Results matching “cinematic road trip” from Intelligent Travel Blog

When the news came out yesterday of the death of John Hughes, the world lost not only a popular director, but a huge proponent of the city of Chicago. Despite not being actively involved in filmmaking for the last ten years of his life, he continued to live in the city where he spent most of his career, a place which, he said, "[I]s a working city, where people go to their jobs and raise their kids and live their lives." His classic films like Sixteen Candles, Home Alone, The Breakfast Club, and of course, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, all could be considered postcards to the city. Here's one of my favorite scenes of all time. What's yours?

Read More: Cinematic Road Trip -- Illinois; 48 Hours Chicago; Free Cities Chicago.

John Ur returns this week to consider the cinematic offerings of Florida, the Sunshine State.

 

Florida is a state with a strong personality. Its name evokes images of early-bird specials, Universal Orlando, or Miami Vice. But there's also a lot to see beyond beaches and buffets. From the edges of the Panhandle near Alabama to Miami and the Keys, the state of Florida sits very close to sea level. The highest point, Britton Hill - the lowest high point of any state - peaks at just 345 feet above the ocean. Seems like the place to be if you're afraid of heights. It's also the place to be if you're into sunshine. The state's temperature has only been recorded at zero degrees Fahrenheit once, during the Great Blizzard of 1899. Of course, the trade-off is the steady barrage of hurricanes that seem to hit the state every year. Without any large geographical features to buffer the winds, the damages are always severe.

But mountains and glaciers aren't the only path to geographical richness. Florida is home to three national parks: the Dry Tortugas, Biscayne, and the Everglades, all rich in animal and plant diversity. The Dry Tortugas are a group of islands in the Florida Keys known for their mangroves and sea turtles. Biscayne, just outside Miami, is home to four distinct ecosystems and hundreds of colorful fish. The Everglades is a subtropical marshland, home to over 360 species of birds as well as alligators, dolphins and manatees. Though the Everglades is considered unstable because of all of the development around it, the state of Florida is making efforts to sustain it and help return some land back to its natural state. Just this year, the state agreed to purchase US Sugar's plant and return that area back to nature.   

Apart from the national parks, you can find the rest of tourist Florida - Orlando has Disney World, the coastlines have great beaches and Miami is a nightclub hotspot. But the tourist brochures won't tell you about the downsides of Florida. The state is the third fastest-growing state in the country adding almost 1,000 new residents daily. The result is ever-increasing suburban sprawl, with property developments swallowing up large swaths of previously open and undeveloped land.

John Sayles' 2002 movie, Sunshine State, takes a look at this issue head-on. Set in northeast Florida around Jacksonville, Sunshine State tells the story of two towns and two women, one black, one white. The women (played aptly by Edie Falco and Angela Bassett) both deal with relationship issues within their family and their lovers, but the over-arching theme, and the plot points that connect the two of them is their community of fictional Plantation Island.

John Ur stays a spell in Georgia during
this week's stop on the Cinematic Road Trip.

Despite having traversed my way across the country many times, Georgia has been a recent discovery for me, having made a few trips there within the past year to visit with my significant other and her family. We hiked to the top of Springer Mountain, the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, and we drove down to Athens to visit her alma mater and Michael Stipes' bamboo-surrounded house. But Georgia is still a world away from most things that I've ever experienced. And several films that have been shot in the state certainly reinforce that theory.

Driving Miss Daisy takes place in 1940s Atlanta. The story, on the surface, follows a 72-year old widow, Daisy Werthan (Jessica Tandy) as she adjusts to being driven around by Hoke (Morgan Freeman) after she's totaled her car and cannot find any insurance to continue driving herself. On the deeper level, the story is about both passive and active racism in the Deep South between the 40s and 60s when the Civil Rights movement was gaining ground.

The filming for Driving Miss Daisy took place in the Atlanta area - in Druid Hills and Castleberry Hills - and nearby locations including Decatur, Douglasville and Griffin, Georgia. The crew looked for places that made the area look rural and undeveloped, qualities that still hold true if you venture a little ways outside of Atlanta's boundaries.

You know you missed him... so John Ur is back with a smattering of the best films which show the landscape of South Carolina.

I know I’ve been to South Carolina. I’ve driven through it any number of times going to Florida or Georgia. But for the life of me, I can’t describe how it looks outside of the ads I’ve seen for the golf courses or Myrtle Beach. And in some ways, I wonder (completely ignoring any important historical events), why is South Carolina even a state? I mean, why doesn’t it just unite with North Carolina and settle down, buy a house, have some kids? Is it really that different that it needs its own borders?

Here’s what I do know, at least from what the important tourism people tell me through their plethora of ads about that state: There are some of the best golf courses around in South Carolina, most notably Hilton Head. For many, this is more than enough reason to book a trip. For those in the audience to which this applies, you may want to check out The Legend of Bagger Vance, a deeply philosophical (sometimes nauseatingly so) film starring Matt Damon and Will Smith. The film shot in Beaufort, Charleston, and Hilton Head, and has some beautiful long sequences filmed on the Pete Dye Course at Colleton River Plantation in Bluffton and the Ocean Course on Kiawah Island.

Besides golf, on the Sea Islands along the coast you may find the descendants of African slaves, the Gullah or Geechee people. The Gullah worked on rice plantations on the coast, which tended to be swampy marshland. Because of the heat, isolation, and undesirable conditions, the slave owners hardly ever ventured out to oversee the work being done. Thanks to their relative separation from the rest of the state, the Gullah were able to retain many of their own traditions including language, song, and the trade for which they are famous: basketweaving. So strong are their skills and traditions that a Gullah woman, Mary Jackson, was recently named a MacArthur Genius.

John Ur crosses into North Carolina on his next stop on the Cinematic Road Trip.

If you drive down the eastern seaboard from Maine to Florida, you will see distinct regional differences between New England, the Northeast Corridor (roughly Washington DC to New York City), and the South. For many years the dividing point has theoretically been the Mason-Dixon line between Maryland and Pennsylvania. But that mentality has been out-of-date for quite some time. For me, the line is the border of North Carolina.

For my family, crossing the border of Virginia into North Carolina means we’re getting very close to one of our favorite vacation destinations: the Outer Banks. We'd spend many hours soaking up the sun, playing in the waves, looking for wild horses and eating as often as we liked. Countless puzzles have been assembled (more often than not, with a piece missing) and countless hours have been wasted lounging in the water.

Though we tend to stay toward the north end of the Banks, the more recognizable cities tend to be to the south –Cape Hatteras, Rodanthe (location for the new movie Nights in Rodanthe), Nags Head, and Kitty Hawk– where the Wright brothers decided to revolutionize travel. Further south, the city of Wilmington is peaking as a television production market. In recent years, "Dawson’s Creek" and "One Tree Hill" were both shot there.

But Wilmington also served as the location for a film that is much darker and more disturbing than the preternatural philosophical sensibilities found in the cast of "Dawson’s Creek." David Lynch’s Blue Velvet has been a cult favorite since its release, but is definitely not for those with a weak stomach for violence and sexual crimes. (Be forewarned, it’s not a real family-type flick.) If you’re down on Market Street, take a look for the Carolina Apartments – which stand in for Isabella Rossellini's Deep River Apartment – one of many area locations that were used in the filming.

John Ur is a lover, not a fighter. So it's fitting that this week's stop along the Cinematic Road Trip is in the great state of Virginia.

I always thought it was strange that, as the saying goes, Virginia is for lovers. If I were not a lover, would Virginia still be for me? If you are a lover, but live outside of Virginia, are you considered an outcast? Isn’t Virginia for recreating history in period outfits? I would love to see some sociological studies on these subjects.

But perhaps Virginia is for lovers because like love, the state is home to many peaks and valleys. It's surprisingly diverse geographically for an Eastern state. Starting at the coastline on the east, the state rises up to the southwest mountains and the foothills of the Appalachians. The highest point in the state, Mount Rogers, is contained in the Blue Ridge Mountains a bit further to the west. It's also home to a wide swath of rivers and forests that make up the Shenandoah Valley, which are easily explored in Shenandoah National Park.

Many women already find the mountainous region of Virginia romantic without even knowing it. This is where a portion of Dirty Dancing was filmed. The Mountain Lake Hotel in Pembroke, Virginia served as “Kellerman’s Resort” in the film (and was once visited by fellow IT blogger Janelle). Cottages and hotel rooms are available at the resort as well as “Dirty Dancing Weekend” packages which include film location tours, trivia and dance lessons. But don’t look to try to recreate the scene where Patrick Swayze lifts Jennifer Grey over his head in the lake… You’d have to drive about 230 miles south from Pembroke to Lake Lure, NC, where that scene was filmed.

I often take a little time out of these articles to talk about states with inferiority complexes. Part of this is to stir up conversation ("My state's better than yours!") and part of it is to try to explain the mentality of living in a small state where your local news and weather is overshadowed by your larger neighbor. The District of Columbia is a completely different story. On the one hand, it is not a state and has no representative in Congress; so much for that whole "No Taxation Without Representation" thing. On the other hand, it is one of the ten biggest cities in our country, one of the most visited cities in the world and has a population greater than Wyoming (and only slightly less than Vermont and Alaska).

