Where Is Pleasantville in Real Life?
Outside the 1998 movie, Pleasantville is a common name for towns in the US and Canada. There are four Pleasantvilles in Pennsylvania alone, and there are also towns and communities named Pleasantville in Indiana, Iowa, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Texas and Wisconsin, as well as in Newfoundland and Labrador. The Reese Witherspoon and Tobey Maguire vehicle got close to real life when Larger Than Life Productions selected Pleasantville, Iowa for a promo tie-in: A contest was held to visit the town of just almost 1,700 inhabitants. It was chosen for being the smallest town named Pleasantville in the States. A welcome billboard at Pleasantville, Iowa, said to be the smallest Pleasantville in America. Photo via Ashton B Crew The movie itself frames Pleasantville as your typical city in the Midwest. But if you look at it from the lens of director and writer Gary Ross, Pleasantville is a stand-in for small town mentality and the great American suburbia, where everything is a black-and-white m
