56/2367. Denial (2016)
This is a courtroom drama about the libel lawsuit brought in the mid-90s against a Emory University professor by a British Nazi-sympathizing Holocaust denier. That's interesting, sure, but the reason I watched it was because I was a student at both Emory University and DeKalb College (renamed Georgia Perimeter College while I was there but is now a satellite campus of Georgia State University) in the mid-90s when the principle action takes place.

The 2016 film begins with an attempt at verisimilitude with establishing shots on Emory's quad in Decatur, GA (purporting to be 1994 and not doing too bad a job at pulling it off)...

...then follows our antagonist as he travels west away from Emory towards downtown Atlanta on Freedom Parkway (a road originally planned as the very controversial Presidential Parkway which was still under construction in the mid-90s)...

...then south along the Downtown Connector ("connecting" US Interstates 75 and 85) through the Grady Curve, so-called because Grady Memorial Hospital is just off camera to the right. (There's a giant neon Coca-Cola sign just off camera to the left.)

Side note: Turner Field, seen on the sign above, is also an anachronism. It didn't exist in 1994. It was originally opened to the public as Centennial Olympic Stadium for the 1996 Atlanta Olympic games. After the Atlanta Braves abandoned it and moved north to Cobb County in 2016, it was sold to Georgia State University to become their football stadium and renamed again to Center Parc Stadium.

Side note 2: That billboard in the bottom right of the frame is advertising then-new (in 2015) news team of Sharon Reed and Ben Swann for WGCL CBS46 News. In 1994, WGCL was calling itself WGNX and after many years as an independent UHF station had just become the local CBS affiliate (after Atlanta's original CBS affiliate, WAGA, became a Fox station). Since 2022, WGCL has become WANF (for "Atlanta News First") but both Reed and Swann are long gone (in 2018 and 2019 respectively).

The antagonist must have been headed south down the Connector to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (called just the William B. Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport in 1994 as former mayor Maynard Jackson wouldn't die and get his name added until 2003) because we next see him pull up to -- I had to Google Image Search this -- the Elmsbridge Civic Centre in Esher, England.

Google Maps tells me that Esher is a suburb of London, where most of the movie is set and filmed, so it's easy to see why the filmmakers would use it here. For the record, according to Wikipedia, the Civic Centre was constructed in 1991, so it is at least period appropriate!

However, in the very next scene, by means of movie magic, we're transported back to the States inside an unidentified lecture hall disguised as DeKalb College (by means of a banner on a podium)!

I have no idea where this last bit was filmed, though I suspect it is also in London. It doesn't match any hall I sat in off Emory's quad in 1993-95, and if there were any lecture halls like this on Perimeter's Clarkston ("Central") or Decatur ("South") campuses in 1997-99, I was never inside them. They never used wood paneling when concrete blocks would do.

That's just the first 5 minutes. The rest of the movie takes place in Europe. I never went to any schools in London or Poland, so for all I know, all those locations are perfect.

More to come.

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