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I saw this old western movie from the 50s, you know, the ones where the squaws wore lipstick and eye shadow, and Jesse James and his brother Frank broke out of a jail in their home town, even though in real life Jesse James never saw the inside of a jail. They were riding across the desert and Jesse asks Frank how far they have ridden and Frank says, " About 20 miles."
You have to go a hell of a lot further than 20 miles to reach the desert from Missouri.
New Orleans is often poorly portrayed. They may get the scenery correct by actually filming there, but the accents are either totally wrong (Gone With the Wind type Southern) or weirdly exaggerated (locals using French expressions).
Things set in the South are often poorly done accent-wise. Most people in the South don't have a Lower South/Old Money South/Plantation accent. A fake drawl is really easy to spot.
There was a time in the 70s and 80s when you simply had to expect any conceivable tv or movie setting from the south Bronx to the Rhine Valley to a Vietnam rice paddy to look like the Santa Monica Mountains. Little House on the Prairie, as mentioned upthread, was particularly egregious, as was M*A*S*H. Even though I have never been there, I feel so familiar with the semi-arid oak woodlands of the southern California foothills.
Even today, whenever an episode of a tv series is suddenly set in an outdoor location, I start looking for the chapparal covered mountains and palm trees. Though these days you tend to see some spruce covered PNW hills (Vancouver) or red clay and pines characteristic of Georgia mixed in.
The later seasons of Miami Vice were clearly filmed in L.A. I was watching an expisode last night. They were driving up a hill. The only hills in South Florida are the garbage mounds.
Blood and Oil was the worst offender. It was set in North Dakota but filmed around Park City, Utah. They substituted mountains in a ski town for a state on the Great Plains.
The other two shows that bug me in this regard are The Middle and The Goldbergs. They're set in Indiana and Pennsylvania respectively but (with the very rare exception when snow is part of the plot) it's sunny and green year round.
Although it's one of my favorite movies of all time, "Manchester-by-the-Sea" did not represent the real Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts.
The real Manchester is an uber wealthy coastal town, but it's surrounded by working class towns. The one they seemed to film in the most was Gloucester, a true fishing city with a working class vibe.
I just think the name "Gloucester" doesn't sound as sexy as "Manchester by the Sea", so they went with that.
In one episode of the 1970s tv series McMillan and Wife, several of the characters travelled to Scotland to meet a relative of McMillan (Rock Hudson). The landscape was clearly southern California and not Scotland.
I mean most tv shows from then look like California no matter where they are set. That watering hole that opens every episode of Andy Griffith isn’t located near Mayberry.
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