, I lived on that street. Again, I could name about 30 movies made there.
I once rented out my loft on Traction Ave to a movie crew, so there’s a movie made IN my home. But I never have figured out what the name of the film was, and I’ve never seen it. But I remember coming home and the crew said they’d left some props behind, and would I mind watching them until they came back with a truck tomorrow to pick them up? I said OK. Then I walked in and there was a pile of 20 fully functional Uzi machine guns sitting on my living room floor. I had a very sleepless night. I was tempted to phone up the LAPD to have them come and pick up the guns but I couldn’t figure out any way to inform them of the situation without getting killed by a SWAT team. “Hello Ociffer, someone left 20 Uzis at my house, could you send someone by to take them off my hands?”
Stepmom was filmed in Nyack, NY, near where I live. Lots of films use Nyack for filming scenes, actually. Stepmom also had some scenes filmed in the '76 House, a restaurant in Tappan, NY. It’s a restaurant now, but it’s the building where they held Major Andre before his trial during the Revolutionary War.
Also, this may be local to the NYC area, but there was an Optimum Online commercial where four teenage kids are standing outside a deli, and they keep asking, “Where’s Mike?” and another kid keeps answering, “Still downloading.” Then they get tired of waiting for Mike and leave. Then Mike arrives and his friends have left him high and dry. The deli it was filmed in front of, “The Pilgrim Market”, is in downtown Pearl River, a relatively short walk from my home.
Thing is, I have to wonder where those kids went? There really isn’t that much to do around here. Maybe they went to the gazebo at the Central Avenue field, or went to the library up the street or something. I dunno.
(Digging out old A-Z) I don’t live in London any more and I haven’t ventured north of the station entrances for about 6 years so it may already have changed. I saw them filming “Hard Time” in Cheney Road, and that’s the bit that looked familiar iat the start of “Backbeat”. I think “High Hopes” was filmed in the blocks between Cheney Road and Pancras Road.
At the end of Dirty Harry, when the psycho is in the schoolbus, he looks out the front window and sees Harry standing on a train trestle. That trestle is in Larkspur, CA, about a quarter mile from my house.
Pancras Road is still there (that’s the one I get the bus down), but it’s permanently troubled with roadworks. They’re reworking the underground around there. The northern end of Cheney Road would seem to be the focus of the Eurostar development; all of the houses between it and Pancras Road are boarded up and have been for a while.
Ooh I forgot one. I’ve been swimming at the beach on Martha’s Vineyard where scenes of jaws were shot…mostlty the part where Brody’s son is in the pond on his boat and the girl is running across the little wooden brige yelling “shark! shark! He’s in the pond” It was spooky because we watched the movie the night before we went to the beach.
A movie featuring River Phoenix and Sandra Bullock, called The Thing Called Love was filmed in Nashville while I was in college. My college was just off Murfreesboro Road, and about half a mile up Murfreesboro, they filmed a bunch of scenes at the Drake Motel. They also built a diner in the parking lot of a horrid little convenience store that I made the mistake of shopping in once when I first moved to Nashville. We watched the diner being built and I drove past a couple of times while they were filming. (We knew when they were filming because they had permits to actually block traffic and only allow cars through a few at a time – to get the right background action, I suppose.)
The fantastic movie Matewan starring James Earl Jones was filmed in a nearly-abandoned mining town called Thurmond in the New River Gorge in West Virginia just a few miles from the house I grew up in (and where my parents still live). I’ve been there since the movie was filmed – it’s a beautiful little place. The buildings are all abandoned, but nearly every exterior was shot there.
More from The Graduate: When Ben runs into the frat house, I see the complex where I lived for five years just across the street (Durant Ave in Berkeley). Also, we see him on Telegraph Ave. with Moe’s books across the street, and later wandering around Sproul Plaza–two more favorites for any Cal alumnus.
Also, you know the car commercial where the guy is driving along talking about dropping a cookie on the floor and the “5-second” rule? That’s the street where my wife and I live. I must’ve seen that commercial several dozen times, but one glance and she said “Hey, that’s our street!”. Amazing.
My best example of this is watching a late night B-Grade soft core on Skinemax. Dancer in the Dark or some such nonsense starring the divine Mrs. Shannon Tweed. She plays a psychologist/professor who night owls as a stripper. So I am watching and a VERY familiar locale flashes across the screen: The courtyard and library at my school, the University of Houston. This was when I was actually in school and worked as an orientation counselor. I knew EVERYTHING about the school but I didn’t know a Shannon Tweed movie was filmed on campus. Of course, I imagine that isn’t exactly going in the recruitment video…
I wanted to see if there was any more footage of the campus, but I became distracted and had to leave the room…
The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena gets used pretty often for movie/TV/commercial shoots, but two stick out in my mind.
Beverly Hills Cop used the Athenaeum (the Caltech faculty club) as the Beverly Hills Gun Club. Both interior and exterior scenes were filmed there, but sadly the gun range itself is not on the premesis.
