Scouting - San Francisco
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by Scott Trimble
Contributing writer Scott Trimble talks about what he knows best, his own hometown:
San Francisco’s film industry goes back before even that of Hollywood. In fact, long before Thomas Edison’s many improvements, the motion pictures themselves were actually invented in the Bay Area by Leland Stanford and Eadweard Muybridge back in 1878 with their successive photos of a running horse in Palo Alto.
The Bay Area was the home of many innovations over the years. The first human to appear in a film was San Francisco gymnast William Lawton in 1880, the same year of the first movie screening to a public audience at Pine & Kearny Streets. The first movie studio was in Fremont, the first color movie was Cupid Angling which was made in San Rafael in 1918, and the first talkie was The Jazz Singer, partly filmed near Union Square in 1927. The first television set was invented by Philo T. Farnsworth in Berkeley in September 1927, and the first TV broadcast went out from North Beach in 1930. More recently, the first CGI visual effects were created by Industrial Light & Magic in San Rafael, and the first all-CGI feature film was by Pixar Animation Studios in Richmond (now in Emeryville).
Despite all these innovations, the film industry moved to Los Angeles in the 1910s and 1920s, mostly because of the consistent weather and the fact that most Bay Area studios simply went out of business during the Great War and the Depression. Still, the Bay Area has continued to remain a popular place for on-location filming because of its 400-mile proximity to Los Angeles and its natural beauty, famous icons, and unique cityscapes.
Some of the most memorable San Francisco movies include; The Lady From Shanghai, Vertigo, Harold and Maude, Dirty Harry, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, A View to a Kill, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Interview With the Vampire, and The Rock.
Some of the most recent include; Twisted, Sweet November, Bicentennial Man, Flubber, Metro, Sphere, Basic Instinct, and The Nightmare Before Christmas.
The Bay Area is a versatile place that has been used as a match for many other cities too. Rent (New York), 50 First Dates (Hawaii), Tucker: The Man and His Dream (Michigan), The Right Stuff (Texas and Florida), and Raiders of the Lost Ark (Washington DC) are a few examples.
One of the LMGA’s newest members is Key Assistant Location Manager, Saisie Jang, based in San Francisco. She is adept at scouting the whole Bay Area, but is an expert on San Francisco and its Chinatown and North Beach neighborhoods, due to her fluency in three Chinese dialects. In describing just how versatile San Francisco can be for filming, she notes that “A few blocks to the left or to the right gives you a completely different feel.” Regarding the occasional perception that San Francisco can be a difficult city in which to shoot, Jang said, “That’s changing. City officials, police, hotels, parking lot owners, vendors, and especially the film office are all very film-friendly, very helpful, and have worked to make it easier to shoot here.”