So while we may not get our representation in Congress, one point of pride for D.C. is its widespread representation in the film world. The city is one of the two or three most iconic in our country, and though the U.S. Capitol can on occasion be faked with the Arkansas Capitol building, there are no obvious replacements for the White House, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial or many of the other neoclassical buildings. To make a D.C. movie, you inevitably have to include shots of D.C. But that's where the rules seem to end.

To the average movie-going public, once you see one of the establishing shots of the monuments on the Mall, a sweeping aerial over the Reflecting Pool, or a look through the iron gates at the White House, you know you're in D.C. and you accept that the filmmakers know what they're doing with the location. To D.C. residents, every little geographical twist is blasphemy.

This week, John Ur heads south to explore the cinematic offerings from Delaware and Maryland.

I consider myself a movie snob. But even I give in occasionally to the hilarious lowbrow humor in some comedies, and I have to admit that Wayne's World is one of my guilty pleasures. One of my favorite scenes is where Wayne and Garth stand in front of a green screen “which magically allows them to travel through time and space.” The screen flashes a photo of New York. “I got a gun. Let’s go to a Broadway show,” Wayne jokes, in an atrocious New Yawk accent.

They crack lines on Hawaii (“Mookalakeheemee, cmonyawannaleime”) and Texas (“let’s raise and rope broncos”) and then comes the line that cracks me up every time I see it. “Imagine being magically whisked away to… Delaware,” Wayne says, as a postcard from the state flashes up on the screen. He loses all humor in his face, and deadpans: “Hi, I’m in Delaware,” with zero enthusiasm. Anytime I’m in Delaware or passing through, I repeat that line to myself and I laugh a little…usually to the bewilderment of any traveling companions.   

This may be Delaware’s seminal film moment. Looking at their filmography, few famous movies crop up. The one notable exception is Dead Poets’ Society. This Oscar winning film, starring Robin Williams, presents an unorthodox English teacher trying to help his students buck the trends of conformity. Drama ensues between the students, their overbearing parents, the administration and Williams’ character, John Keating. Though set in Vermont, the film was shot at St. Andrews School in Delaware, a Christian college prep school, and many of the students were used as extras in the movie. And although the school has exactly the look necessary for the film – antiquated Gothic architecture that has become a signature trope in academic movies – I have to wonder, were there no schools in New England that also could have fit the bill?

John Ur pauses his Cinematic Road Trip for a moment in New Jersey, where he was born and raised, to discuss several films from New Jersey's native sons.

Along our journey I’ve tried to avoid painting us into a corner. I’ve tried to cross a border from one state and leave through another. This way, while you’re out on the road, you can follow along this route without ever having to backtrack. Unfortunately, there are two problem states – Maine, which only shares a border with New Hampshire; and New York, which divides New England from the rest of the country. Today, we make the jump from Connecticut through the Empire State down into the Promised Land – New Jersey.

Most people don’t think of wilderness when they think of “the dirty Jerz.” But if you were to take Route 80 out to the west of the state towards Pennsylvania, you’d find a sparsely populated land with rolling hills which lead to the Delaware Water Gap, which separates New Jersey from Pennsylvania. Here you could fly-fish the river in the morning and hike up hills along the Appalachian Trail in the afternoon.

You can see some of this area in The Station Agent. This movie was directed by NJ native Tom McCarthy, who has acted in TV shows like "The Wire" and "Boston Public."  It’s a lesser known film, a hidden gem, that tells the story of a man who inherits a rundown train depot in the middle of nowhere (Newfoundland, NJ) and goes there to escape the hustle and bustle of Hoboken. Though the movie hits up different spots of rural NJ (Dover, Hibernia, Lake Hopatcong, Rockaway), the majority of it is filmed at the Newfoundland train station, which can be found off of Route 23 and Green Pond Rd. The film offers a glimpse not of complete isolation but small town New Jersey: a place where you can walk out onto a railroad bridge over a river and let your feet hang down as the water rushes below.

You may already be familiar with the industrial urban north east of the state, home to Frank Sinatra and made famous for its gangsters on the large and small screens in "The Sopranos"  and Donnie Brasco. In the southern half of the state, farms dominate most of the land – it is called the Garden State for a reason. In season, taste the tomatoes, blueberries or corn and you’ll have a tough time convincing yourself they’re not the best you’ve ever had. You can also visit the Pine Barrens, a forest of pine trees famous for the legend of the Jersey Devil – a hideous creature that will eat your livestock. But the heart of the state, in my opinion, lies in Central Jersey.

Once again, I find myself in a position that may be insulting to some people. At times it’s harsh generalizations. At other times, it’s pointing out a lousy movie or two. But like the Dakotas, and Vermont and New Hampshire, this insult is combining Connecticut together with Rhode Island in one column. Anyone who lives in Connecticut or Rhode Island would be well within their rights to start shouting at me that I shouldn’t be sticking them together solely because of their proximity.

But the point of this article is landscape, scenery, the view. And by those accounts, RI and CT are just not far enough apart for me to justify writing a separate column for each. Both states exhibit that New England charm that is also quintessential to the experience of Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. It’s the red, orange, and yellow leaves of autumn trees. It’s the small town, laid-back feel you get when driving off the beaten path. It’s the colonial architecture. It’s brick buildings and cobblestone roads. It’s things that look and feel antique even though they're being used in the modern day. And it’s the coastline.

Like Massachusetts and Maine, Rhode Island tends to have a rocky coastline dotted with lighthouses to help their adventurous and hard-working fishermen and sailors find their way safely to shore. I’ve enjoyed a few trips to Newport, where you can tour the mansion vacation estates of the Astors and Vanderbilts – you know, to see how poor people used to live. The Cliff Walk around the edge of the city next to the ocean is a beautiful hike.

Although mostly filmed in Jamestown, Dan in Real Life did make some brief stops in Newport. The story revolves around a self-help writer/widower from New Jersey who is struggling to keep his own daughters from rebelling against him. He takes them up to Rhode Island for the annual family vacation with his parents and brothers and sister. You can actually rent the house – Riven Rock - where the movie was shot and spend a week looking out on Narragansett Bay. 

The shoots around Rhode Island tend to center on building locations and exteriors, but you can still spot some of the wonderful natural coastline. Dan (Steve Carell) is pulled over by a cop while speeding along Ocean Avenue in Newport, looking for his daughter. Behind him is the rocky coast of the state and Rhode Island Sound stretching out towards the Atlantic Ocean. Other city/town locations include Westerly, Providence, East Greenwich, and West Greenwich. You should be able to spot the Jamestown and Jamestown-Verrazano Bridges in some aerial views of Dan driving his car over Narragansett Bay. I'm going to conveniently jump over the fact that this is a romantic comedy and pretend that because funnyman Carell is in it, that makes it all ok.

John Ur pahks his cahr in Massachusetts for this week's Cinematic Road Trip column.

Ask any Massachusetts resident where they live and the answer will almost always be measured by their proximity to Boston. Like its rival to the west (New York), Massachusetts has a tough time establishing its identity outside of its largest city. And, being about 1/5th the size of New York by total area (and in the throes of a major baseball rivalry) it's hard not to occasionally think of the state as having a bit of a Napoleon complex.

But this is not to denigrate the rest of the state. In the west are the Berkshires, one of the state’s largest tourist attractions any time of the year. Thousands come to the area to stay in the rustic B&Bs in the highland hills, where rivers slice through the many valleys. And just try to make it out onto Cape Cod's classic beaches (locally referred to just as “The Cape”) during a summer weekend and you’re likely to be backed up in traffic for a few hours with about 100,000 of your closest friends. Like the Hamptons, or the Jersey shore, you do whatcha gotta do to get to the beach.

But there are few cities in the country that have as strong a cultural identity as Boston. You don’t need me to tell you that Boston has a storied history. Founded by Puritan colonists in 1630, the city has come a long way from its conservative beginnings – as any of my Irish brethren who’ve celebrated St. Paddy’s Day there will tell you. Though its population is only 560,000 compared to New York’s 8 million, Boston imparts on you a sense that it is just as big and just as important as the next guy.

How to best see Boston on screen? There is the obvious answer: Good Will Hunting. The Academy Award winning story of janitor/genuis Will Hunting (Matt Damon) is spliced with classic shots of Boston and Cambridge: Will and his counselor, Sean Maguire (Robin Williams) have a heart-to-heart in the Public Garden. Will rides the Red Line T train through the city to MIT, where he mops floors and solves math problems on the side. Will drinks and jokes and horses around with his buddies (played by Ben and Casey Affleck) at Woody's L Street Tavern in Southie, then heads up to Harvard's Dunster House to hang with his girlfriend (played by Minnie Driver). But beware casual viewer! Those shots that you don’t seem to recognize from Boston may very well not be; several scenes, including those in the lecture hall and the college bar, were shot in Toronto.

