Baseball Field, Field of Dreams
In Field of Dreams, beginner farmer Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) risks bankruptcy to build a baseball diamond in the middle of his Iowa cornfield. Kinsella, rebelling against his deceased father's calculated lifestyle, impulsively follows the advice of a mysterious voice assuring, "If you build it, he will come." Months after he builds it, they come: several ghosts of baseball's past, including "Shoeless" Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta), flock to the field to relive their glory days. By film's end, baseball fans from all over arrive to witness the mystical match. And since the 1989 movie's release, about 65,000 people per year have also made the trek to the Field of Dreams.
Built by Universal Studios in 1989, the 193-acre (78 hectare) site is now owned by the Lansing family. The family maintains the baseball diamond and welcomes tourists free of charge. However, in mid-May 2010 the family put the land — including a two-bedroom house — on the market for $5.4 million. Both Costner and Liotta have reportedly passed on the chance of owning the Field of Dreams.
Sylvester Stallone's underdog franchise had its hits and plenty of misses (does anyone actually remember a single thing about Rocky V?), but one of its successes is its inspiring movie buffs to experience a brief moment of exercise. If you find yourself near the Philadelphia Museum of Art steps, you run up them. Simple as that. There is no way around it. Ideally you will wear a bandanna and play the Rocky theme song ("Gonna Fly Now") in your head. Second-guessing the location? Orient yourself with the nearby Rocky statue.
In Crook County, Wyoming, a cylindrical tower more than 1,000 ft. (300 m) tall stands alone in an open plane. The structure, known as Devils Tower, is recognizable to anyone who has seen Steven Spielberg's 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In the climax of the film, several characters — who have been so unknowingly obsessed with the structure that they have sculpted it in mashed potatoes and repeatedly sketched it — descend on Devils Tower, where they greet a gargantuan alien mother ship (below, the money shot arrives at about the 1:30 mark). Yet the stone tower was famous long before its association with UFOs. In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt named Devils Tower, a sacred symbol to several Native American tribes, the U.S.'s first national monument.
Tiffany's & Co., Breakfast at Tiffany's
In the opening scene in Breakfast at Tiffany's, a New York City yellow cab drives down a quiet Fifth Avenue and drops Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) off near the corner of 57th Street. The formally dressed Golightly stares through her iconic sunglasses into the Tiffany & Co. window as she consumes her morning pastry and coffee. As she later says, "Well, when I get it, the only thing that does any good is to jump in a cab and go to Tiffany's. Calms me down right away. The quietness and the proud look of it. Nothing very bad could happen to you there." The scene, filmed outside New York's famed jewelry store, was one of the few not filmed at Paramount Studios' California backlots.
Of all the images associated with The Exorcist — spinning heads, split pea soup, crucifixes handled in unholy ways — it is the creepily steep stone staircase that might be the longest-lasting in memories. The 1973 horror blockbuster's satanic steps — which prove to be the cause of death for several characters — are located in Washington's Georgetown enclave by a house at 3600 Prospect Street, which was used for exterior shots of the possessed girl's residence. Students at the neighborhood's namesake university — which features heavily in the film — put on several screenings of the film every Halloween.
It took 30 years to build the Trevi Fountain but just a minute of screen time for the monument to be immortalized. Other films — Roman Holiday and Three Coins in the Fountain — featured Nicola Salvi's 18th century masterpiece, but its most celebrated role was in Federico Fellini's La dolce vita. In all its black-and-white glory, the 1960 classic highlighted Swedish bombshell Anita Ekberg and her strapless evening gown basking in the pouring water. Tourists inspired by the scene, though, have to settle for tossing coins into the fountain. Bathing, however curvaceous you may be, is not allowed.
Katz's Delicatessen was already 100 years old in 1989 when the romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally came out. The landmark New York deli on Houston Street, with its overstuffed pastrami-on-rye sandwiches, was the ideal setting for Meg Ryan's fake orgasm. The classic scene was made that much more classic by the line uttered by a nearby customer (played by director Rob Reiner's mother): "I'll have what she's having."
Not far from the Utah-Arizona state line sits Monument Valley — a place John Wayne once referred to as "where God put the West." Large red sandstone monoliths (with names such as the Three Sisters and East and West Mitten) scattered throughout the dusty desert served as the perfect backdrop to director John Ford's depictions of the Old West. Ford filmed several of his westerns, including Stagecoach and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, which both starred Wayne, in the valley. Goulding's Lodge, a hotel in Monument Valley, is often visited by fans of the Duke, and the proprietors offer a large selection of John Wayne DVDs for guests.
The 1949 thriller The Third Man suggests that serious business at an amusement park is best conducted on a Ferris wheel. In a cabin on the Viennese Great Wheel (Wiener Reisenrad) at the Prater park, Joseph Cotten's good guy and Orson Welles' bad guy — former friends — discuss the latter's fake death, the police, the Russians and good and evil in general. Confronted about his racket, Harry Lime (Welles) maintains his cool — something he probably wouldn't have been able to do on a roller coaster. The two get off the wheel, and Lime utters one of cinema's most giddily evil statements. "In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed. But they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock!"
In the pursuit of love, Benjamin Braddock tested the patience of the gods. In The Graduate, Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) storms into a church where his beloved Elaine (Katherine Ross) is about to marry another. Just as the exit music is cued, Braddock pounds on a glass balcony window, shouting, "Elaine!" over and over and over. She finally responds by shouting Braddock's name, and the two desperately try to escape the church. At one point, Braddock uses a large cross to fend off the mob of angry guests. The film's now famous finale was filmed at the strikingly modernist United Methodist Church in La Verne, Calif., about 30 miles (50 km) east of Los Angeles.
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