Films Shot or Featuring the City of Chicago

This summer the downtown area of Chicago is shut down most every night for the filming of the latest Batman film, I know from personal experience, whenever a film is either filmed in or set in Chicago my wife and I tend to go "Gee! I know where that place is!" When the film version of the 60's TV show The Fugitive was released my wife was very excited because they filmed much of it in or around the University of Chicago where she had been going for medical treatment. One time I went with her there and she took me on kind of an improvised Fugitive tour to some of the places that they filmed at.

Chicago wasn't always a place where Hollywood came to shoot movies though it had been a center of the early days of motion pictures. Charlie Chaplin got his start at the Esseney studios here and more than a few early films were shot in the Loop and the north side between 1908 and 1917. For along time Chicago wasn't a place where Hollywood went to film. The first Mayor Daley didn't like cooperating much with the studios especially if they put the city in a bad light. That changed in the 70's when Mayor Byrne took over City Hall and actively courted the studios. The flood gates really opened with the 1978 film The Blues Brothers based on the Saturday Night Live skits. Byrne even permitted the film crew to drive a squad car through a fake window set up in the Daley Center. She also posed with stars Dan Aykroyd and Jim Belushi in a photo op. I'll talk more about the Blues Brothers later on. So here are a few films either set or featuring Chicago. One note before I begin: I've left out a few films that were either filmed in the studio (like the 1934 film In Old Chicago) or set in the city but filmed other places (Like the musical Chicago which was shot in Vancouver)