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Category: A Little Bit from Elaine A Little Bit from Elaine
Published: 20 May 2021 20 May 2021

By Elaine Carlson

Who thinks James Cameron's "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" (1991) starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton is a critically-acclaimed movie?

Lily Price does. She created the list "From State to State: 50 Iconic Movies Set In Each State." She said she chose the best "50 critically-acclaimed movies." Her pick for California was "Terminator 2" The actor turned politician went back to acting after leaving his government job and in his role as Terminator races "through the 'Golden State' to prevent a nuclear apocalypse."

Her selection for New Mexico is "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." (1967) "This iconic movie is known as one of the best spaghetti westerns --- a movie set in the west but filmed in Europe to save money, in this case in Spain by Italian director Sergio Leone" and starring Clint Eastwood.

It is set during the Civil War in the New Mexico Campaign of 1862. To her "this western encapsulates the rough and tumble west with all the shootouts and tough attitudes, while accelerating a young Eastwood to stardom."

Nick Cannata-Bowman created "Most Famous Movie Filmed in Each State." I wanted to see which movie he chose for California. To him that is a difficult job because "Hollywood is the epicenter of the media industry, the list of projects filmed in California is endless."

He didn't give up,"We're going to go ahead and tag Roman Polanski's Los Angeles-centric noir classic "Chinatown," (1974) because it is "regarded by many to be one of the greatest movies ever made."

In "The Best Movie Filmed In Your State And DC" Hrisvina Brymes also acknowledges in California making movies is a big business. That state "is perhaps the most popular shooting location for American movies and the best one is a silent classic." The classic is Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times." (1936) I wonder why she put perhaps into that sentence.

If I were to prepare such a list of 50 (or 51) top movies, for California I would have to decide between Orson Wells's "Citizen Kane" (1941), "Casablanca" (1942) or Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" (1960).

In Delaware. Price gave her top spot to "Dead Poets Society" (1989). Now before thinking of sending a congratulatory letter to its director Peter Weir or to the widow of its star Robin Williams think about what she said, "Dead Poets Society is the first major Hollywood movie to be shot entirely in Delaware."

I doubt there will be many people surprised about her choices for Kansas and Georgia.

In Kansas --- "The Wizard of Oz." Dorothy Gale was in Kansas at both the beginning and the end of the movie but Judy Garland and all the actors who were cast as the Munchkins had to go to MGM's Culver City Studio in Los Angeles for the filming.

She put "Gone With The Wind" (1939) into Georgia's top spot. In her accompanying notes she said, "Hattie McDaniel was the first African American to win an Academy Award for her role of Mammy in the film, but she was not allowed to attend the Atlanta premiere in the segregated south."

Cannata-Bowman's pick for the best movie in Georgia is "Forrest Gump" starring Tom Hanks. He tells us "While most of 'Forrest Gump' was shot in South Carolina," the scene with the title character sitting on a bench was filmed in Savannah, Georgia.

His selection for Arizona is the Coen brothers' "Raising Arizona" (1987). The movie was set there and it is "a film shot almost exclusively across various locations within the state." Both Coen brothers were writers for the show and Joel Coen was the Director and Ethan Coen was the Producer.

While working on this piece the word iconic kept coming up. I only had a vague sense of its meaning so I looked it up --- "Random House Webster's College Dictionary" (1991) Random House Inc. pg 666

Icon 3 A sign or representation that stands for something. Iconic adj. And I am not lying about the page number. Isn't that something?