Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
The Office - set in Scranton PA but you can often see palm trees and mountains that clearly give away it's SoCal filming location.
If we want to talk the 70s, the original True Grit is set in western Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma but it was portrayed as desert and Fort Smith, Arkansas appears as a desert town. The 2010 Coen Bros film did a better job but still portrayed the area as being much more arid than it actually is.
True Grit is a good example. As pointed out, even the reboot screwed it up a little bit. IIRC, it was filmed in New Mexico. It looked slightly like the Ozarks at times, but was obviously more arid.
"Little House on the Prairie" had an episode "Jonathan's Mountain" where Ernest Borgnine was a hermit living on a mountain.
There are no mountains in southern Minnesota.
Also, the show was set in the 1880s, and yet the village doctor had a telephone. Telephones were only invented in 1876 or 78? and in the 1880s, only existed a couple of large eastern cities. It was much too expensive to string lines in rural areas. Another episode showed Nellie Oleson recording Laura Ingalls gossiping on a recorder. Gramophones had barely been invented, and certainly no one in a prairie village would have one. There would have been no electricity, in fact many rural areas of America didn't get electricity until the 1940s. Another episode in one of the last seasons, showed Laura traveling to Arizona to take a university class and meeting Ralph Waldo Emerson. But, Arizona at that time was a rough primitive territory. I can't imagine a poor teacher from Minnesota traveling that extreme distance, using multiple trains, just to take a class.
Laverne and Shirley in their sitcom, had metropolitan New York accents, though the show was set in Milwaukee. The movie "Rocky" had Sylvester Stallone speaking in a New York accent. Philadelphia, although nearby, has a very different accent (which is described in detail on Wikipedia under "Philadelphia accent").
The Patty Duke show was set in Brooklyn Heights, NY, according to the words of the theme song. But the wholesome, white-bread characters all seem like they could be from someplace like Utah. The same way with the sitcom "Family Affair" where the family, including children, lived in a high-rise in Manhattan, yet seemed so wholesome, slow-spoken, and polite.
Last edited by JMT; 09-16-2019 at 07:56 AM..
Reason: North America only
Recently saw Hurricane Heist and it was probably the WORST and inaccurate locations besides Transformers 2 and possibly even worse than Rumble in the Bronx.
Its set in a fictional town called "Gulfport, Alabama" though I wonder if they really wanted to set it in Gulfport, Mississippi and thought Gulfport was in Alabama. Its portrayed as a small town while Gulfport MS is a sizable city with many resort hotels and high rises. The movie was actually filmed in Romania, Eastern Europe!!!!!! There are mountains in the distance shown very prominently in the film, and one scene also shows rolling farmland which is not what the Gulf Coast is like. Also there's a long chase scene on a highway that is clearly a European highway and doesn't look like an American highway at all though its supposed to be "Route 90". The signs and markings don't even look like they're in the US at all.
Also, in The Marine, that movie is set in South Carolina but filmed in Australia and everything was off. They had a chase on "Interstate 95" which was a two-lane road lined with Australian businesses and clearly Australian topography and plant life.
The southern half of Indiana is forest, not cornfields. So if Hawkins is supposed to be around Bloomington then it kind of works.
One of mine is Ozark. Its clearly not filmed at LOTO. The lake itself doesn't look the part, nor does the built environment. Ozak makes LOTO look like a has-been hillbilly recreation area and its really not like that.
Yes, I live within 20 minutes of Lake Allatoona, and within 45 minutes of Lake Lanier, which are both stand-ins for LOTO. I think they are decent fill-ins in that they are both large reservoirs with somewhat wooded and hilly terrain.
Since moving to the Atlanta area, I'm now aware of what shows and movies are filmed here vs. where they claim to be filmed. My wife has gotten into a lot of extra/background acting work and it's so interesting to see. Many times it's in a warehouse in an exurb off the interstate with no windows!
Some of the upcoming season 3 of Ozark is being filmed at Stone Mountain. I'm not sure if the mountain will be pictured or not, otherwise kind of hard to cover that up and imply that it's Missouri!!!
You often get the gritty industrial vibe, but much of the state is farmland and many areas are absolutely beautiful.
Hahaha, yes, they do that to New Jersey, too. Everything always looks like the most industrialized part of the state with the oil refineries and whatnot that you see as you drive on the northern end of the NJ Turnpike closest to the city.
We have farms, horse country, and the Pine Barrens, but you'd never know watching TV.
I loved the TV show "House", which took place at a fictional hospital in New Jersey, but there were often inaccuracies that jumped out at me. Distances from one place to another that weren't correct (for example, they said it would take two hours to drive from one specific town to another, and those towns are maybe 20 minutes apart) and once they claimed that there were "only three" types of poisonous snakes in NJ--rattlers, copperheads, and coral snakes. There are only TWO--we don't have coral snakes here.
Another one that made me yell at the TV was watching the 2001 movie "Serendipity". At the end, they show this beautiful star-lit sky--and they are supposed to be in NYC. You can't see stars like that in New York unless there's a northeastern blackout, lol.
"Little House on the Prairie" had an episode "Jonathan's Mountain" where Ernest Borgnine was a hermit living on a mountain.
There are no mountains in southern Minnesota.
Also, the show was set in the 1880s, and yet the village doctor had a telephone. Telephones were only invented in 1876 or 78? and in the 1880s, only existed a couple of large eastern cities. It was much too expensive to string lines in rural areas. Another episode showed Nellie Oleson recording Laura Ingalls gossiping on a recorder. Gramophones had barely been invented, and certainly no one in a prairie village would have one. There would have been no electricity, in fact many rural areas of America didn't get electricity until the 1940s. Another episode in one of the last seasons, showed Laura traveling to Arizona to take a university class and meeting Ralph Waldo Emerson. But, Arizona at that time was a rough primitive territory. I can't imagine a poor teacher from Minnesota traveling that extreme distance, using multiple trains, just to take a class.
Laverne and Shirley in their sitcom, had metropolitan New York accents, though the show was set in Milwaukee. The movie "Rocky" had Sylvester Stallone speaking in a New York accent. Philadelphia, although nearby, has a very different accent (which is described in detail on Wikipedia under "Philadelphia accent").
The Patty Duke show was set in Brooklyn Heights, NY, according to the words of the theme song. But the wholesome, white-bread characters all seem like they could be from someplace like Utah. The same way with the sitcom "Family Affair" where the family, including children, lived in a high-rise in Manhattan, yet seemed so wholesome, slow-spoken, and polite.
Hahaha, yes, they do that to New Jersey, too. Everything always looks like the most industrialized part of the state with the oil refineries and whatnot that you see as you drive on the northern end of the NJ Turnpike closest to the city.
We have farms, horse country, and the Pine Barrens, but you'd never know watching TV.
I loved the TV show "House", which took place at a fictional hospital in New Jersey, but there were often inaccuracies that jumped out at me. Distances from one place to another that weren't correct (for example, they said it would take two hours to drive from one specific town to another, and those towns are maybe 20 minutes apart) and once they claimed that there were "only three" types of poisonous snakes in NJ--rattlers, copperheads, and coral snakes. There are only TWO--we don't have coral snakes here.
Another one that made me yell at the TV was watching the 2001 movie "Serendipity". At the end, they show this beautiful star-lit sky--and they are supposed to be in NYC. You can't see stars like that in New York unless there's a northeastern blackout, lol.
Yes, I grew up near the Appalachians and Delaware water gap. Absolutely beautiful country, nothing like the parking lot stereotype of NJ
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
