Chicago is home to the famous Essanay Studio where Charlie Chaplin shot many of his movies in the 1930s.
Though Essanay Studio is long gone, it remains a Chicago landmark at
St. Augustine College.

Chicago's historic Wrigley Field was used to portray nearly all of the ballparks in the Babe Ruth biopic
The Babe.

Mermet Springs, a scuba diving park in Southern Illinois, paid only $1 for the airplane used in the action thriller U.S. Marshals. Divers today can actually swim through its hollow hull.

In The Dark Knight, The Gotham City license plates were directly modeled off of Illinois license plates.

During the parade sequence in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, several Chicagoans, who were not extras (including a construction worker and window washer), began dancing. The director found it so funny he filmed them and included the shot in the movie.

The artificial snow used in the filming of the mega-hit Home Alone was donated to the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

The prop Lincoln Park Zoo mailbox used in Return to Me, proved to be a production nightmare, requiring a guard to stand watch so that zoo visitors didn't actually drop letters into it.