Legally Blonde opened with Reese Witherspoon’s character riding her bike blissfully through the campus of her girls prep school set in LA someplace. The campus actually used for that sequence was clearly Caltech - the most prominent feature was the arched bridge over Millikan Pond in front of the library.
Logan’s Run used a part of the Fort Worth Water Gardens as the portal to the outside world, or some such. Specifically, the bottom of this fountain, where there sits a pool. They’d jump into the pool and reappear out in the wilderness somewhere, I think. As I recall, the surrounding cityscape was airbrushed out, but they didn’t need to do much since it’s in a pretty deep hole.
[plug] If you’re ever in Forth Worth, check this place out. It’s actually pretty cool. [/plug]
I’ve been to the Water Gardens. Those concrete slabs are kinda steep, I kept having flashes of them finding my broken body at the bottom
<i>the Outsiders</i> was filmed in my old neighborhood. The drive-in theater is called the Admiral Twin, and it’s actually still in operation. The drive-in restaurant, Pennington’s, sadly is not. (They made the world’s finest onion rings there.) <i>Tex</i> was also filmed in the Tulsa area. I’m an extra in the crowd in the basketball game scene… not that you can see me or anything.
The opening scene in <i>So I Married An Ax Murderer</i> was filmed in an SF bar that a friend of mine worked in. He’s the guy in the furry green jacket.
My cousin’s wife lived in the apartment in NYC that was used as Jamie Lee Curtis’ apartment in “Blue Steel”. It happened before I knew her, however.
There are a couple of ones in “Tootsie”. The bar where Jessica Lange’s father confronts Dustin Hoffman after his secret is out is a few blocks from my parent’s house…I’ve been there once or twice. The bar. I’ve been to my parent’s house many times. Then there is a very brief exterior shot near the end of a community playhouse where Dustin Hoffman’s character is in a production, it’s in Mahopac NY, near where I grew up.
In “Field of Dreams” there is a scene with Kevin Costner driving up and down a street in Boston talking to himself, its obviously Huntington Avenue.
Several locations in “Good Will Hunting” are instantly recognizable: some in Harvard Square, some in Boston. The exteriors (and maybe the interiors) of the college where the Robin Williams character teaches is Bunker Hill Community College.
Many of the exterior scenes of houses in “Remember the Titans” were filmed in my Atlanta neighborhood.
The opening scenes (when the helicopters come over the mountain) of “MAS*H” were filmed on the Fox Ranch above Malibu. Most of the exterior shots (at least in the early days of the series)were filmed there, too. The Fox Ranch is now a state park, and a friend’s house backs right up to it. There’s still an abandoned Jeep there from the TV series days!
First, Hodge Podge-a-Lodge was on national PBS. At least, I remember it well from my central PA childhood.
Second, I lived in Minneapolis for a couple of years. Drop Dead Fred was apparently filmed there, as I recognized the skyline in the scene where the leading actress was jogging along the river talking to someone.
And Jingle All The Way, execrable as it was, was a movie that I actually witnessed the shooting of, since production was conducted while I lived in the Cities. I even got to see Ah-nold shooting the Mall of America scene. The man is a dwarf! I’ve also seen the (real) Holidazzle Parade at least twice, although the parade in the movie was shot in California.
Hal Hartley’s The Unbelievable Truth was filmed in his and my hometown, though most of the shots look as generic as anyplace. The mechanics garage, however, is right near the train station, and can easily be seen from the train window every time I come back from Penn Station. It’s been repainted a different color since the movie, I think. Also, I grew up about a half mile from the beach where the final scene takes place.
In York, South Carolina, (population 6,000) we had no less than three movies filmed there during the ten years I lived there. (Is there a town in the US where there wasn’t at least one movie or TV show filmed there?)
Courtroom scenes from “Murder in New Hampshire” about the Pamela Smart case (the NH teacher who recruited two students to kill her husband) were filmed at the York County courthouse. In one scene, they pan from the words “County Courthouse” carved into the building to Smart being escorted down the front steps. The movie also starred WKRP’s Johnny Fever, aka Howard Hessemann.
Beauty-pageant scenes for another movie, called something like “Death of a Beauty Queen,” about a Columbia, S.C., murder case, was filmed at the McCelvey Center auditorium. The center used to be the old elementary school (the old-school kind: brick two-story building with huge columns and polished marble floors). The center was right down the street and around the corner from where I owned a home. Late at night, at home from the newspaper, I would walk down to gawk at the set-up.
The third movie you may or may not have heard of was a quirky little indy feature starring Mel Gibson and called “The Patriot.” That was filmed at a Rev War historical site called Brattonsville a few miles down the road, while a lot of the battle scenes were filmed on a farm in Chester County about 12 miles away. It was chosen because it was a huge stretch of land with lots of ridges and absolutely no phone lines, cell towers or modern buildings to film around. I would recognize the place again, having spent four very long hot days there in a Continential Army uniform. At lunchtime, I would hike the mile back to the mess tent and be amazed at not seeing anything that looked like civilization.
