Cincinnati in TV and the movies

My hometown of Cincinnati isn’t exactly Paris or New York. It is therefore somewhat understandable, I suppose, that our local news media is making a big deal of the episode of The Brady Bunch that was filmed here nearly a half-century ago:

47 years ago, The Brady Bunch visited Kings Island

While I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, going to Kings Island—Cincinnati’s only real amusement park—was a “big deal”. Much of the scenery in the above clip from The Brady Bunch therefore looks familiar. 

Kings Island is still there, by the way. But it’s changed a lot since 1973.

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A few feature-length films were shot in Cincinnati in the 1980s. Rain Man, starring Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise, comes immediately to mind. This movie was filmed in various locations in and around Cincinnati.

I’ve had lunch in the Italian restaurant Pompilio’s, in Northern Kentucky, where Rain Man‘s iconic “toothpick scene” takes place.

Around the same time, Fresh Horses was also shot in the Cincinnati area. Much of this film, starring Andrew McCarthy and Molly Ringwald, was made at the University of Cincinnati.

I was a student at UC while Fresh Horses was in production. The scene depicted below is set in a lecture hall in UC’s Old Chem building. I took a number of classes there, including organic chemistry (which was just about as abstruse as the class depicted in the scene from the film).

Oh, and I had a brief speaking role in Fresh Horses. A dialogue with Molly Ringwald’s character. 

No! Just kidding. One day, though, I did briefly catch sight of Molly Ringwald from a distance. That’s about as close to Hollywood as I have ever gotten.