Comments on: Celluloid Soonerland

By: Lisa Paul

Lisa Paul — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:50:39 +0000

I know I’m prejudiced, but I have to say San Francisco and Venice are the two places I’ve been that really look like the postcards. It’s just that we don’t look like Hitchcock “engineered” us. Although Venice looks exactly like Nicholas Roeg imagined in “Don’t Look Now”. Minus Julie Christie. Which is a big minus.

By: CGHill

CGHill — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 03:34:26 +0000

Close as I came to such a thing was seeking out Mulholland Drive and Dead Man’s Curve in L.A. Mulholland was more or less intact; the Curve had been flattened a bit, taking the scare out of it, and anyway it wasn’t quite where Jan said it was.

So maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t come to San Francisco. I’d probably wander into some restaurant and ask for Rice-A-Roni.

By: Lisa Paul

Lisa Paul — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 03:29:06 +0000

Hitchcock totally messed up perceptions of San Francisco for everyone as he would have a character walk across the street near one landmark and end up clear across town at another. Then there is the shock you discover when you move here and realize, no, every apartment doesn’t have a stunning view of the Golden Gate bridge.

Don’t get me started on Bullit. Every Englishman who comes here tries to replicate the car chase –which is impossible since it actually goes through several non-contiguous neighborhoods and into the next county all while ostensibly staying in “downtown” San Francisco.

By: Sooner Cinema Reviewed at http://www.dustbury.com/ «

Sooner Cinema Reviewed at http://www.dustbury.com/ « — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 17:35:14 +0000

[...] Celluloid Soonerland [...]

By: CGHill

CGHill — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 17:21:55 +0000

Once a year they come down and shoot a few more exteriors.

By: McGehee

McGehee — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 17:03:08 +0000

As for Oklahoma-ness, I would have thought the oil well on the Capitol grounds in OKC would have worked, but “Saving Grace” hasn’t shown it yet. The one unmistakably OKC location they have used wasn’t significant before a certain April day in 1995.

By: McGehee

McGehee — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 17:00:45 +0000

[I]s there any Wyoming film that doesn’t show the Grand Tetons?

There was a scene in “Lonesome Dove” set in Wyoming’s Powder River country, not a Teton in sight. Of course, they could have filmed the scene on Edwards Dry Lake Bed for all I could tell.

By: McGehee

McGehee — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 16:59:17 +0000

In fact, Hal Ashby’s Bound for Glory, a biography of Woody Guthrie, somehow manages not to mention Oklahoma at all.

I finally got around to trying to watch that movie after having had and enjoyed what I had thought was its soundtrack (with vocals by David Carradine!) many years ago. My disappointment at there being almost no singing was enough to make me return the DVD only half-watched.

And until you mentioned it I hadn’t noticed the omission of Oklahoma from the movie, since the songs on the album had made no bones about where Woody was from.

By: Jeffro

Jeffro — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 16:34:54 +0000

I challenge anyone to show me any relation to the western Kansas countryside portrayed in Gunsmoke and the reality. Any trees that were here were long gone by Dodge City’s salad days, stripped for construction of forts and cities. There is a difference between locations near Hollywood vs outside my front door. I gotta say, Oklahoma definitely has some topographical diversity going on compared to Kansas. The Panhandle vs the mountains in SE OK? Way too cool. We do have the Flint Hills, which are a fairly subtle beauty.

But, we’ll always have Dorothy, the Yellow Brick Road, and tornadoes.