Hey, I once lived in one of the towers at Discovery Bay Center, howdy neighbor!
As for filming in the neighborhood, I once heard a wag describe a sure way to make a few bucks when they are filming nearby. Just wait until the “all quiet” signal and start honking your car horn. Someone will be by shortly with a stack of cash. May be an urban legend?
One of the shoots my daughter was on was on a set of railroad tracks running through a suburban set of houses in New Jersey. The camera work was done to make it look like the middle of nowhere. It was filmed at night, going to midnight, which might have been disruptive to the homes nearby. But the residents were mostly in their backyards watching the filming.
More disruptive was that they rented one of the houses as dressing rooms, so we were in someone’s bedroom, which was not the best dressing room I’ve ever seen.
But the owners got paid pretty well, I think.
I’ve had shoots in my neighborhood, at my work, and everywhere in-between. Being in SoCal and nearby several studios, it’s a part of the background. If they’re on a break, you can chat with the crew and sometimes cast. They don’t like people wandering off the street to bug them, but when they’re in your way they’re friendly. They live here, too; they know the hassles. Local residents are typically accommodating to shoots as well. Sometimes that means waiting for a scene to end shooting before you can get across an area.
It’s a big industry here, and I’d guess about a quarter of the people I know locally are in media or entertainment. I don’t follow things enough to know or recognize most stars. At a function my kids were in, I was chatting with a woman whose kids were there too. Later, someone asked if I knew who she was. I didn’t, and still didn’t know after they told me her name. Wiki told me she was a fairly famous TV and voice-over star with an Emmy. She just seemed like any other mom to me. :shrug:
Dick Wolf’s series Chicago PD, Chicago Fire, and Chicago Med film in my neighborhood all the time. As others have said, most of what you see are huge trailers that line up and down both sides of the block. I always look for names on the doors, but never see any. I also like to walk my dog past the trailers, hoping he’ll get “discovered.” (he’s really photogenic)
Once I was walking down the street, and saw that a storefront had been painted with a sign that said “Alderman’s Office, 51st Ward.” That puzzled me for a moment, because Chicago has 50 wards, and I was in the 43rd ward. Then I realized it must be made up for one of the shows.
This just happened to me a couple weeks ago. I’m in LA, about 3 miles from Sony.
For the most recent time, the production crew pasted flyers (with gaffer’s tape, so you know it was legit) to the buildings within about a 3-block radius of the filming site, alerting us to the filming day and time – just one day, from about 8am-4pm. They also set up orange traffic cones along the curbs and blocked off street parking for 24 hours. This was done the day before filming, so there wasn’t much warning.
They did not close down streets to cars nor restrict residents’ movement in and out of buildings, but they did have a person blocking the sidewalk so pedestrians couldn’t just stroll past the cameras and crew. I am sure they would have let through anyone who lived or worked there.
I saw the flyers and cones the night before, so I knew what was happening and to avoid the street. But if you lived in my building and entered from the side door and took the nearby freeway onramp instead of surface streets, you probably wouldn’t have known anything was happening. By the time I got home, there was no sign anything out of the ordinary had happened.
Homeland filmed outside my workplace a while back, before I worked at this location. I’m told it was a mild inconvenience because everyone had to come and go through the front entrance instead of the staff entrance in the rear.
I wrote screenplays for some fund-raising films almost 10 years ago, and we filmed in the library I worked at then, but shooting just waited until after closing, then did the exteriors as fast as possible while we still had daylight, then shot the interiors when the sun went down.
I’ve seen a few Hollywood shoots in my life.
The first was when a scene from the film Lucas was filmed at my high school in a Chicago suburb. The scene was filmed in the boy’s locker room, which screwed up our P.E. schedule for a few days, as I recall. (A few years before, a scene from Risky Business was also filmed in that same suburb, but it didn’t affect me.)
The next was at my university in Houston, Texas. It was a forgettable Dolph Lundgren film. Dark Angel, maybe? Anyway, they filmed a scene in one of the engineering labs. The scene was filmed at night so as not to interfere with university operations, but the scene was set in the day. They therefore put big light boxes on the exterior of the windows to make it look like daylight inside the building. I was walking by the film shoot late at night during one of their breaks, and was asked if I wanted to meet the actors. I said, “Sure!” and got to meet Dolph Lundgren himself (who was still pretty famous at the time). He asked me what I was studying (chemical engineering) and told me that he actually had a master’s degree in chemical engineering! (Which is supported by his biography on IMDB.)
The last was downtown Newport, Rhode Island. While filming Amistad, Steven Spielberg filmed the exterior scenes in Washington Square as a stand-in for 19th-century New Haven. The courthouse scenes were filmed inside the Old Colony House on the square. For the exterior scenes, they had to turn modern Newport into a 19th century town, which involved removing all the vehicles, traffic lights, street signs, commercial signs, covering up the asphalt with gravel, etc. One of the store owners in the square (a camera shop, IIRC), refused to cooperate, so the filmmakers had to carefully keep that store out of view of all the shots.
