Jodie Foster is working at the Arecibo Observatory at the beginning of the movie Contact before they lose their funding and she ends up at the Very Large Array in New Mexico.

Located in Puerto Rico, Arecibo has been operating since 1963. The radio telescope is the largest single-aperture telescope ever constructed, and the main collecting dish contains the largest curved focusing dish on Earth.

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Although it was set in New York, the interior of the Pandora Theatre in 1993's self-referential turd The Last Action Hero, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and some dumb kid, was Los Angeles's Orpheum Theatre on South Broadway. Exteriors were shot in New York City at the Empire Theatre on 42nd Street.

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Canaima National Park in south-eastern Venezuela was the inspiration for Paradise Falls in Disney/Pixar's Up. The filmmakers visited Angel Falls and the table-top mountains called tepuis when doing research for the movie. Tepui means "House of the Gods" in the local Pémon language. The largest tepui, in the western end of the park, is Auyantepui which translates to “House of the Devil” or "Devil's Mountain." Angel Falls though, the world's highest waterfall which drops over the edge of Auyantepui, was named after American Jimmie Angel who was the first person to fly over the waterfall in 1933. He crashed his plane when returning to the falls in 1937, and his 11 day survival before he found help was such a big deal in Venezuela that the Venezuelan government named the falls after him.

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Stanley Kubrick is reported to have based The Shining's red bathroom on the men's room of the Biltmore Hotel in Arizona. The design of the Biltmore is usually attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright, which is only partly true. The architect of record is Albert Chase McArthur who had been commissioned by his brothers to design a luxury hotel for them in Phoenix. McArthur studied under Wright, who had built the McArthur house in Chicago for McArthur's father in 1892, and Wright was the consulting architect for the Biltmore.

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The Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park served as the inspiration for parts of the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. The Overlook's Colorado Lounge in the movie was modeled after the lounge in the Ahwhanee and built on a soundstage at Elstree Studios.

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