I love John Ur's Cinematic Road Trip posts for the way that the films help capture a sense of place—so I was struck by a recent piece in the New York Times which laid out a similar road trip, using Edward Hopper's Cape Cod paintings as a guide. Hopper had a home in Truro, and over the course of 30 years he painted dozens of iconic plein air paintings, often from inside his car. Many of his wide, sun-soaked works were completed at the end of the period in which the heavy tree cover native to the area was cut down to allow settlers to come in. But now the trees grow denser, and so too the developments on the Cape, which causes a continuous struggle between the locals and the vacationing guests. The article both seeks to find places on the Cape which still capture the Hopperesque classic light, and also points out several places from his paintings which still exist.

The Times also has a great series of Then and Now renderings of the paintings alongside contemporary photographs of the lighthouses, church spires, and beach shanties which inspired Hopper. And the Truro Public Library will be showing a collection of works inspired by Hopper all this month.

For more Then and Now glimpses of destinations, visit the gallery available on Traveler's website.

Painting: Methodist Church, Provincetown (1930) Wadsworth Antheneum Museum of Art, via the NYT

John Ur is back this week with a tour of the many sides of Maine.

John Ur sits with his head in the clouds in Maine

Maine is a state filled with illusions. There are beautiful pine tree forests (appropriate for the Pine Tree State), gorgeous mountains, and picturesque coastlines. But hidden behind those inviting postcard vistas are rough and tumble environments, about which casual visitors may not be aware. The White Mountains extend up from New Hampshire and include the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, Mount Katahdin. Though this mountain may seem inviting, it is a monster of a hike, with scraggly rock slopes that make every step into a chore.

And then there's the coast, all 3,478 miles of it, if you count the inlets and offshore islands. The coast is home to Acadia National Park, the first National Park established east of the Mississippi River. The park began as an illusion in 1604, when Samuel de Champlain pronounced that the region's mountains were ‘all bare and rocky’ and dutifully dubbed the place Isle des Monts Deserts. It wasn’t until much later that people started to discover the beauty hidden behind the rocks. National Geographic magazine ran an article on the park in November of 2005, and with it, some wonderful pictures.

Depending on your disposition, you have two movies to choose from to see Maine’s coast. On the show tune, fairy tale side, there is Carousel, the 1956 Rodgers & Hammerstein musical directed by Henry King. On the more realistic, darker side, there is In the Bedroom, helmed by Todd Field in 2001. Carousel was not as popular as some of R&H’s other hits (The King and I, Oklahoma, South Pacific, Sound of Music) because of it’s decidedly darker tone than the others. In contrast, In The Bedroom makes Carousel look like, well, a musical, with its grim, unflinching look at a son’s death.

John Ur is back this week to enlighten us about the film history of two of the Northeast's wedge states: Vermont and New Hampshire.

This week, I tried to pull a slick journalistic move. I was going to prove the lack of geographic knowledge among Americans, e-mailing my friends with a question: “Which state is further west: Vermont or New Hampshire?” It’s not a trick question and most of them got the question right: Vermont. Those that got the question wrong shall remain nameless and will also soon be contestants on “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?”

Vermonters and New Hampshirites might be a bit upset that I’ve grouped these two states together. They might argue that the states or the people have different personalities, political preferences, and different landmarks. Frankly, I’m not buying it. These states are New England to the core – pine trees, covered bridges, apple orchards. They share their northern borders with Canada, their southern with Massachusetts, and each other's colonial charm.

Residents of the rocky West would probably scoff at the idea of an East Coast mountain. Mount Mitchell in North Carolina is the highest point east of the Mississippi at over 6,000 feet. Colorado has more than 50 peaks over 14K. So to say Vermont is famous for its ranges might be a bit of an East Coast bias. But with its Green Mountains (the root of the state's name comes from the French explorer Champlain, who dubbed it "Verde Mont"), Vermont is a great place for hiking or skiing, particularly at Killington, Stowe, Sugarbush and other slopes. Did you know Vermont has a Koppen climate classification of Dfb, similar to Minsk, Stockholm and Fargo?  Yeah, me neither.

John Ur is back this week with a glimpse into the film highlights of the Empire State: New York.

The opening scene from Woody Allen's Manhattan

Subtract New York City from the state of New York and writing this week’s article would take on all the excitement of Iowa. But fortunately for you and me, we have reached New York after a long journey across the country and the city and its film history still exist. And as you well know there will be plenty to talk about when we look at the city, but for a moment let’s look at the entire state.

Many people refer to the region of the state outside of the city as “upstate” New York. This is a bit of a misnomer. The term has been used for any and every city in New York including Westchester, which is a mere 38 miles from Manhattan, and full of residents who commute into the city for work. Such is the far-reaching shadow of the city. You’re either in it or you’re out of it.

But the state of New York has a lot of variety to offer. The Adirondack and Catskill Mountains offer great hiking and skiing opportunities. Besides the Finger Lakes region and Lake Champlain, the state borders Lake Ontario to the north and west. I also remember fondly some family outings to Lake George – another of the agonizingly long car drives from home. Fishing, swimming, boating and other watersports abound in these lakes and some of the rivers that run through the state.

I’m sure I don’t even need to mention the popularity of Niagara Falls. The Falls’ popularity rose after the 1953 movie Niagara with Marilyn Monroe was released and they’ve since been featured in other movies like Superman II and Pirates of The Caribbean: At World's End.

The Falls sit about 25 minutes northwest of Buffalo on the border between New York and Ontario. Buffalo has it’s own film history. If you’re looking for popular, there’s Bruce Almighty. If you’re looking for indie, there’s Buffalo ’66. And if you’re looking for classic sentimental, there’s The Natural. Besides Buffalo, The Natural shot in other locations around New York State – Fredonia, South Dayton, Stafford, and New York City.

But all of this is a prelude to the headliner. New York City. The City. There are far too many clichés that I could call up from memory when talking about the City. I’m going to try my best to avoid them here. Feel free to lambast me if you catch one. I grew up just a 40-minute train ride from Manhattan and I could see Staten Island across the Arthur Kill from my house. I never really thought much of this until the first time I spent any significant time away from home and I realized the City is like a giant magnet, a vortex.

John Ur gets pumped up for Pennsylvania in this stop along the Cinematic Road Trip.

Growing up, I visited relatives out West. My parents would load up the car with our suitcases and a cooler for drinks and food. My sister and I would reluctantly get in the car. Stay on your side! Stop touching me! I’m not touching you! Mom, she’s on my side! Keep it up and I’ll pull this car over and wallop the both of you!

I tried to hide myself in a Nintendo Gameboy, playing Tetris until my thumbs were sore. Are we there yet, Ma? We’re almost out of New Jersey. (It was about two hours into the trip. I was restless.) And then we crossed into Pennsylvania—the Wild, Wild West. Let’s not even talk about western Pennsylvania. As far as I was concerned, that was as far from N.J. as California.

My memories from that era are vague. I remember the biblical town names of eastern P.A.—Bethlehem, Nazareth—and I remember signs for Lancaster County, the heart of Dutch Country. It always seemed a little odd to me that there would be signs advertising a place in the state where people wore hats and rode horses. Why was this a tourist spot?

If you’re curious about the Amish people of Lancaster County, you might want to check out the 1985 film, Witness. The movie stars Harrison Ford as Philadelphia cop John Book, caught up trying to solve the murder of another police officer. The only witness to the murder is a young Amish boy. In an effort to protect the boy, his mother, and eventually himself, Book takes up shelter in the Amish community—where there are no phones, no electricity, and no easy way to track him down.

While Book is hiding out, he picks up the simple way of life that the Amish lead—working their farms with the help of horses, milking cows by hand, building birdhouses. The Amish even allow him to participate in an old-fashioned barn-raising. The climactic scene takes place largely inside of a corn and grain silo on the Lapp family farm. What may seem primitive to me and you is to them modern and relevant—with days starting before dawn and working the fields until after night falls.

It wasn’t until almost 10 or 15 years later that I was able to drive through the state from east to west and reach the Rust Belt City of Pittsburgh. There are no shortage of films shot in the city of yellow bridges, but my recommendation is The Silence of the Lambs. I don’t remember many cityscape shots in the movie, but many scenes set in Baltimore were shot in and around Pittsburgh.

But if we’re going to talk the quintessential Pennsylvania movie—and we are—we have to talk Rocky. Sylvester Stallone plays the title character in the movie he wrote that made him a household name. The story is set in Philadelphia, where Rocky is trying to make a name for himself as a boxer. He fights for chump change and makes some extra money as a “collector” for a loan shark. (Sounds like some people I know in Jersey.)

John Ur makes a stop in West Virginia in this week's Cinematic Road Trip column.

David Strathairn is a 59-year-old actor born in California. His most famous role has probably been as Edward R. Murrow in the Academy Award-nominated Good Night, and Good Luck. Before becoming an actor, he spent some time in a Ringling Brothers Clown College. And he played prominent roles in the two movies that we’re going to look at today in West Virginia.

Strathairn has long been a solid supporting actor in Hollywood, but got his break through his friendship with director John Sayles. Both Sayles and Strathairn made their debut with the Return of the Secaucus Seven in 1980. Seven years later Sayles called Strathairn again to appear in his film Matewan, shot in Thurmond, West Virginia. The city was chosen for its enduring characteristics of a 1920s coal mining town in Appalachia. As of the 2000 census, the town had a population of seven people.

