California Doubling: Difference between revisions

* Funny how Culver City, California looks a lot like [[Hogan's Heroes|Nazi Germany]] and [[The Andy Griffith Show|Mayberry, North Carolina]] at the same time.

* Both ''[[Matlock]]'' and ''[[Profiler (TV)|Profiler]]'' were set in or around Atlanta, GA. Were it not for establishing shots, dialogue references, and the opening credits of 'Matlock', no Atlantan would know this.

* ''[[Alias (TV)|Alias]]'' did this practically every episode. So often in fact, a DVD featurette was called "From Burbank [home of a number of studios in LA] to Barcelona".

* ''[[Angel (TV)|Angel]]'' had a few episodes supposedly set in places like Rome and U.K. For the U.K. one, they went to a forested area of northern California but were still disappointed at how little it looked like the English countryside. Minutes before they were to film, however, a fog bank rolled in and gave the setting a much more UK feel.

* [http://www1.skicanadianrockies.com/alberta-winter-stories/hollywood-comes-to-alberta/explore-hollywood-in-alberta.html Rural Alberta] can also Vancouver Double for any number of outdoor locations, depending on the particular area, with the Badlands of southern Alberta being used for numerous Westerns over the years. Famous examples include ''[[Unforgiven (Film)|Unforgiven]]'', ''[[Brokeback Mountain]]'', and ''[[Shanghai Noon]]''.

** Winnipeg has also Vancouver Doubled for 21st century Minneapolis and 19th and 20th century Kansas City, Chicago, and St. Louis, due to the hundreds of Victorian and Edwardian buildings still remaining in the downtown core.

* ''[[Ballistic Ecks vs. Sever|Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever]]'' weirdly inverts and subverts Vancouver Doubling by be set in Vancouver without using any notable landmarks to make it look like Vancouver (except for Library Square), and doing things like having the city police driving black cars and otherwise looking nothing like their real-world counterparts.

** That's not the only thing that didn't make sense in the movie...

* An episode of ''[[The Sentinel (TV)|The Sentinel]]'', which was set in Washington, had a scene in one episode by a big bell. With 'RCMP' stamped on it.

* ''[[Fringe]]'' is set in Boston, and has shot there for the first season (as Boston is trying to make the city more hospitable to film and TV shoots). However, the creators have admitted that filming had to move to Vancouver in season 2 for budget reasons.

*** The show has been mocked constantly in Boston for shots like this. It's a little baffling since they keep insisting on citing specific Boston landmarks, instead of just not mentioning the setting very often.

** The Alternate Universe Fringe Division is based in the (very cool looking) Vancouver Public Library.

* The show ''[[Eureka]]'' takes place in the fictional town of Eureka (which is not the same as the actual city of Eureka, CA), but is filmed in a variety of locations outside Vancouver.

* ''[[Hellcats]]'' has the good city of Vancouver playing ''Memphis''.

* This trope is [[Lampshaded]] in [[Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip]] when Danny says they can't afford to make a movie without a bond and Matt responds "We make some budget cuts, we shoot in Vancouver." (Danny refuses, because "Vancouver doesn't look like anything. It doesn't even look like Vancouver. It looks like Boston, California.")

* ''[[Pretty Little Liars]]'' has the rare distinction of getting two entries in this trope (see also [[California Doubling]]: Live-Action TV above), as the pilot was filmed in Vancouver.

* ''[[The Bourne Series|The Bourne Ultimatum]]'' had a scene set in Moscow during the events of ''The Bourne Supremacy'' (which was filmed in Moscow during that film). To avoid having to get an entire crew to Moscow again, they created a snowy Moscow in East Berlin, which was mostly rebuilt by Stalin and so looked much like the architecture of Moscow.

* In ''[[Maverick (Film)|Maverick]]'', the climactic poker game is set on a riverboat steaming the Mississippi River south of St. Louis. Anyone familiar with the area knows that the exterior scenes of the riverboat were shot somewhere very, very different from the Mississippi River south of St. Louis (probably on a river in the Pacific Northwest).

* The Philippines doubled for Vietnam in ''[[Apocalypse Now]]'' and a biker film called ''The Losers''.

** This is a particular favorite country for a lot of low budget Hong Kong movies to double for the US and other countries due to the different kinds of urban cities, beaches and deep jungles.

** Substitutions within substitutions...

* The ''[[Transformers (Film)|Transformers]]'' movie filmed scenes set in the Middle East in the White Sands military bombing range, in New Mexico, once again for fairly obvious reasons.

* ''[[For Richer or Poorer]]'' was the first in a growing number of Baltimore Doubling. Notably outrageous though as the much of the movie takes place in Lancaster PA, which is not that far from where the film was actually shot.

* Parts of the Czech Republic and Poland often double for parts of Austria or Germany. They stick up German language street and shop signs.

** Nearly all scenes of ''Eurotrip'' were filmed in or near Prague. No scene was set in the Czech Republic itself, though Slovakia, which was unified with it as Czechoslovakia until 1993, is featured.

