Why Vancouver is always a stand-in for San Francisco in movies and TV shows (2021)

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• Hacker News
• ...and Seattle
  by beembeem
• The alien planet is always a Canadian forest!
  by expedition32
• Nah, you can tell because they don’t have annoying people paint street numbers on the curbs.

  That said it’d be difficult to film the film Bullitt in Vancouver unless they cut out a lot of the street scenes, the marina, San Bruno mountain, the old freeways…

  by mc32
• The painting address numbers on curbs was a widespread scam in San Francisco. Grifters scammed homeowners into doing it.
  by comrade1234
• the non politically correct answer - Vancouver allows you to sell the dream of a wonderful city, clean streets etc.
  by dzonga
• Like SF, you can pick streets in Vancouver and sell whatever story you want about the city. You won't find many film cameras on East Hastings unless it's a documentary.
  by lwansbrough
• Also Battlestar Galactica -multiple shots of homes in Vancouver- I remember watching the series and wondering what city was being used for Baltar's house and surroundings because it was so beautiful, futuristic and clean..then I went vistied Vancouver.. its truly a gorgeous city and area

  http://www.battlestarlocations.com/locations-guide/the-minis...

  by AIorNot
• Thanks for this. Just started another rewatch and were of course in awe of the house.
  by cpuguy83
• Every time I visit the library it feels like I'm in New Caprica.
  by goodroot
• It was very fun to attend UBC then immediately start recognizing bits of the campus in many TV shows - Man in High Castle, Stargate, Battlestar, and many others.

  They have long since fixed it but there used to be an absolutely awful/hilarious set of street view captures for UBC that were taken by accident during filming for Man in the High Castle…the entire main mall had Nazi flags up. https://ubyssey.ca/humour/ubc-nazi-territory-street-view/

  by buildbot
• Same for SFU students too especially the mountain top Burnaby campus.
  by justinhj
• I thought it was funny that almost every alien planet on Stargate SG-1 looked like British Columbia.
  by dreamcompiler
• And the advanced planets looked like the SFU campus.
  by chorizo
• They called one of the planets “Kelowna”, a town in BC a few hundred km away.
  by clickety_clack
• Tax breaks for filming and it's not SF specific or even cities. Other planets too, like Stargate SG-1 being filmed around Squamish 1 hour away.
  by carabiner
• Having a street shut down for filming in New York or San Francisco is probably beyond the budget of most directors.
  by expedition32
• Shooting on location halfway across the galaxy definitely seems like it would strain the union's rate schedule. If you can take a Stargate so that you could be back home on the same day so you only have to pay local rates would be amazing.
  by dylan604
• Its really amazing how most planets in the galaxy look exactly like the Pacific northwest.
  by ecshafer
• I always got a chuckle when Stargate went meta. They had a planet called Kelowna (a real BC city) and a country called Langara (I was for a time a faculty member at Langara College). At one point, they visit an Oregon town called Steveston, with the location being the Steveston district of Richmond BC.

  Of course, nothing can beat the thrill of waking up every morning and looking out my bedroom building at the office building that was taken over by an evil computer on X-Files.

  by vincent-manis
• And Toronto is New York City.
  by CapitalistCartr
• Ah yes, American Psycho was shot in Toronto wasn’t it?
  by mikrl
• Except for that one hit movie (Rumble in the Bronx) when Vancouver stood in for New York.

  https://imgur.com/a/jr1KARI

  by fanatic2pope
• “Come with me to Canada. Toronto is just like New York, but without all the stuff”- Steve Martin on 30 Rock
  by m-ee
• You can also tell if something was shot in Canada by all the Canadian actors all over the place. I recognize so many people from X-Files, and so many other shows.
  by mistyvales
• Swear I recognized location/trees from TV show The Magicians in the latest adaptation of Shogun(standing in for Japan).
  by stevenwoo
• Or in the case of Superbad, a film based on Seth Rogen's experiences as a Vancouver teenager in the late 90s, Vancouver is a stand-in for Los Angeles, which is a stand-in for Vancouver.
  by thought_alarm
• My mother worked in a factory that sewed drapes for film sets before she retired. My brother-in-law used to be an operations manager for a warehouse that rented equipment to film sets.

  There is just a very long tail of services and a robust supply chain that is required for most industries to be successful.

  by pkaler
• Psych (the TV show) was set in Santa Barbara but filmed in Vancouver. They then did an episode where the plot was that characters all took a trip to British Columbia, which I recall being amusingly meta.
  by topkai22
• Same thing happens in Ice Cube's "Are We There Yet" where the characters are driving from Portland to Vancouver but the whole movie is filmed in Vancouver and surrounding area.
  by justinhj
• Wow. With all the beach, pier and flyby shots, as a non-American, I really thought it was all shot in Santa Barbara. Man. What editing can do.
  by tecoholic