Matewan is the story of coal miners struggling to form a union in the face of a repressive coal company. Despite their attempts at action, the Stone Mountain Coal Company threatens to cut miners’ pay at every turn. When the miners go on strike, the company brings in some hired thugs to intimidate and rough up the union men. Strathairn plays Police Chief Sid Hatfield (of the infamous Hatfield Clan)—an uncommon man who cannot be bought out by the coal company in a time when that practice was commonplace.

The background for the action is the hills and forests of southern West Virginia. The miners come out of their holes sweaty and covered in black coal dirt. Some of the action takes place near the railroad tracks that run through the area: The rails are rusted but trains still lurch into town to drop off their cargo and pick up coal for shipping up the line. The brick buildings and natural beauty of the area—with the New River Gorge just nearby—served the movie well, and also served to inspire Sayles while making the film. He later wrote,

[In] the hills of West Virginia, the people and the music have a mood and rhythm to them that needs to be seen and heard to be felt completely. There is a cyclical sense of time there, a feeling of inescapable fate...Politics are always at the mercy of human nature and custom, and the coal wars of the twenties were so personal that they make ideology accessible in a story, make it immediate and emotional.

John Ur hits the halfway mark for our journey together on the Cinematic Road Trip. And where best to do it but Ohio...

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland

Here we are halfway through our journey together. It seems like just yesterday we set off from the desert in West Texas and circled our way across the Southwest and up the Pacific Coast. We hiked through Canyon Country and Rocky Mountains and danced our way across the Great Plains, nibbling as much corn as our stomachs could hold, as we pulled up to the Great Lakes region. Mark this date. Today is the point of no return. It would be just as long a journey to turn around and go back as it would be to continue on and complete the task. Burn the ships, men! Onward we march!

Before we rush off into the forest and get ourselves lost, maybe we should figure out where we are. We are here, of course, and here happens to be Ohio. According to the US Census Bureau, Ohio is in the East North Central States Division of the Midwest. Say what? Leave it to a government agency to use more words than necessary to make something as confusing as possible. But one thing is certain, or at least widely assumed, and that's the fact that Ohio is the swingiest of swing states. When it comes to presidential politics, the phrase most often proffered by pundits is "as Ohio goes, so goes the nation." (It also cropped up as the title of a documentary about the 2004 election ...So Goes the Nation.) We'll see how it swings come November.

I haven’t spent all that much time in Ohio but I do know that much of the state has been through the same economic downturn felt by other steel manufacturing locations throughout the Rust Belt. Despite that, Ohio has many economic advantages for its various industries, including being within a day’s drive of over 50% of the nation’s population. And being home to King (Lebron) James.

John Ur introduces us to the fine films from the land of lakes: Michigan.

"Mishigama," or "Large Water," is the original name the Ojibwe people gave to Lake Michigan, and it's where state of Michigan, bordered by four of the five Great Lakes, took its name. The state seems to stick out from the rest of the States like a sore thumb, or as the Lower Peninsula is more commonly known, a “mitten.” Not only is it geographically unique (is it Midwest? Is it East?), but did you know that Grand Rapids was the first city in the U.S. to put fluoride in their water?

While you’re sitting at home, pondering the glass of water you’re drinking and thinking to yourself,“Fluoride? I didn’t know I was drinking fluoride,” I’m going to jump quickly into Michigan movies. If I were an immoral man, I would recommend Grosse Pointe Blank, which is set in the small town of Grosse Pointe, Michigan. But only one scene in a house and an aerial over Lakeshore Drive were shot there. The rest was shot elsewhere (mostly in California). Dear Grosse Pointe government officials: If you do not allow movies to be shot in your town, I cannot put your town in this column and you won’t find any tourists heading your way. Thank you.

Tourists who do make it to Michigan will find that the Wolverine State has the longest freshwater shoreline in the world thanks to the unique formation of its land boundaries from two different peninsulas. The largely forested, and sparsely populated, Upper Peninsula is a different world from the Lower Peninsula. The “U.P.,” as its often called, contains the Porcupine Mountains, which according to some definitions are the oldest mountains in North America. You’ll also find here Isle Royale National Park. The namesake island is the largest in Lake Superior, and its wolf and moose populations are studied closely as an example of a predator-prey relationship in a closed environment.

The Lower Peninsula is flatter and known less for its natural landscape than for its ability to produce automobiles. You can catch the beauty of the Lower Peninsula in Sam Mendes’s 2002 period drama, Road to Perdition. It was filmed mostly in and around Chicago, but the end scene with Michael Sullivan (Tom Hanks) and his son (Tyler Hoechlin) took place on the shores of Lake Michigan. At the end of their long journey attempting to escape the outstretched arm of gangster retribution, Sullivan and his son head to Perdition (a fictional town filled in by Saugatuck, Michigan, not far from Holland). They climb over sand dunes in Saugatuck Dunes State Park and hang out on the beach watching the tiny waves of the lake lap against the shore.      

John Ur makes a play at picking the best films of Indiana, the Hoosier State.

Let's start with the obvious. If you were going to name a film Home in Indiana, where would you shoot it? If you guessed Indiana, you’d be wrong. Most of the film was shot in Kentucky. How about The Hoosier Schoolmaster? Though it was made three separate times between 1914 and 1935, it was never shot in Indiana. But the Hoosier State hasn’t been completely left out in the cold. Of those movies that were shot in Indiana, two of them are some of the most famous school sports stories of all time.

The name Hoosier has an unconfirmed origin. Some believe it evolved from a slurring of words like “who’s there” to “Who’sh’ere?” The word could have referred to boatmen, who after successfully “hushing” up opponents in a brawl were known as “hushers.” Another folk tale refers to a man named Samuel Hoosier who hired men to work on the Louisville and Portland Canal. These men came to be known as “Hoosier’s Men” or “Hoosier’s.” The use of the word was, and can still be in some areas, derogatory taking the meaning of slow, derelict or irresponsible. But one movie was able to go a long way in turning that meaning on its head.

The 1986 film, Hoosiers, about an underdog high school basketball team from the small (fictional) town of Hickory, Indiana, is considered one of the top 10 all-time sports movies. Its inspiring storyline launched a league of imitations, all hoping to capitalize on the film's success: Down and out ragtag team gets a new coach with a new style that clashes with the old. After arguments and turmoil, the team comes together and starts to play bigger than themselves, culminating in a most unlikely of championships. Must be Hollywood putting a spin on reality, right? Wrong. The story was inspired by Milan High School’s 1954 Indiana state championship victory.

New Richmond, Indiana, starred in Hoosiers as the town of Hickory. Today, there are signposts around town commemorating the locations represented in the film. Greg Guffey’s book “The Greatest Basketball Story Ever Told” explains how the town still revels in its adopted  role: “As [the fictional] Milan the town still lives for ’54, so does New Richmond  the town live for ’86 and Hoosiers. A small sign hangs under the customary town marker. ‘Welcome to Hickory,’ it reads. The post office has ‘Hickory, Ind.’ under its regular New Richmond identification.”

One of the best parts about planning a road trip is the strategizing. After Illinois, do we head into Indiana or Kentucky? We would be painting ourselves into a corner if we went into Indiana, because then we’d have to go south to Kentucky, and then north through Ohio to Michigan… and then what? We’d be stuck. We’ve hit all the other states that border Michigan. (Yes I realize Maine is going to present a problem.) So we’re going south to Kentucky.

The Bluegrass State is unlike most other states that we’ve looked at so far. We started in the Southwest and ventured through the Pacific Northwest, the Rocky Mountain region, the Midwest cornfield states and then most of the states bordering the Mississippi River. With the exception of the southwest tongue of Kentucky that touches the Mississippi, the state seems to begin a new region—the Mid-Midwest? The Central Southeast? This tricky area, along with Tennessee, sits in its own space known sometimes as the Upland South.

Kentucky is known for bourbon and mint juleps, tobacco and Mammoth Cave National Park (the longest cave system known in the world). It's famed for its college basketball in the memories of sports fans, and bluegrass music in the ears of audiophiles. And then there’s horse racing. One of the most famous horse races in the world, The Kentucky Derby, takes place on the first Saturday of May in Louisville. If you’re into horse racing and want the authentic-look-and-feel experience, you can check out Seabiscuit. I snobbishly refuse to recommend any movie with Tobey Maguire in it, so remember to just look at the horses and try to block him out of your mind. The movie itself shot in California, New York, and Kentucky, with Keeneland Racetrack in Lexington sitting in for the Pimlico course. You can set yourself on a nice two-day visit to Lexington with this guide from the Lexington Convention and Visitors Bureau.

John Ur leads us through some of the funniest films of Illinois on his latest stop on the Cinematic Road Trip.

Well friends, it’s been a long strange trip through the Midwest. We’ve twisted and turned our way through the agricultural heartland of America, and I’m not shy to say I’m glad it’s over. There are only so many words in my limited vocabulary for farm and corn. Sure, these large, loosely populated states have some nice qualities to offer, but those qualities usually do not include an abundance of films set and shot inside their borders. I am very excited, for that reason, to come today to Illinois. Illinois is the most average state in the country. Seriously. It was measured!  So it would stand to reason that I would find the most American films on this most American road trip in the most American of states. Right?

