Wilmington: the Right Coast Location! Quiz

Answer: Drew Barrymore

Drew Barrymore, from a prominent acting family, went on to have an active career as an adult. Her long list of movies include "Boys on the Side", "Ever After", "Charlie's Angels", and "50 First Dates". She also has produced and directed films. Frank Capra, Jr. - who also has a family heritage in movie-making - found the location for "Firestarter" after seeing a magazine picture of Orton Plantation, a historic antebellum rice plantation built around 1735 in Brunswick County, near Wilmington, North Carolina.

Much of the movie was filmed at the plantation and in other locations around the state, and movie producer Dino De Laurentiis was inspired to build a studio in Wilmington as a result. Over the years since 1983, Wilmington has been involved in the making of well over 200 films, and still counting.

Answer: David Lynch

"Blue Velvet" starred Kyle MacLachlan - who also appeared in David Lynch's "Twin Peaks" and his version of Frank Herbert's "Dune". Isabella Rossellini, Laura Dern, Hope Lange, George Dickerson, and Dean Stockwell also appeared in "Blue Velvet" along with Dennis Hopper, as perhaps the most viscerally evil villain one could imagine. The building in the photograph is a Wilmington landmark known as the Carolina Apartments, located at 420 Market Street.

In the movie, it becomes the building where Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini) lives and where a particularly disturbing scene with the Dennis Hopper character takes place. David Lynch received his second nomination for a Best Director Academy Award for "Blue Velvet".

His first was for "The Elephant Man" in 1980.

Answer: False

No one could accuse the makers of "Weekend at Bernie's" of being respectful of the dead! Two young employees of Bernie Lomax (played by Terry Kiser) are invited to his beach house, not knowing the mob is planning to kill them for revealing information. Meanwhile, the mob has killed Bernie, and the guests go through great pains to palm him off as being alive, positioning him in lifelike poses while they can't resist enjoying their resort weekend, in spite of carrying a dead body around and evading killers.

The result is hilarious, although (according to a 2013 article in "Scientific American") forensically impossible. The movie was shot on location mostly around Bald Head Island off the Brunswick County coast near Wilmington, North Carolina, on the Atlantic Ocean.

The historic lighthouse in the background of our photograph - affectionately called Old Baldy - appears in some scenes of the movie. The ferry landing and marina on the island were featured prominently, as were the golf carts people drive in lieu of automobiles, which are not allowed on Bald Head Island.

Other water scenes were filmed near Wrightsville Beach, which is a few miles from Wilmington. A web site dedicated to The 80's Movies Rewind explains that the beach house where much of the action (or inaction in Bernie's case) takes place was built for the movie on state park land and therefore had to be dismantled after filming. Other filming was done in and around Wilmington and in New York City.

Answer: Her husband is brutally abusive to her.

Filmed in 1990, "Sleeping with the Enemy" begins in an ultra-modern house with large windows facing the ocean, supposedly on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts. The beginning of the movie was actually filmed a few hundred miles down the Atlantic coast on the north end of Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, across Mason Inlet from Figure Eight Island, an exclusive community accessible only by a guarded bridge.

However, the film location was closer to Shell Island Resort, which attracts many visitors and is hardly as isolated as the movie makes it look.

While the house and the scenery are breathtakingly beautiful, the audience soon realizes that the walls of glass windows form a prison in which the wife is terrorized and brutally tortured by her cold, controlling husband. Exterior scenes and shots looking into the house through the windows were filmed in front of a temporary set that stood open to the elements in the back and was never a completed house.

The structure was dismantled once filming wrapped up.

After the wife in the movie makes her escape to a cottage, supposedly in a small Midwestern town near where her mother lives in a nursing home, filming moved primarily to the neighboring state of South Carolina. While Julia Roberts's character does fall in love with another man after her move, she fakes her death and runs away out of sheer terror.

Answer: Vladimir Nabokov

The "Lolita" movie released in 1997 follows the novel, in which Humbert Humbert (Jeremy Irons) flees with his young step-daughter Lolita (Dominique Swain) on a journey across the United States. There is also a flashback to Humbert's childhood in France, giving background for his attraction to pubescent girls, so filming was done on location in Europe as well as in many different locations in the United States.

The multiple locations added to the expense of producing the movie, which eventually cost $62 million to make, netting only $1.1 million in revenue.

The nature of the subject matter of Nabokov's novel required producers of the movie to work around censorship issues and to overcome the "ick" factor that kept audiences away. Ironically, while the screenplay of the 1962 movie version of "Lolita" was supposed to be written by Nabokov himself, the chronology was altered by director Stanley Kubrick, many details were changed, and no explicit sexuality was depicted, thus minimizing the impact of Lolita's plight.

The 1997 version attempts to stay true to Nabokov's narrative, but the complex irony of the novel does not translate well to the screen. Nabokov is said to have written his first notes on the novel that would become "Lolita" in 1948 on the back on index cards that he kept for recording facts about butterflies. It has been said of Vladimir Nabokov that he could have as easily become famous as an expert on butterflies as a novelist. His other novels include "Pale Fire", "Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle", and "The Gift".

Answer: The Fisherman

When I asked actor Muse Watson on Facebook if he had any thoughts about this question, he answered something like, "I can't think of anything, but if you do it I won't kill you." So here goes. Ben Willis - played by Muse Watson, who would later develop the memorable character Mike Franks on the popular television series "NCIS" - is a fisherman who first takes revenge on a boy he blames for the death of his own teenage daughter, but he later stalks and kills teenagers who had tried to cover up a drunken hit and run accident by throwing Ben's corpse into the ocean. Ben, who is still alive when they try to dispose of his body, bides his time, tortures the young people with the knowledge that someone knows what they did, then takes his revenge on the anniversary of these events (which happens to be July 4th).

