Movie/TV locations that are so obviously NOT the real place

Oh, and Frances Fisher looks like so old in it.

Are you going to tell us the title, OP?

The chapel in the wedding massacre scene in “Kill Bill” 1. It’s supposed to be in El Paso, but the Joshua tree outside is only found in the Mohave Desert.

Sorry, The Wrong Paris.

The New York City in Independence Day is impossible. Not only is it not accurate, it’s literally impossible.

Most of Friday the 13 part 8 Jason takes Manhattan is in Vancouver. The Halloween movies are supposed to be in Haddonfield Illinois but you can see Palm Trees in the first one.

The series Untamed with Eric Bana was supposed to be Yosemite but it was filmed entirely in British Columbia. I'm not even all that familiar with Yosemite and I could tell it wasn't filmed there. Lots of people were seriously irate, expecting to see their beloved Park and iconic El Capitan. Instead they got the gloomy Pacific northwest, animals that are not found in Yosemite, a permanent village of sinister squatters, implausible rescue operation on what looked nothing like El Capitan. These people didn't even try.

There was a movie streaming, forget the name, no recognizable stars, but it purported to be American student goes to school in Paris. The first scene was her in a taxi arriving from airport and going past every famous site (clearly the driver was racking up the tab) and then her walking and sightseeing—always in the foreground walking left to right because it was all clumsily filmed in front of a green screen. I’m sure the rest of the movie took place indoors with telltale American light switches and electric outlets but I changed the channel.

The Good Wife's version of "Chicago", which is not only so clearly NYC in every shot, but also believes we have two feet of ice and snow in May and spend an inordinate amount of time giving a shit about our State's Attorney.

Homeland was especially laughable trying to pass off Charlotte as DC.

QAF was clearly filmed in Toronto, not Pittsburgh

Little House on the Prairie - clearly filmed in CA, not Minnesota

Would love to see a movie set in Canada that was filmed in Romania.

“The Long Walk” is supposed to be in Maine but the landscape looks nothing like rural Maine. It was Manitoba.

I remember when season one of Fargo tried to pass of Calgary (top) as Duluth (bottom)

I was informed that The Martian wasn't filmed on Mars but it looked very realistic to me.

We laughed about the alleged Boston setting of FRINGE.

Oklahoma! doesn't have those mountains in real life.

Rizzoli & Isles: the writing/acting somewhat captured a Boston vibe, but the SoCal locations were so distracting.

I always wondered if Korea really looked like Southern California when I watched M*A*S*H. I still am not sure.

Outdoor shots of Bewitched (set in Connecticut) where you could see palm trees.

In series 1 of "The Morning Show," when New York streets weren't green-screened it was shot in the Loop in Chicago.

;Murder, She Wrote's Cabot Cove, Maine looks more like Montecito, CA.

007 stage in Pinewood Studios

Biopic of James Dean in his hometown in Indiana, but with mountains in the background.

I've also seen movie scenes set in Florida with mountains in the background. Do directors think people won't notice?

Spencer's Mountain, which was the basis of the series "the Waltons" was written by the author very specifically to take place in the Appalachian mountain part of Virginia. But when they made the move with Henry Fonda and Maureen O'Hara in the early 60s, they changed the entire setting to the Grand Tetons - more photogenic. At least they didn't pretend it was the Appalachians.

The West Wing, Season 2, episode 2 Toward the end of the episode, the president and Josh are at what is supposed to be O’Hare airport in Chicago, but is really LAX Terminal 5, which was then the Delta terminal.

Ontario Airport in Riverside County stands in for LAX in many films and tv shows.

Seinfeld, famously set in NYC but clearly shot on a soundstage in Hollywood.

The first or second episode of The Last of Us had the two escaping from Boston and stopping to camp for the night in woods with a mountain in the background. They probably weren’t much past Rt 128.

R29 - the exteriors were shot on the Universal Brownstone Street backlot.

13 Reasons Why and Euphoria

R3. The Joshua tree is also found in Arizona. In California, it is found in both the Mojave desert and the Colorado (Sonoran) desert.

R22 it looks nothing like Montecito at all. Certain establishing shots look a lot like Mendocino, which is where they were shot—500 miles to the north.

Anything filmed in Atlanta passing for the Midwest

Something Wild - a Jonathan Demme film with Jeff Daniels and Melanie Griffith from 1986 - was shot in Tallahassee, Fl, while it was supposedly set in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. If you look carefully, you will see palm trees in the backgrounds of some shots and lots of Spanish moss!

The Office. Nearly everytime there was a driving scene, you would see them passing palm trees and giant mansions with all kinds of tropical flora. The real Scranton is a depressing dump. The episode where Michael does the whole Survivorman thing in the woods also looks nothing like the Northeast, with giant Redwoods and other native Californian plants.

Weapons takes place in Pennsylvania but the Georgia pine trees and architecture say otherwise.

R35 The ash trees in Georgia are very unique to those woods which makes it incredibly identifiable, especially when they're trying to convince us they're anywhere else regionally.

R38 HA! Jinx.