By virtue of having the third largest city in the country by population, Illinois enjoys a vibrant filmmaking industry. Chicago also happens to be blessed with a large contingent of iconic buildings which makes shooting a “Chicago” film outside of the city a difficult task. And yet, some of the most memorable Illinois films are actually filmed in the city's outer-lying suburbs, thanks largely in part to the work of John Hughes. Hughes was born in Michigan but grew up in Illinois and set many of his now-famous cult films in the suburbs, though often adding a subtle sprinkling of Chicago spice.

Sixteen Candles, Weird Science and The Breakfast Club (all Brat Pack movies) made Hughes a star writer-director. Each was set in Chicago suburbs—Evanston (Sixteen Candles), and Northbrook (Weird Science  and The Breakfast Club). (Pretty in Pink, another Hughes classic, was set in nearby Elgin, but it was actually shot in Los Angeles.) But Hughes’ most financially successful film, and arguably his most famous, is Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.  Besides highlighting some of the same suburbs seen in his previous movies, Hughes takes us on a jaunt through downtown Chicago while we play hookie with Ferris. You can see some famous tourist spots during these scenes: The Art Institute of Chicago, the Sears Tower, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and Wrigley Field.

A fair and balanced look at the filming of Illinois would include talk about other genres besides the comedies of John Hughes. This view would likely encompass Batman Begins, The Color of Money, The Fugitive, and The Untouchables among others. But I’m not much for being fair or balanced (must be a genetic thing). I’m not a big comedy fan in general, so when one state happens to present a few of my favorites, you can be sure I’m going to call them out.   

John Ur heads to the land of Cheeseheads for his latest stop on the Cinematic Road Trip.

I had just finished scraping some bugs off the windshield when I looked out over a lake in Wisconsin, and saw some dark clouds rolling in. Until that point, the day had been sunny and breezy and comfortably warm. The wind started to whip through the trees and I decided it was time to roll out before the storm got too heavy. Not twenty minutes out of the city on I-90 and we’re beset by rain and wind. Rain started coming at us sideways, the wind sending plastic orange construction barricades sliding across the street, and 18-wheeler trucks had to pull off the road because the fanny-end of their trailers were going one way while their cabin was going another.

I pulled over behind one of these trucks when I judged it was prudent to get off the road (read: I followed everyone else). About fifteen minutes later, everything seemed to calm down a bit – the wind slowed, the rain straightened out – and the parking lot turned back into a highway as the cars cautiously pulled back on the road from the shoulder. I don’t know to this day if that was a tornado that blew past us, but in the month prior to my trip, Wisconsin had a record number of twisters.

This is a long roundabout way to say that weather in the north central region can be unpredictable. Sam Raimi found that out when he was trying to shoot A Simple Plan. Originally the movie had been slated to shoot in Minnesota (a la Fargo) but Raimi had to move production to Wisconsin because there wasn’t enough snow. In the film, Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton, and Brent Briscoe play three friends in need of some extra money, who happen to stumble upon a crashed plane that contains over $4 million dollars. They hatch a plan, a simple one no doubt, to keep the money without telling anyone about it. The plan, however, rests solely on the thin hope that all three men will be able to keep their mouths shut. I will stop there and let you draw your own conclusions as to how the plot works out... Many of the exterior shots of the film took place in Ashland, Wisconsin, including the road and woods leading to the crash site of the plane. But as cinematographer, Alar Kivilo found out sometimes you have to improvise – though the road and woods were shot in Wisconsin, the actual valley where the plane sat was shot in Minnesota and the two pieces were spliced together in the editing room. Sneaky Hollywood!

This isn’t the first, nor last, sleight of hand pulled by moviemakers to trick an audience. Though with such nondescript locations as a snow-covered road and a wooded valley, it would be hard for anyone to pick out that longitudinal jump without some inside info. Attentive viewers can spot a more obvious switcheroo in the camp comedy, Major League.  The story revolves around the Cleveland Indians as they struggle through another awful season (which reflected the real-life Indians woes in the late '80s before they went on a successful tear through the '90s). Maybe the team in the movie had a problem since they were actually playing at Milwaukee County Stadium (former home of the Milwaukee Brewers). It’s tough always playing on the road.

There’s a lot to say about Minnes-oota, doncha know. Ya, there’s lots of lakes and snow, just like the Norwegian and Swedish immigrants were used to back home. You betcha.

Apologies to any 'Sotans whom I’ve offended with my mocking Scandinavian accent. My only exposure to the dialect has been through movies and Betty White in Golden Girls reruns when I was a kid. 

My real experience with Minnesota was fleeting and uneventful. I raced across the southern border of the state along Route 90 heading from Wisconsin towards the Badlands in South Dakota. The most memorable part of that stretch of country? The suicidal insects that Jackson-Pollocked my windshield and front bumper. These bugs came in all shapes and sizes, and different colors—at least, their insides were different colors. Every few hours, I’d have to stop the car and break out the Windex because the wipers couldn’t handle the sticky goo remains of the tiny kamikaze artists. Valiant and courageous defenders of their personal air space, but no match for a speeding Subaru.

Minnesota—Dakota for “whitish or cloudy water”—is filled with lakes and rivers, making it a great place for outdoor adventure. The State Tourism Board actively promotes Voyageurs National Park, which is located in the upper northeast corner bordering Canada near the wilderness mecca Boundary Waters Canoe Area. Minnesota has no less than 22 scenic byways if you’re the driving type (this article is titled “Road Trip” after all). If you're feeling a bit more urban, the Twin Cities (Minneapolis-St.Paul) have an extended series of bike lanes through the cities—a good eco-friendly way to see the place where almost half the state population resides. You can then extend your bike ride into the hills around the Mississippi, Minnesota, and St. Croix River Valleys.

As for cinema, within the past two decades, Minnesota has fared slightly better than its neighbors to the south and west. Robert Altman shot his last film here in 2006 (A Prairie Home Companion). Sam Raimi shot some of his 1998 thriller, A Simple Plan, here after learning some techniques for shooting in the snow from his friends, and Minnesota natives, Joel and Ethan Coen. (We'll delve into the film a bit more next week in Wisconsin).

I have never been to Iowa, but from what I hear, there are many cornfields. Driving down highways walled up with cornstalks for mile after mile can get pretty repetitive. I imagine people at road stops employed by the state as public relations representatives, reciting lines a la Bubba from Forrest Gump: “There’s corn on the cob, creamed corn, corn salad, corn soup, corn stew, corn burgers, and then you can make corn ethanol, high fructose corn syrup, corn feed for animals…” and their list would go on interminably. 

But corn is big business in the Hawkeye State, and for the past 14 years, Iowa’s been producing more corn than any other state. In fact, in an average year, Iowa’s corn output is more than that of some countries – three times as much as Argentina's for example – over 2.5 billion bushels in 2007. At 56 pounds a bushel (for shelled corn – husked, and de-cobbed), that’s 140 billion pounds of corn.

So if you want the quintessential Iowa experience, you have to see corn, right? Just for the sake of fairness, I figured I should do some research. Seems like Iowa has three different geographic regions: the Young Drift Plains, the Driftless Area, and the Dissected Till Plains.  The Young Drift Plains are rich with the fertile topsoil that Iowa is famous for and the Dissected Till Plains are marked by rolling hills and ridges along the Missouri and Big Sioux Rivers. But the landscape highlights of Iowa lie in the Driftless Area – considered the “Switzerland of America” by Iowans for the beautiful pine-forested hills.

Concentrate. Concentrate. Here you are. On Jeopardy. Alex Trebek is staring at you. You grasp for breath. He's just read out the "Final Jeopardy" question and that music – that haunting, contagious music – is playing. Quickly. Quickly. Must write down an answer. All your money is on the line. The category is U.S. states. "These two U.S. states share a border with eight other states, the most in the country." Think. Think. Landlocked. Can't be out west. Those states are too big. Um... uhh...

Bum, bum bum. The music ends. Alex looks at you. Sweat drips off your brow. "Let's see what you put down. Tennessee and – I'm sorry. The other state is Missouri. Missouri. Let's see how much you wagered."

And you wake up in a fever. Missouri. Missouri. You always forget Missouri. But, being the Hollywood Producer that you are, you find forgiveness among your peers. Not many think of Missouri when setting their movies - as shown by the relatively low film output from the state in the past 100 years. And with the exception of Robert Altman and Scott Bakula (shout out to my Quantum Leap fans), The Show-Me State has not shown us much as far as raising cinematic talents (oh yeah, don't forget Walt Disney!).

So what's the deal, Missour-uh? You've got some great cities like Kansas City and St. Louis. The Gateway Arch (above) is one of the most popular symbols of America (seen in TV shows, commercials and movies including American Flyers with Kevin Costner) and you have a rich history of influence in the Civil War and in modern-day politics.