He disguises himself in a fisherman's slicker and uses an ice hook to slash his victims. When two of the teenagers struggle with him on a boat, his hand is severed, and he again winds up in the ocean. Of course, this is not the end.

The hook returns! And there's more in "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer" - the sequel - and other movies inspired by it. Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillipe, Freddie Prinze, Jr., Anne Heche, Bridgette Wilson, Johnny Galecki, and Stuart Greer appear in the original movie. According to an online article in "The Southport Times" local places shown in the movie include Dosher Memorial Hospital, the Old Yacht Basin, the American Fish Company, the Cape Fear River, the ILS Building, Ollie's Oyster Bar, Port Charlie's Restaurant, the Southport Fish Company, and Short Street; however, other scenes were filmed elsewhere in North Carolina and across the country on the Pacific coast of California.

Answer: Ya-Ya

The movie follows four girls as they grow into women and work out issues of alcoholism, mental illness, and family dysfunction. When the girls are told their chattering sounds like "gumbo ya-ya" they embrace the word and form a secret club called the Ya-Ya Tribe.

At one point, the mother of one of the girls is dubbed the high-priestess of ya-ya, and the story belongs very much to her, as well. "The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood" was filmed in 2001 at Buckner Hill Plantation in the historic district of Faison, in Duplin and Sampson Counties of North Carolina, around 73 miles from Wilmington.

This area is best known today for producing wine from native muscadine and scuppernong grapes, but it has a long history agriculturally. The North Carolina estate, which dates from 1855, stood in for the Louisiana plantation Pecan Grove from the novel written by Rebecca Wells, who grew up in a setting much like the one she writes about. Both interior and exterior shots were filmed on location at the historic mansion in Faison.

Some scenes, such as the exterior of a cabin, were filmed at the Orton Plantation in Brunswick County, a location for many other movies and television series like "One Tree Hill" and "Dawson's Creek". Other interiors were set up in the Wilmington studios. Because the scenes in the movie were supposed to take place over a sixty year period of time - with one character played by three actresses of different ages - the setting also had to change with the years. Paint was chipped away slightly to show age, shrubs were made to look taller, and the kitchen was seemingly "remodeled" at a certain point.

Answer: Bees

Although the house in the photograph is in the old southern city of Charleston, South Carolina, the state where the events of "The Secret Life of Bees" is set, the pink house in the movie is located in the small town of Watha, North Carolina, around 35 miles driving distance from Wilmington. Lumberton, North Carolina, also provided filming locations for the movie, which was directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood and produced by Will and Jada Pinkett Smith and starred Jennifer Hudson, Queen Latifah, Dakota Fanning, Sophie Okonedo, and others.

The story takes place in 1964, as a fourteen-year-old named Lily Melissa Owens (played by Dakota Fanning) escapes an abusive situation and finds a deeply spiritual world among a sisterhood of women bee-keepers, where she also discovers answers to the mystery of her dead mother. Lily runs away with her African American caregiver Rosaleen (played by Jennifer Hudson) after the woman is beaten for defying white men in an effort to vote.

It is no coincidence that they wind up with strong black women in the place where Lily's mother once lived. Nor is it a coincidence that Lily's middle name is Melissa, which means bee in Greek. Lily comes to find her mother within herself.

She also finds love and a true family.

Answer: Southport

Southport is a small town 30 miles (48 kilometers) down the Atlantic coast highways from Wilmington by land. But one can have an even more picturesque journey by driving to the southern end of New Hanover County, going through Carolina and Kure Beaches to connect with the Southport-Fort Fisher ferry, then riding across the lower reaches of the Cape Fear River to Brunswick County by water. Movie fans who visit will recognize settings for television series like "Dawson's Creek" and movies like "Safe Haven", "Crimes of the Heart", and many others. Movie fans can tour these locations, and history buffs can visit the North Carolina Maritime Museum and buildings from many past eras, or shop the "Antiques District" on historic Moore Street, or explore the Old Smithville Burial Ground and Old Brunswick Jail.

There's an annual three-day event in the summer that has earned Southport the name Fourth of July Capital of North Carolina; the celebration includes a parade, fireworks, and - perhaps most moving - a ceremony in which immigrants to the United States are sworn in as citizens. And then there are the arts and the beautiful natural setting.

But you'd expect all that from a picture-perfect town, wouldn't you?

Answer: Iron Man 3

In this third movie of the "Iron Man" series, hero Tony Stark teams up with a ten year old boy named Harley to investigate terrorist attacks perpetrated by an arch-villain called the Mandarin. Their pursuit takes them into death-defying adventures involving Air Force One and a damaged oil tanker. Special effects abound.

The parts of "Iron Man 3" requiring electronic magic were filmed in Cary, North Carolina, at Epic Games and SAS - and other scenes were filmed elsewhere in North Carolina, in Florida, in California, and even in China.

However, the aerial stunts filmed over the Cape Fear River were memorable, even for residents of Wilmington accustomed to celebrity sightings and detours around film locations. Many followed this part of the filming online via a live web cam set up by a local television station.

Much of the real work was done behind the doors of EUE/Screen Gems Studios in Wilmington on sound stages. For example, Tony Stark's Malibu mansion was created by computer and enlarged on a set at Screen Gems.

Many visual effects were created in post-production by several groups, who merged their efforts. Real human beings appear in the film, though: for example, Robert Downey, Jr. plays the title role of Iron Man/Tony Stark, Gwyneth Paltrow is Virginia "Pepper" Potts, and Ben Kingsley fleshes out The Mandarin, Iron Man's "Marvel Comics" arch-foe. As with many films and television shows, none of the action of "Iron Man 3" is supposed to be in North Carolina, but "Wilmywood" plays its part well, pretending to be any number of exotic locations.