* [[Spaghetti Western|Spaghetti Westerns]] were filmed with a variety of European locations doubling for the American West. The semidesertic province of Almería in Spain, with its wide-open spaces that evoked an untamed frontier (and extras who could more or less pass for Mexican), was probably the most common.

** The same location was used as well in ''[[Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade (Film)|Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade]]'' and the [[The Young Indiana Jones|prequel TV series]], standing for Greece, the Hatay republic (now in Turkey), Egypt and Mexico. The Mexican episode was later recut and released as a TV movie with additional scenes in the American SW that were ''really'' filmed in the American SW, and it is quite amusing to see how the vegetation and terrain suddenly change as soon as the main character crosses the frontier. [[Grass Is Greener]] here indeed...

** ''[[Lawrence of Arabia]]'' was also partially filmed in Spain, in addition to Morocco and Jordan. Only Jordan lies in the region the film is depicting.

** A good chunk of ''[[Dirty Dancing]]'' was shot at the Mountain Lake Hotel near Roanoke. The movie was set in [[Borscht Belt|the Catskills]] in [[The Sixties]], but since most of the actual Catskills resorts had shut down (or were in no shape to shoot a movie) by then ([[The Eighties|1987]]), another location had to be found.

* ''[[Batman Begins]]'' and ''[[The Dark Knight]]'' took place in the fictional Gotham City, of course, but many outdoor scenes were filmed in an extremely recognizable [[The Windy City|Chicago]]. To the extent that some fans take it for granted that Gotham City ''is'' the Nolanverse's equivalent of Chicago. Much of the first film was also filmed in England (the fields surrounding Wayne Manor {{spoiler|and what's left of it after it's burned down}} are clearly not in the US).

* The Universal Studios Backlot tour has a corner of buildings that can stand for any old city in Europe with just the wave of a flag.

* A rather odd, yet strangely hilarious, inversion: ''[[Zombieland (Film)|Zombieland]]'' has quite a bit of its running time set in Hollywood, including a major movie star's mansion and a theme park. So both of those scenes were, quite naturally, filmed in Georgia.

* ''[[The Wind and The Lion]]'' was filmed in Spain, with Spanish locations being used to portray the Moroccan desert, Tangier, [[Washington DC]], Oyster Bay, Long island, and Yellowstone National Park. Railroad buffs will notice some obviously European railroad cars in the background when [[Theodore Roosevelt]] is giving a whistle-stop speech; otherwise, it's a pretty convincing job.

* All ''Wrong Turn'' films are set in West Virginia, but first two movies were shot in Canada and the third one was shot in Bulgaria.

* ''[[Sex and The City]] 2'' was filmed in Morocco, doubling for Abu Dhabi. The filmmakers had asked permission to film in Abu Dhabi (and Dubai before that), but were denied both times.

* Quite bizarrely, ''Youth In Revolt'' is set in various California locations (Oakland, Ukiah, Berkeley, Santa Cruz) but filmed entirely in Michigan! Of course, it doesn't look remotely like California. With California so easy to film in already, one wonders why Michigan was chosen...tax credit, perhaps?

* Although the 1983 film ''The Lords Of Discipline'', about elite military cadets and racism in their ranks, is set in the Southern US, most of the film was shot in England.

* ''Away We Go'' depicts a sort of road trip across the United States, but was almost wholly filmed in Connecticut -- which doubled for Colorado; Madison, Wisconsin; and Montreal.

* ''[[The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Film)|The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen]]'' was partly filmed in the Czech Republic.

* Several scenes in [[Home Alone|Home Alone 2]] that take place in New York were actually shot in Chicago.

* ''[[The Avengers (Film)|The Avengers]]''' final battle scenes set in New York were shot in Cleveland.

== Live Action TV ==

* In ''[[The Tomorrow People]]'': "Worlds Away", on arriving for the first time on an alien planet, one character warns the others, "This isn't just some wood in Surrey," which is [[Lampshade Hanging]] by the writers -- the scene was indeed filmed in a wood in the British county of Surrey.

** Ironically, in the third episode, Victorian Cardiff was California Doubled by Swansea, a smaller city nearby - this was due to Cardiff being heavily bombed in [[World War II]], so not many Victorian buildings survived.

** In ''The Vampires Of Venice'', the titular [[City of Canals]] was doubled by the Croatian city of Trogir.

* The Paris half of ''[[Highlander the Series]]'' was filmed in and set in Paris.

* The scenes in the pilot for ''[[The Sarah Connor Chronicles]]'' that were set in New Mexico were actually filmed in New Mexico. The rest of the series was set and filmed in [[Los Angeles]].

* Doubling has been aggressively averted on [[Breaking Bad]], which is filmed almost entirely in the Albuquerque area. However, they turn around and approach the trope from the other end, because scenes set in Mexico are usually filmed in New Mexico [[Color Wash|with a yellow filter slapped over the lens]].

* The sitcom ''The Ugliest Girl In Town'' (an American production) was both filmed and set in London.

[[Category:The Wild West]]

[[Category:California Doubling]]