And to post another strike against Missouri, I've already mentioned two films that were shot partially in the state: Paper Moon (in Kansas) and National Lampoon's Vacation (in Arizona). To make matters worse, most of the ghetto scenes in Vacation that supposedly occur in St. Louis were actually shot on a Hollywood studio back lot. 

Ok, enough picking on Missouri. In another case of city stunt-doublehood, many of the scenes of the film Escape from New York were actually shot in St. Louis to save money. According to IMDB, The Chain of Rocks Bridge, Union Station, Fox Theatre, and the Civil Courts Building in St. Louis were all used as sets for this futuristic action movie where the president must be rescued from Gotham after being kidnapped by a gang of convicts. Though I'm not sure how much of these sets are recognizable: The film's dark lighting and set decorators dressed it up to appear like a hellish version of the Big Apple.

We recently gave you an up-close and personal look at the Proximity Hotel, an eco-savvy hotel in Greensboro, North Carolina. Now IT brings you another style of eco-dwelling: The Lodge at Sun Ranch, opening  June 6.

Located on Sun Ranch’s 26,000 acres in Montana’s Madison River Valley, the intimate Lodge (16 guests max, please) boasts a lengthy list of love-the-earth tactics, beginning in the rooms themselves. The Lodge uses biodegradable shampoos, organic cotton linens and towels, and detergents free of hazardous chemicals, among a slew of other guest room eco-amenities.

The Lodge remains green throughout the rest of the property, too, and brings in guest speakers to promote conservation education. And it should come as no surprise that one of IT's favorite touches is the Lodge's sustainable cuisine, which uses organic, natural and local ingredients.

The Lodge on Sun Ranch even plants 10 trees in the Amazon through Trees for Travel for every guest to offset carbon emissions. (We can’t imagine how many trees other hotels would have to plant to achieve the same goal.)

Before you consider “booking it” to Big Sky Country, have a look at National Geographic's recently released MapGuide for the area, and read about Montana's cinematic history and scenery. Bike enthusiasts and/or history buffs should check out Adventure Cycling Association's week-long pedaling trip through Montana's historical hot spots.

Photo: The Lodge at Sun Ranch

Subscribe to this blog's feed

For the past few weeks John Ur has been heading on a course due south through the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma. This week he takes a sharp left turn and heads into Arkansas before turning another ninety degrees and heading back north through the remainder of the Midwestern states.

Let me be frank: The film industry in Arkansas is not exactly booming. The state’s largest city and capital, Little Rock, does not hold many famous landmarks except its capitol building. However, because of its resemblance to the U.S. Capitol building in Washington DC, the Arkansas capitol has served as the stunt double for its more famous counterpart in several films, most notably in the television movie Under Siege (1986), when a group of suicide bombers attacked. John Grisham, one of Arkansas' most famous sons, has had several of his stories converted into movies, and his first hit book, The Firm, was directed by Sydney Pollack with scenes shot in West Memphis, Arkansas (as well as Memphis, Tennessee and Washington DC).

But the state also has a few stars-of-screen natives, including Joey Lauren Adams, Wes Bentley, Mary Steenburgen and Billy Bob Thornton. Early in his career, Thornton was able to pull off an Orson Welles trifecta – to write, direct and star in a film (see Welles in Citizen Kane) using Arkansas as his setting. Thornton wrote Sling Blade, a story of a mentally handicapped man who was released from a psychiatric hospital after serving 25 years for the murder of his mother and her lover at the age of 12. This man, Karl Childers (played by Thornton), became an iconic character in popular culture – his gruff bass voice and rudimentary language oft-repeated in satire for comedic effect: Mmhmm, I reckon. Alright then. I used a Kaiser blade. Some folks call it a sling blade, I call it a Kaiser blade.

John Ur introduces us to the "trigger word" and challenges you not to break into song during his visit to Oklahoma.

On my mother’s side of the family, we have trigger words. It's a running joke between my grandmother, aunt, and my mother and I that has been carried down the line. At any random point in conversation, if you were to say a trigger word, the other person will launch into at least one line of song. So, if you were to say, mention the word “spoonful” around mom, she will immediately jump in with: “A spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down." At that point, I usually shake my head in disappointment at myself for not seeing it coming.

I can thank Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein for writing the musical, Oklahoma! We collectively can thank former governor George Nigh for making the title tune Oklahoma’s state song. And I can thank my mother for giving me a life with the trigger word, “Oklahoma.” As soon as the state is mentioned, she will round her lips and raise her eyebrows and proceed into the song and a little two-step dance:

“OOOOOOOOooooooklahoma where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain."

The classic image of Oklahoma, besides the Broadway cowboys with gleaming teeth and bandannas around their necks, can be derived from John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath—a family of Okies in their overloaded truck driving off through the dust looking for work in California. John Ford adapted this image of Tom Joad and his family to screen back in 1940. Some scenes were shot in Sayre and McAlester, OK, but much of the rest of the film was shot in New Mexico, California, and on sets built on studio lots. (Tom Joad is also a trigger word for Bruce Springsteen’s “Ghost of Tom Joad” in my book.)

But the dustbowl depicted in the film is a bit dated. Right now Oklahoma is in the midst of promoting the geographic diversity in its ten different land regions: the Ozark Plateau, the Prairie Plains, Ouachita Mountains, Sandstone Hills, Arbuckle Mountains, Wichita Mountains, Red River Valley, Red Beds Plains, Gypsum Hills, and the High Plains. It's also working to promote it's Native American history (modern day OK was where the infamous Trail of Tears began) as well as it’s burgeoning wine industry—according to a friend who recently took a vineyard tour while visiting.

John Ur clicks his heels and takes us to Kansas for this week's issue of Cinematic Road Trip.

Think of the words "Kansas" and "movie." What's the immediate thing that comes to mind? If you're like 99.9 percent of Americans, I'd guess that The Wizard of Oz was the first film you thought of. And while the Sunflower State is more than willing to accommodate your instincts for Judy Garland memorabilia, if you’re on the road in Kansas searching for locations from the film, you’re in the wrong spot: The film was shot entirely on set in Culver City, California, and not in Kansas.

Kansas is arguably the symbol of the American Heartland. It contains the geographic center of the lower 48 states and is one of the country’s leaders in agricultural production. This is due to the large amount of flat, arable land in the western two-thirds of the state. The eastern third tends to be a bit more hilly and forested, with more of the big cities located in this trident: Topeka, Wichita, and Lawrence among others.

In Paper Moon, we get to see both areas of the state. In Peter Bogdanovich’s 1973 Great Depression Era period piece, Ryan O’Neal stars with his real-life daughter, Tatum, as Moses and Addie, an unlikely pair of con artists as entertaining to watch as Newman and Redford in The Sting. A novice actress, Tatum O’Neal became the youngest person to ever win an Academy Award when she took home the Best Supporting Actress statue.

Most of the film was shot in Hays, Kansas, a small town off of I-70 about 200 miles due west of Topeka. But the duo also take a road trip of their own. Moses intends to drive Addie to her only known kin in St. Joseph, Missouri. Along the way, Addie quickly picks up on the scams that Moses is running. Their journey takes them through the north-central plains of Kansas, picking up money and tramps and running from the law. At a certain point, they need to get rid of their car, which is now hotly pursued. They end up at a remote farm in the hilly, forested eastern section of the state where Moses has to wrestle a young Randy Quaid for his vehicle. Only in Kansas.

John Ur returns for this week's edition of Cinematic Road Trip. Today's stop: Nebraska.

Every time I begin one of these columns, I chant the name of the state that I mentally try to inhabit and see if it fits a song like “Ooooooooklahoma.” Well Nebraska does not, as far as I know, serve as the title of any popular song, but the Counting Crows once sang of, “Omaha, somewhere in middle America, get right to the heart of matters. It’s the heart that matters more.” As in: Somewhere in middle America, believe it or not, there are actual people living out their lives.

This may come as a surprise to people fixated on the East and West Coasts, but not to Alexander Payne. Over the past decade, Payne has become a prominent writer-director on the backs of some strong movies—most recently, Sideways, which won him (and his writing partner, Jim Taylor) the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Payne grew up around Omaha but is not the first famous Hollywood figure to sprout from the city among the cornfields. He follows native Omahans Henry Fonda, Marlon Brando, Fred Astaire, and Nick Nolte, all of whom also made their way to Tinseltown.

Payne must maintain a fondness for his home state. He’s adapted two novels set in east coast states to be shot around Omaha. In Election, Reese Witherspoon plays an over-achieving high school student running for Student Council President of Carver High School. Payne shot the high school scenes at Papillion-La Vista High School in Papillion, Nebraska, which is in the suburbs ten miles southwest of Omaha. (The original novel by Tom Perrotta is set in New Jersey.)

Although less critically acclaimed than Election, About Schmidt provides a greater view of the rest of Nebraska. In this film, Payne relocates Louis Begley’s novel from Long Island to Omaha and casts Jack Nicholson as Warren Schmidt, a retired assistant vice president for Woodmen of the World Insurance Agency. This is an actual company located on Farnam Street in Omaha.

John Ur returns with another glimpse into the cinematic adventures of the 50 states. Today, he presents us with a double whammy of both Dakotas.