All the new Stephen King series and films that take place in rural or small town Maine in the 60s-80s with more racial and ethnic diversity than a Cosby Show dinner party,

The X-Files used Vancouver and the surrounding area as a stand-in for the continental US. I actually find it charming.

Stephen King usually has a handful of black characters in his stories, r41. Don't exaggerate. The casts are still mostly white. Hate that complaint.

In [italic]Terms of Endearment[/italic], Garrett drives Aurora from River Oaks to Brennan's by way of the beach. It's a much shorter drive that doesn't involve leaving the city.

In [italic]Crazy from the Heart[/italic], a couple drives from south Texas to Mexico by way of the mountains. Nope. It's weirder in that it was produced by Houstonian Thomas Schlamme.

r12, the new LHOTP was filmed in Winnepeg.

Bosom Buddies TV sitcom with Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari. The location is based NYC, but the outdoor scenes of the opening credits and closing credits were all in Los Angeles. As someone very familiar with all of Manhattan I recall looking for landmarks of building and parks and realized it had to be LA. Years later I read the producers wanted to do everything on the cheap, even the credit scenes.

Yes, R45. The park they are jogging through at the very beginning looks nothing like NYC.

I was about seven or eight and loved Bosom Buddies and so didn't really think much about the location, having not watched it in years, the fact that it was supposed to be in NYC is hilarious as everything screams LA.

Castle is set in nyc, shot in LA. They tried to pass off LA's trains as the nyc subway.

[quote]The park they are jogging through at the very beginning looks nothing like NYC.

If i remember, it was MacArthur Park, which indeed bears no relation to Central or any other park in Manhattan.

The damp cake gave it away

On a similar note, I don't think Garry Marshall thought it necessary to send Penny/Cindy to Milwaukee for the L&S credits. The schlemiel/schlomozzel was obviously on a backlot, and the brewery looked like Southern California.

The entirety of the series Cobra Kai trying to pass off Atlanta as SoCal. Too many discrepancies to note other than to say that the exteriors of buildings and vegetation looked nothing like the San Fernando Valley.

The film Factory Girl about Edie Sedgwick was set in Manhattan but filmed in Shreveport, Louisiana. Obviously there were problems.

I can’t remember a specific but any time they try to pass the UK off as LA it shows. Potted palms around the pool of an 18th century country house doesn’t read authentic.

Even though I can usually tell when something is shot in Canada based on how drab everything looks, I have never watched a TV Show or Movie closely enough to know when something is substituting for something else when it's shot here in the States. I guess I've missed all those palm trees.

R53, a lot of this probably wasn’t an issue before home video and pausing and rewinding.

“Supernatural” was supposed to be all over the USA but, especially in the first season, everything was filmed in the same damp, muddy, and overcast area of BC.

As a botanist I can tell pretty much if the location is appropriate. Period pieces drive me mad, like the Pride and Prejudice with Kiera Knightly where there are 2 enormous sequoia in front of the house. The story is set in the early 1800s, yet these trees first arrived in the UK in 1853. Anything that is supposed to take place in the UK or Ireland should show hedgerows in the landscape. They began to seriously plant these in the 1700s

Distinctive lamps and blue street signs are each a dead give away for outdoor scenes in Los Angeles proper.

Not exactly on topic, but it always annoys me when a scene is supposed to be the streets of New York and they are empty

World War Z using Glasgow, Scotland for Philadelphia. Laughable.

R58 many streets, including in Manhattan, are dead quiet in the middle of the night or at sunrise. On an early Saturday morning I can stand in the middle of 8th ave and not see traffic for many blocks to either the north or the south.

R42 There were so many XFiles episodes that allegedly took place in Virginia. You’re not going to find anywhere near Vancouver that looks like Middleburg or Culpeper. I appreciate the effort on Chris Carter’s part, though.

I visited a friend in Rome, GA this summer and it was like walking into a Netflix movie. So much gets shot around there.

Filming a show set in NYC or the NYC area in Los Angeles was quite normal for many years but I’m going to give you dataloungers and example of the complete opposite.

The HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce from 2011 which is set in the Los Angeles area was actually filmed in Westchester Cty New York.

I heard that none of the Star Trek shows were filmed at the real places. Totally takes me out of the story. And thankfully OP didn't ask about theater. I watched a theater play the other day, Macbeth. It actually played in a building in my city, not in the highlands of Scotland at all.

The new Maigret. Very off putting. Filmed in Budapest and everything is in English.

" Lord of the Rings" was supposed to take place in Middle Earth, but it was filmed in New Zealand, not Gondor, Rohan, or The Shire. I feel cheated.

Things shot in Canada have a very cold light to them.

Now that Netflix is building a huge new studio in New Jersey, expect to see a lot of the Garden State. They’re filming in my town right now. No idea where they are going to pretend they are, but it’s unlikely the story is actually set here.

The Krypton scenes in all of the Superman movies weren't even filmed outside of our solar system. Completely inaccurate. Anyone who knows Krypton could tell.

Just found out it’s “Bad Day” starring Cameron Diaz.