The Ten Best Movies Set in Colorado but Filmed Elsewhere

Many of the best movies about Colorado weren't filmed here. After unreeling the best movies made in the state, we're rolling out the ten best movies about Colorado that were all made somewhere else:

Citizen Kane (1941)
Filming locations: New York, California
Decades-old spoiler alert: “Rosebud,” the last word that millionaire newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane (director/co-writer/star Orson Welles) vocalizes before shuffling off this mortal coil, is a sled. But what most people forget is that this plaything symbolizes his early years in Colorado, before gold was found on the family’s property — a discovery that ended an innocence Kane still yearns for long after it’s been shattered.

Harvey (1950)
Filming location: California
The story of Elwood P. Dowd (Jimmy Stewart), a man whose best friend is a human-sized invisible rabbit, comes by its Colorado roots honestly: Mary Chase, who wrote the play of the same name on which the movie is based, graduated from West High School in Denver and later attended both the University of Denver and the University of Colorado Boulder.

The Long, Long Trailer (1953)
Filming location: California
A not terribly successful effort to turn first-couple-of-television Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz into movie draws, The Long, Long Trailer is a road-trip comedy that depicts the pair’s honeymoon nearly crashing during a drive through the mountains of Colorado. Since then, plenty of other films have made fictional treks through this state without crews ever setting foot here.


Support Your Local Sheriff (1969)
Filming location: California
One of the most entertaining movies made by actor James Garner, Support Your Local Sheriff takes place in the town of Calendar, Colorado. Since no such town exists, we’re guessing that the filmmakers simply gave up looking for it after a while and decided to take a shot at reproducing it on a Hollywood back lot.

5 Card Stud (1968)
Filming location: Mexico
Unlike Calendar, Colorado, there actually is a Rincon — but it turns out to be a region of New Mexico, not a town 100 miles from Denver, where 5 Card Stud takes place. The only real-life connection between Colorado and this revenge drama, in which Robert Mitchum and Dean Martin are among the principals in a narrative about lethal retribution for the lynching of a man allegedly caught cheating at poker, is that it played in local theaters.

Jeremiah Johnson (1972)
Filming location: Utah
In one of his best roles, Robert Redford plays a Colorado mountain man who commemorated his victories over Native Americans bent on wiping him off the face of the Earth by slaying them and eating their livers. Redford famously attended the University of Colorado Boulder, but he fell in love with Utah, which served as a setting stand-in. At least it wasn’t California.

Red Dawn (1984)
Filming location: New Mexico
The Internet Movie Database description of Red Dawn’s plot begins: “From out of the sky, Soviet, Nicaraguan and Cuban troops begin landing on the football field of a Colorado high school.” But the plucky group of teens who battled these ferociously stereotypical enemies, portrayed by the likes of Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, Jennifer Gray and C. Thomas Howell, aided by Powers Boothe and Harry Dean Stanton, didn’t get any closer to Colorado than New Mexico, a state that continues to attract more than its share of movie-production revenue.


Battlefield Earth (2000)
Filming location: California, Canada
This Scientology super-session, with believer John Travolta starring in an adaptation of sect founder L. Ron Hubbard’s best-known novel, focuses on the Psychlos, a cadre of aliens that rule the Earth circa the year 3000. But you’ll be glad to know that Denver survives in this dystopian future, albeit under less than ideal circumstances: It’s the Psychlos’s central base and the location of a giant slave camp.

Day of the Dead (2008)
Filming location: Bulgaria
As anyone who’s ever been there knows, Leadville is an extremely picturesque place — and it would have looked great in this quasi-remake of director George Romero’s 1985 zombie-fest of the same name. But apparently Bulgaria was cheaper.

BlacKkKlansman (2018)
Filming location: New York
If ever a film should have been made in Colorado, it was this one. After all, Ron Stallworth, on whose autobiographical book the screenplay is based, served as a police officer in Colorado Springs, where he managed to fool the Ku Klux Klan into making him a member despite his status as an African-American. But no: Director/co-writer Spike Lee is a proud resident of the greater New York City area, and he didn’t venture much farther than Ossining, a community on the Hudson River. Which sucKkKs.