National Geographic’s recent feature article on North Dakota, "The Emptied Prairie," documented the ghost towns that lie in the open space between the cities of North Dakota and the farmlands where cattle, buffalo and wheat reign supreme.  In South Dakota, there is much of the same: a few mid-size cities, lots of farmland, Native American Reservations, and in every direction, horizon.

Given that North and South Dakota respectively rank 47th and 46th out of 50 in population (as of the 2000 Census), and that the majority of their land is devoted to agriculture (like much of the rest of the Great Plains), it stands to reason that there would not be many movies to choose from when reviewing homegrown cinema. Unfortunately, reason stands true in this instance. With apologies to Dakota natives, I have made the executive decision to combine North and South Dakota into one column for the purely selfish reason of giving me more material to work with.

North Dakota, though not rich in film history, holds (a small) claim to a cinematic gem. The Coen Brothers’ 1996 crime-drama, Fargo, was named after the largest city in North Dakota. But unfortunately, to further undermine the North Dakotan Tourism Industry, Fargo was largely shot in Minnesota. There is however, one distinct shot that you can look for if you’re driving through ND. There is a large statue of Paul Bunyan that sits west of the city of Bathgate on Pembina County Highway 1. Besides this minor claim to fame (and the larger fame that the film’s title brings to the small city), I can’t find another movie set or shot in North Dakota. Native Dakotans, can anyone help me out?

John Ur returns for another round of Cinematic Road Trip. This time, he casts his line and pulls up a winner in the form of the great state of Montana.

There is a certain grace and flair necessary for driving across the United States. As I mentioned last week, if you try to muscle your machine over the hills, you might pop a cork. You have to deal with inclement weather (stay tuned for Wisconsin!) and long hours of mindlessly straight and flat land. You must stay alert for animals straying to the roadways looking for food (like the twelve-foot-tall elk I met around the bend of a dark road through Yellowstone National Park). Without the aid of a GPS, you must pay close attention to signs and landmarks in order to avoid getting lost. And if you're from New Jersey, as I am, you must acclimate yourself to the confluence of speed limits as highways meet neighborhood roads. Or else you'll find yourself, as I did, face to face with the sheriff, who waited patiently at an intersection as the limit abruptly dropped from 75 to 25 mph. But don't worry, he'll be plenty congenial as he takes your fine (in cash) on the spot.

What is there to see in Montana besides flashing lights in your rearview? That depends on which side of the Continental Divide you're on. The eastern 3/5ths of the state, like Colorado, is a part of the Great Plains, long and flat. There's a reason it's called Big Sky country. The western 2/5ths is more densely populated; the Rockies spread up from Wyoming and Yellowstone National Park (which overlaps into Montana) and eventually stretch up to Alberta and British Columbia, Canada.  This section of the state contains some of its most populous cities – Bozeman, Butte, Great Falls, the capital of Helena, and Missoula. It also contains the outdoor gem of the state – Glacier National Park.

Pop quiz: What U.S. state has a population smaller than that of the city of Washington, DC? The answer is John Ur's latest installment of Cinematic Road Trip: Wyoming.

Let me give you a tip about driving through Wyoming. When you have a vehicle loaded up with camping equipment, clothes, and accessories for traveling across the country, it’s probably a good idea to take it easy going up through the Bighorn Mountains between Buffalo and Worland. Though you may be tempted to floor the gas so your car can creep up the mountains at 60 or 70 mph, you’re likely to overheat the transmission and cause the fluid to expand and leak out onto your engine and smoke to come out of your hood.

If this happens to you, especially in the middle of a night without a moon, where there is only endless darkness in each direction, you may have to stop at Ten Sleep. The town got its name from Native American traders who used the number of days walking between trading-post villages as a unit of measurement. There’s only one gas station and if you order pizza at the bar across the street, the bartender will tell you to walk back to the freezer next to the pool table and pick out the frozen pizza that you want her to heat up in the toaster oven.

Fortunately, once you get out of Ten Sleep, Wyoming has a few unique locations that you won't want to miss: the spooky Devils Tower National Monument, Grand Tetons National Park's regal mountains, and the granddaddy of national parks, Yellowstone, with its signature geysers and rainbow-colored hot springs. You may think that you already have an idea of what Wyoming looks like. This is cowboy country. This is the landscape made famous by Brokeback Mountain. But hold on just a moment.  Though Brokeback Mountain was set in Wyoming, it was actually shot in southern Alberta, Canada.

John Ur returns with the latest edition of Cinematic Road Trip. This time, he's leading us through Colorado.

If you’ll allow me for the second week in a row to journey back to my childhood memories.... I was 13 years old when I took off in an airplane for the first time and headed west of the Mississippi. I landed in Colorado and as we rode in a bus from Denver to Colorado Springs, I sat fixated at the window, thinking 'Look, there are mountains out there!' What I was seeing was the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, which includes Grays Peak and Pikes Peak, which was the inspiration for "America, the Beautiful."

Colorado has a mean elevation of about 6,800 feet—a higher average than any other state (fun fact for nerds like me—Alaska's average is only 1,900). But the eastern two-fifths of the state is mostly flat, thanks to their place on the western edge of the Great Plains, which stretch from Canada to Mexico through ten U.S. states.

But plains are just plains. Mountains are MOUNTAINS. When John Ford made The Searchers in the 1950s, he wanted mountains to serve as the backdrop for a winter scene with John Wayne and a large unit of cavalry. He chose Gunnison as his setting, a city nestled in the valley between the Sawatch and Anthracite Ranges and the Arkansas River. Some second unit filming (which normally does not involve actors, or at least none with speaking roles) took place in Aspen and southwestern Colorado. Other footage features Utah, New Mexico, and California.

Hitch a ride with John Ur on his Cinematic Road Trip. Today we're taking a pit stop in Utah.

I was about ten years old when I was assigned a project to create a map of Utah. The map would include all of the major cities and many of the major landmarks. I remember marking out the cities of Ogden, Provo and Salt Lake City. I traced the outline of the Great Salt Lake. I located Kings Peak (the highest peak in the state) near the right-angle turn in the state’s northeast border.

But there was one spot on the map that drew my fascination more than any other. That was the Bonneville Salt Flats. Salt flats? My research told me this was a large area where people would go to try to set speed racing records. I couldn’t fathom this. How could anyone drive through salt? How could you get all that salt to one place to begin with? Did they have giant steamrollers out there to make the large pile of salt flat?

Check out The World’s Fastest Indian with Anthony Hopkins and you will solve every conundrum from my childhood fascination. The movie follows a New Zealand man, Bert Munro (Hopkins), as he attempts to break the world land-speed record in the Sixties.  Besides Bonneville, the film was shot in Salt Lake City and small towns like Skull Valley, Tooele, and Wendover, Utah (as well as New Mexico and New Zealand).

John Ur is back this week with a detour in Nevada...

In 1924, the AASHO (American Association of State Highway Officials) and the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Public Roads began to lay out the proposed routes of Interstate Highway System. Since that time, Americans have driven across the country for pleasure and for business, with family, friends, or solo. I remember the itch I felt in the seat of my pants reading about Sal Paradise speeding through the middle of the country headed to the promised land of California in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. America is made for road tripping.

The excitement of the road comes partially from the air rushing past the window as you fly down the asphalt and it comes partially from pulling out a large map of the country, taking a marker and drawing the first lines of what could be your future path. The United States, with our vascular structure of easily accessible roads, lends itself to an infinite number of routes for a cross-country trip. What it does not give is one convenient path to hit all of the lower 48 states.

Nevada is the first state of many that we will explore that does not fit cleanly into an itinerary. It is one of many landlocked states that does not border an ocean or another country and requires a bit of zigzagging to reach. The question for you when planning your trip becomes – when do I zig and when do I zag?

John Ur is back this week with the next stop on the Cinematic Road Trip. This time it's Idaho. Sweet!

A confession must be made. The amount of time that I’ve spent within the borders of the state of Idaho between birth and the present day total approximately ninety minutes – eighty of which were spent in the car driving between Montana and British Columbia. But cry not, native Idahoans! For I am aware of the tragedy of my limited visitations to the Gem State.

Any avid reader of adventure and backpacking magazines could rattle off a number of great locations in Idaho that deserve your outdoor attention: Snake River, Hells Canyon (the deepest canyon in the U.S.), Shoshone Falls (higher than Niagara Falls), and Borah Peak (the highest in the state, and which has a number of peaks running through the Rocky Mountain Range), to name a few. You can check out some of the great, natural areas of Idaho here, in panoramic photos no less.

Idaho's 80 recognized mountain ranges stretch across much of the north and southeastern part of the state. The majority of the cities lay in the Columbia Plateau, a region that follows the Snake River through the center of the state. This region is also the home to the farms that make the state famous for its potatoes. And potatoes are the main ingredient of Tater-Tots, a small cylindrical side dish made from deep fried, grated potatoes.

