New York City as Ohio? The NY Times says it's so, as film productions take advantage of the city's new tax breaks to encourage production money come to the Big Apple. Freelance location scout Mark Bodnar ran down how the city can be transformed into almost anywhere:
For the rural South? "I'd head to Rockaway Beach and all those great abandoned Army barracks there."
For farmland? Floyd Bennett Field, in Brooklyn.
For the desert? A marble-and-tile quarry on Staten Island.
And, of course, there's Brooklyn, where his scouting company, Where'bouts, is based. "Brooklyn can cheat as anywhere in America," Mr. Bodnar said. "Just south of Prospect Park, people have yards, big backyards, Victorian houses. It's suburban. It's a neighborhood. It could be anywhere."
Gothamist also got a kick out of learning that Martin Scorsese decided to shoot in New York for the set-in-Boston The Departed (which is a remake of the awesome Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs) when he was in Beacon Hill, telling his location scout, "What the hell. This is Brooklyn Heights. Let's go." And it turns out that the crew of Spiderman 2 did want to film the subway showdown on NYC elevated tracks, but the MTA refused, hence the Chicago substitution.
What are some areas of the city that seem absolutely un-city like? The outer boroughs do, in some areas, take on that anonymity that befits suburban anywhere (especially with McMansions coming to Queens). Are there are any movies that have claimed to be set in NYC but are clearly not? And we don't mean the direct-to-video stuff. Gothamist is relieved now that movies set in NYC will have more of a chance to shoot in NYC, because ever since seeing the Muppets Take Manhattan, we've believed in authenticity; we spent most of New York Minute picking out the shot-in-Toronto scenes versus the New York ones.
Photograph of a swampy bit of Queens - the Broad Channel - by Jake Dobkin
