Just as good film actors are valued for their ability to portray a multitude of different characters, many of the “locations” we see in movies are real places that are pretending to be somewhere else.
When we see a “New York” story, we naively assume it was filmed there.
Back in 1981, I was shocked to learn that most of the terrific Louis Malle-John Guare film “Atlantic City” was shot in Montreal.
Connecticut moviegoers are getting an education in the amazing trickery production designers can pull off in the current “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2,” in which a series of Bridgeport-shot sequences are presented as taking place in Providence, R.I. and New York City.
Just as the Louis Malle picture was made in Canada because of tax incentives, a new wave of Connecticut productions are dressing up familiar local sites to become other places.
Tuesday night, I attended a press screening of the new Barry Levinson film, “What Just Happened” — set to open Oct. 3 — which generated lots of press coverage in 2006 when Robert DeNiro and Sean Penn arrived in Bridgeport for several days of filming inside the Showcase Cinemas in the Black Rock section of the city.
The first ten minutes of “What Just Happened” take place inside the theater — where a Hollywood bomb-in-the-making is undergoing a disastrous test screening — but the movie tells us we are in Costa Mesa, California.
It’s fun but disorienting to see DeNiro (as the harried producer of the flop) and Catherine Keener (as an angry studio head) arguing (above) in the lobby of a multiplex many of us know very well. (There is also another key scene in the men’s room of the Showcase Cinemas).
After watching “Traveling Pants” and “What Just Happened” I was left wondering how many other films are pulling off such completely convincing location magic. Clearly, appearances can be totally deceiving when it comes to Hollywood filmmaking.