Washington is stuck between a rock and a hard place in the realm of cinema. On the rock side, it is not very close to Los Angeles. The hard place is Vancouver, B.C., which in the past three decades has climbed up the ladder to become the third largest city for film and television production behind Hollywood and New York City. The growth of the industry just north of the Washington border began largely due to the strength of the U.S. dollar against the Canadian dollar. Vancouver was a perfect place to film on the cheap, with beautiful mountains and cityscapes that could double as American locations, and Washington was left out in the cold.

The dollar has softened but Vancouver’s filmmaking base of indoor studios and talented crew members has kept the business flowing. The state of Washington has over the past few years tried to increase its production with tax-based credits for filmmakers along with other incentives. But unfortunately for them, these incentives are similar to those offered in other states and cities including those in British Columbia. So what’s a poor state to do?

Play to your strengths, that’s what. Washington has some breath-taking scenery. From Puget Sound to the Cascade Mountains, Mount Rainier (pictured, above), Mount St. Helens, the Snake River, the Columbia River, the San Juan Islands and Olympia National Park, Washington has the unobstructed exteriors needed for many movies. So it should be easy to pick out some movies with sweeping vistas right? Right?

Well, let’s see. There was Dancer in the Dark, by Lars von Trier, that was entirely set in Washington State circa 1964. But a movie “set” in a location does not always mean it was shot there. Dancer in the Dark was actually filmed in Sweden with the exception of the Washington State Penitentiary scenes. If you have an interest in seeing the penitentiary, it’s located in Walla Walla, not far from the northern border of Oregon.

There was WarGames with Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy. This '80s hit built the most expensive set ever at the time, constructing the NORAD HQ in the Cascade Mountains.  There is also a scene of Broderick and Sheedy taking a ferry to “Goose Island.” The real location they ferry to is Anderson Island – the southernmost island in the Puget Sound.  Other locations for the film include Everett, Seattle, and Lake Chelan National Recreation area as well as locations in California.

But if you want the quintessential Washington State experience, you have to go to the quintessential Washington State city—Seattle. And there's a slew of all-time classics shot in Seattle including The Last Mimzy, Firewall, The Ring Two, Life or Something Like It.  OK, you probably guessed that I’m just pulling your leg. Though these movies were shot in Seattle and they surely have redeeming qualities, we all know that when we think of Seattle, we think of one movie.

John Ur is back with another stop on the Cinematic Road Trip. This time, he sets his sights on Oregon.

During my cross-country drive, I remember looking south across the Oregon coastline and shuddering. Cannon Beach's fog was rolling in over, and the rhythmic waves from the Pacific Ocean had me thinking, 'This place is creepy. It’d be a great place for a Stephen King movie.' The beach was soggy from rain and the rocky coast exposed a land that had been beaten for ages and was tired of being picked on. Trees arched permanently away from the wind. I half-expected zombies to dig their way out of their sandy graves and creep inward from the shore, infecting the entire population in an apocalyptic battle for the future of mankind.

Fortunately, no zombies were to be found. But driving through the fog along the coastline was like seeing things in black and white. The fog and gray skies desaturated the landscape. Trees became dark gray. Lighthouses were a dingy white. Nothing remained a clean, pure color. Everything was (dis)colored by the mist.

Let’s play a game. Name a movie made in the United States. Go ahead name one. The odds that the movie you just named was filmed in California is one in three. And of those movies shot in California, two-thirds are shot in and around Hollywood, according to an August 2005 study by the California Film Commission.

Now, name a country. How about Bulgaria? Or Costa Rica? The film industry of California brings in an estimated $34 billion dollars a year into the California economy (at least as of 2002, according to the L.A. County Economic Development Corp.) which is more than the GDP of 100 countries, according to the IMF, including those of Bulgaria and Costa Rica. In fact, it's as much money as the bottom 38 countries combined.

So to say California produces a lot of film would be to say that Iowa grows a lot of corn. The state is large and the landscape assorted with deserts, mountains, forests and an ocean all within close proximity to Hollywood. This, and reliable sunshine, makes it an ideal location for the center of the film industry.

If southern California is your thing, and for many people it is, you might want to check out these movies to get a feel for the major cities on the West Coast: For San Diego, though it may not stand up as an all-time classic, Anchorman, Will Ferrell’s comedy, was shot all around the city. For Los Angeles on film: LA Confidential or Mulholland Drive will give you an idea of the vastness of the city sprawl.

Driving north of Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, you’ll come to Santa Ynez Valley. This area has experienced a tourist boom in the years following the success of Sideways, the story of two middle-aged men on a road trip through one of the lesser-known wine regions in California.

But I would like to drive you up the coast from Tinseltown to the City by the Bay where I was lucky enough to stay for a few months during my college years.

John Ur makes a pitstop on his Cinematic Road Trip to give us a taste of Arizona.

Back when I was just a wee lad, my mental map of Arizona included nothing but orange sand. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could live there. To me, any desert must be like the Sahara I’d seen on TV. I had no perception that different types of deserts could exist in different climates.

Fast forward some twenty years and my perception of Arizona hadn’t much changed. I expected to see a flat, dry and sandy land sprinkled with a town here and there. Much to my pleasant surprise, Arizona is much more diverse in landscape than I pictured. True, in the south, the land is largely dominated by saguaro cacti and the rugged landscape of the Chihuahuan Desert (as can also be seen in southern New Mexico and West Texas), but as you move north from Phoenix toward Sedona and Flagstaff, the elevation gains about 5,000 - 7,000 feet, with Humphreys Peak topping the state at 12,633 feet above sea level.

Heading north through the state, you will see the landscape shift from the flat desert land in the south to the wonderful red rocks of the central region. Sedona boasts an impressive amount of rock formations, each with their own particular name (based roughly on their shape: Coffee Pot, Bell, Cathedral Rock, etc.). Flagstaff and areas further north are surprisingly green and maintain a moderate climate throughout most of the year due to their elevation. And then, of course, there is the Grand Canyon, which sits in the middle of an enormous canyon country that stretches north into Utah and Colorado and south into Mexico’s famed Copper Canyon. Did you know you could ski in Arizona? Me neither. 

John Ur is back this week with the latest edition of his new column about films that capture the 50 states.

New Mexico is like a dream to me. Adobe houses with curved corners seem to climb out of the mud like giant ant hills. The Native Americans and Latin American immigrants who populate much of the state seem an extension of the earth and trees. Dry, red rocks that litter the landscape in the northwest, abandoned ruins of ancient American pueblos in Bandelier National Monument that are just an hour from Santa Fe, and the blanket of gypsum at White Sands National Monument all help to create the psychedelic landscape you'll find throughout the state. It’s no wonder Roswell is famous for UFO sightings. The residents were probably just dizzy from all the gorgeous abnormalities of the far-reaching horizons.   

New Mexico has a surprisingly long history of filmmaking. Many famous old Westerns have been shot in the state (Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and The Man from Laramie among others). If you’re a Western type of moviegoer, and looking for a modern take on the genre, 3:10 to Yuma would be my recommendation. The original 3:10 to Yuma starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin was shot on movie sets in Burbank, California, and locations in Arizona. But the 2007 remake, with Christian Bale and Russell Crowe, was filmed in and around Santa Fe, Abiquiu, and Galisteo, New Mexico. Many of the film’s sets were built and designed to match the period (Civil War era) so the New Mexico that you see will be partially created. But you might get a feel of the wide open space with unforgiving, thirsty terrain in every direction. (Side note: A portion of the movie’s set built on Cerro Pelon Ranch in Galisteo has been saved. Cerro Pelon is the largest Western set in the United States and includes some of the original Silverado buildings.)

Welcome to Intelligent Travel's latest column, written by John Ur, which will map out some of the best movie sites across the 50 states. Every week, we’ll look at a state (or portion of a large state) and find the best landscape cinema for you to experience before embarking on a trip of your own.

West Texas stretches on for miles and miles...and miles.

Driving from El Paso southeast towards Big Bend National Park, I imagined at least 15 different pastimes I would enjoy more than driving through western Texas. The most drastic visual picture on that landscape was the gas station where we stopped in Alpine. Beyond the asphalt lies plains and rolling hills, and more plains and more rolling hills.

To understand the vastness of Texas, you must realize that is the largest state in the lower 48, about 100,000 square miles larger than California. For an East Coast boy raised in New Jersey, a state about 1/30th the size of Texas, the idea that I would drive for 6, 8, 10, 12 hours and not pass through at least four other states was daunting. Even more daunting would be to try to identify the landscape and feel of the entire state in one post. For this reason, I’ll just focus on West Texas here. More specifically, Big Bend Country.

Recently, there were two films based in West Texas that I believe hit the nail on the deserted region’s head. The Coen brothers' current masterpiece, No Country for Old Men, though gripping and gruesome in its drama, opens with some of the best lonesome shots of this area that is largely dominated by the Chihuahuan Desert. The hills in the opening sequence are poked with cacti and low-growing shrubs. The sun, unfiltered by trees or clouds, batters the dry soil and any who dare to roam below.  According to a recent interview with the Coen brothers, the only Texas locations were shot around Marfa. The rest of the film was shot in Las Vegas (New Mexico) and Mexico. Paul Thomas Anderson's recently released period epic, There Will Be Blood, was also shot around Marfa.