I’ve seen a LOT of shoots just by going about my daily business. The only time there was any shooting at my condo complex was for a House Hunters episode on HGTV. I wasn’t aware of it on the time. I recognized our complex when I saw the aired show.
Once I was walking one of the dogs behind the high school a half block from the complex, and I saw a Ferrari Testarosa “crashed” against a utility pole. It was obviously just a shell.
I live just a few blocks from Weta Studios, which is located in a mostly-residential suburb. While Ghost in the Shell was being filmed, we were briefed that we might hear gunfire at odd times, but when they had to fire weapons at night, they’d keep it to only two nights, and make a significant donation to local charities by way of apology.
It was fine with me. As it turned out, I only actually noticed guns firing in the distance once.
Quite a few years ago, they were shooting a scene for Nash Bridges with Elvira at my workplace. They were there for most of the day, having arrived before we started work at 8 AM, and wrapped somewhere mid-afternoon.
Fairly disruptive - from time to time, it would be announced to the building via the phone system that we had to be quiet, which meant work stopped, and the sales floor was pretty much off-limits to us and any would-be customers until they were done. And nobody not directly involved with the production was allowed to talk to Elvira. When she was done, her handlers whisked her away very quickly.
Ultimately, only about ten seconds of shooting made it to the final cut.
When I lived in LA, I went to buy a turntable in a Santa. on Ica stereo store. They wouldn’t let me in because they were fixing some TV show.
To this day, I do not own a turntable.
I blame Hollywood.
A what kind of stereo store?
Yeah, this. I live on a very picturesque street in Brooklyn. It’s very, very popular for shoots because it’s timeless. Move the cars out and it could be a hundred years ago. Nothing has changed (and it’s a NYC historical district, so nothing ever will). Look down that street, nothing but three-story brownstones on a cobblestone street, with slate sidwalks, you’d think you were back in the 19th century sometime. And, indeed, a few years back, Winter’s Tale spent about a week shooting on my block. That was actually kind of fun – they put fake snow down, and it was amazingly realistic.
Sometimes they’ll park vintage cars all along the street, so at least there’s that.
Blue Bloods was shooting in the neighborhood last week. So were two other productions. So parking was shot in the whole neighborhood for a couple of days.
It’s kind of a pain in the ass.
How could you possibly imagine they would be able to do that?? 
A Santa Monica stereo store.
I don’t know where that came from. I blame trump.
We’re just up the street and around the corner from Discovery Bay. Whenever we decide to rent a car for a day, it’s always from the Enterprise place that’s in there. Maybe about a five-minute walk away.
As for the Hawaii Five-0 shoot, that wrapped up on Tuesday. Supposed to show on the October 18 episode. Some sort of abduction scene, I gather. The abduction itself was filmed up on the seventh floor of our building. We’re down on the second.
There is always film production going on around Montreal, but the closest it ever got to me personally was a portion of the 2003 film Levity, starring Billy Bob Thornton and Morgan Freeman, about 150 feet from my front door.
Annoyingly, in his review of the film, Roger Ebert said the characters live in a “slum.” Hey, screw you, dump-truck.
Film crews are an extremely common sight in my town. The only time I’ve ever been inconvenienced was coming back from a restaurant on the main square, while an episode of Watchmen was being filmed; a production assistant asked us not to cross into the background of the scene while they were getting a shot. He held us up for about three minutes, then allowed us to pass; even calling it a “minor inconvenience” an overstatement. Given the amount of money and jobs Hollywood brings to the area, I’m willing to put up with far more hassle than I’ve ever encountered.
Never have seen a celebrity, though, which is disappointing.
Although Orange County is close to Hollywood the majority of the county is outside of the original Thirty Mile Zone (Studio Zone or TMZ), so I don’t see too many film shoots.
Tarantino did shut down a local street in my City to film a scene for his latest film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. We have an old shut down Taco Bell that they fixed up to look like it did in the 70s. Most of the locals were excited to have a big name director in town and went to watch the filming.
We also have two of the massive hangars from WWII that are often used in film, commercials, and TV shows. They are located on an old base so their use does not disrupt anything.
Films occasionally shot where I used to live. Once I was crossing the street in front of a big Hollywood production when a cop yelled at me that I couldn’t take a picture as I crossed. I wasn’t actually taking a picture but my response was an assertive, “Fuck you! I have a First Amendment right to take a picture if I damn well want.” Then I turned and noticed it wasn’t a cop. It was a probably 18-year-old security guard who was trying to sound authoritative and do what his bosses told him to do. I apologized.