AintItCool has a set of spy photos taken yesterday of some location shooting for J J Abrams upcoming Star Trek franchise reboot. The production was filming in front of Cailfornia State University at Northridge’s Oviatt Library, trying to go incognito under the false title Corporate Headquarters. With the Starfleet logo on the lightpost banners, they clearly were not fooling anyone, hence the leaked pictures.
If you look at one of the pictures in the group, reproduced here at right (click to make bigger), you may notice that the Library looks familiar. That’s because it was also used as the location for the front of the superhero high school in Disney’s 2005 film Sky High! (You can also see a picture of the Library when it isn’t moonlighting as a filmset at its Wikipedia entry.)
While it is true that some locations are used repeatedly, there’s often a disconnect for sharp eyed filmgoers when the same place is supposed to be in different locations in different films. It’s bound to happen occasionally, as not all films have the budget to film in the locations they are set in. Jack Nicholson’s Manhattan publishing office in Wolf can look suspiciously like the rundown Los Angeles apartment building in Bladerunner, because both films shot their scenes in LA’s famous Bradbury Building. More recently, viewers of the television series Heroes became familiar with an alleged Manhattan location called “Kirby Plaza,” complete with a distinctive red sculpture, during the show’s first season finale. However, if they went to see Rush Hour 3 a few months later, they may have been surprised to see Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker race through the exact same plaza in an action sequence set in Los Angeles.
The most recent example of this for me was watching the newer “3:10 to Yuma.” Parts were filmed in the same old-westy town where the kids were abandoned on the tv show Kid Nation.