Now a museum celebrating his life, this was the home of the poet Pablo Neruda from 1939 to his death in 1973. The "Casa de Isla Negra" was named by Neruda to describe the black rocks right off the shore. It was here that Neruda lived with this third wife, singer Matilde Urrutia, and they are both buried on the property with a clear view of the beach.

In 1973, when armed forces loyal to the dictator Pinochet searched this home of Neruda's, he famously said:

"Look around—there's only one thing of danger for you here—poetry."

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In 1979's Roger Corman B-movie Rock 'n' Roll High School, exteriors of the Rockatorium, where Riff camps out for tickets and the Ramones arrive in their pink Cadillac, were shot at the Mayan Theatre in Los Angeles. The Ramones concert itself was filmed at the Roxy Theatre on Sunset Strip in Hollywood.

The Mayan opened in 1927 and first showed live musicals, then movies, then in the 1940s it was a burlesque house, back to movies in the 1950s, was a porn theatre in the 1970s and is now a nightclub. You can also see the Mayan, inside and out, in The Bodyguard starring Kevin Costner.

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If you guessed that Vince Lombardi High School from the Roger Corman-produced Rock 'n' Roll High School was in Wisconsin, you would be wrong, since it doesn't exist. The movie was filmed at the Mount Carmel High School in Los Angeles, an all boys Catholic high school that had been closed for several years by the time the movie came out in 1979. This is the former site of the school. I don't know if there is any truth to the rumors that the explosion at the end was part of the building's demolition. I believe the building was actually demolished around '82 or '83.

Todd Rundgren, Cheap Trick and Tom Petty were supposedly all considered for the movie before the Ramones got the part.

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In the movie Contact, Jodie Foster receives the message from the aliens while at the Very Large Array in New Mexico.

Unlike the Arecibo Observatory which does collect data for the SETI@home project, the 27 antennas at the VLA are not actually used in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.

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Jodie Foster is working at the Arecibo Observatory at the beginning of the movie Contact before they lose their funding and she ends up at the Very Large Array in New Mexico.

Located in Puerto Rico, Arecibo has been operating since 1963. The radio telescope is the largest single-aperture telescope ever constructed, and the main collecting dish contains the largest curved focusing dish on Earth.

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