Reel San Francisco Stories

Christopher Pollock's annotated filmography of the San Francisco Bay Area

While visiting Northern California, evangelist Billy Graham once commented, "The Bay Area is so beautiful, I hesitate to preach about heaven while I'm here." Not only lovely, the region is also uniquely photogenic, and many, many films - more than 600 - have been shot in San Francisco and the surrounding area over the past nearly 90 years.

My interest in local film locations and history dates back to the 1990s when I worked in offices located at 170 Maiden Lane, a building that had, years earlier, been part of Ransohoffs, a high-end San Francisco department store. The offices were posh, with lofty ceilings, wide archways and other elegant touches. Notably, the archway motif was echoed by tall arched mirrors that adorned several walls. I learned that the floor had once housed Ransohoffs' dress salon. And then one day an architect (the company I worked for was a design firm specializing in destination resorts and hotels) told me that a classic scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo had taken place within our walls. This bit of information motivated me to do some research and I learned that though the sequence in which Scottie Ferguson takes Judy Barton shopping for a new wardrobe had not actually been filmed on site, Hitchcock had replicated the setting - precisely - on a Hollywood sound stage, just as he had recreated the Podesta Baldocchi florist shop and Ernie's restaurant for the film.

"Ransohoffs" Vertigo (1958)

Note the arched mirror detail behind Kim Novak

30+ years on, a Christmas tree graced the dress salon area depicted in Vertigo

A few years later I came across a book that boosted my interest in Bay Area film locations to a new level: Jeff Kraft and Aaron Levinthal's singular Footsteps in the Fog: Alfred Hitchcock's San Francisco. Within its covers I found a trove of detail on the locations used not only in Vertigo, but also Shadow of a Doubt, The Birds, Psycho and more. Once I started blogging, I began to make use of some of what I'd learned in that book and others and online, becoming something of a film location geek in the process and eventually making a 6-minute video I called San Francisco Movie Locations, a Mini-Tour. 

Then, just last week, Christopher Pollock's new book Reel San Francisco Stories arrived in the mail and I've been perusing it intently ever since, filling its pages with small green post-its to mark tidbits of interest, like:

• The farm depicted in The Farmer's Daughter (1947, Loretta Young and Joseph Cotten) was the Scott Ranch on Adobe Road in Penngrove, California (in Sonoma County, North of San Francisco) and the two-story Victorian home, outbuildings and silo shown in the film were all demolished long ago; all that remains of the ranch today is the "rolling landscape."
• Aunt Polly (Jane Wyman), the chilly spinster who took in her niece Pollyanna (1960, Hayley Mills), lived in one of the Bay Area's most idyllic locations, the Wine Country. The film's locations were shot in towns like Napa and St. Helena in Napa County and Santa Rosa, the county seat of Sonoma County. Lucky Pollyanna! 

When I discovered that Storm Center (1956, Bette Davis) was shot in Santa Rosa and that the town's Carnegie Library was a pivotal location, I realized why that ivy-draped library building and the trees enclosing it had always seemed so familiar to me. Alfred Hitchcock had used the same library in Shadow of a Doubt (1943) for the scene in which Young Charlie (Teresa Wright) rushes to its doors just at closing time.

Santa Rosa's Carnegie Library, Shadow of Doubt (1943)

Bette Davis in Storm Center (1956)

Pollock catalogs the hundreds of films set in the Bay Area from the early 20th century (Behind That Curtain, Fox, 1929) to very recent times (Blue Jasmine, Paramount, 2013, Cate Blanchett). Each entry includes release year, studio, director, stars, some behind-the-camera crew, a brief synopsis of the plot and a list of locations featured (addresses included). But this book is more than a lengthy film index. On most pages, adjacent to one or two films, is supplemental background on persons or places or events related to the particular movie(s). For example, accompanying the entry on This Earth is Mine (1959, Rock Hudson, Jean Simmons) is a brief history of the Napa Valley's Inglenook Vineyard, a site featured in the film, from its beginnings in 1879 to its present status as the award-winning winery of director Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather series, Apocalypse, Now), who has become an accomplished vintner as well as filmmaker.
 

Francis Coppola's Inglenook (once known as Niebaum-Coppola and, later, Rubicon Estate) in Rutherford

And there is more. By way of an introduction, Pollock provides concise but wide-ranging historical background on film in the Bay Area. Going back to the inception of moving pictures, he tells of the Muybridge-Stanford "experiments" of the 1870s in which Mr. Muybridge took serial photographs of a horse belonging to his patron, former California governor Leland Stanford, at Stanford's Palo Alto Stock Farm. The photos of the running horse were copied to a disc in the form of silhouettes and projected onto a screen by a machine Muybridge had invented. As these images appeared in quick succession, the horse seemed to gallop. As one Muybridge biographer has noted, these images held "the primal DNA" of movies, TV and video games - not to mention the moving pictures that so fascinate those of us who regularly roam the Internet...

THE PIONEERING PHOTOGRAPHY OF EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE

 
Among the many Bay Area notables Pollock mentions who have made appearances in locally filmed movies was the San Francisco Chronicle's Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, Herb Caen (1916 - 1997), who had a bit part as a reporter in Nora Prentiss (1947, Ann Sheridan). The oft-quoted wag, who was besotted with the City by the Bay, memorably quipped, "One day...if I go to heaven, I'll look around and say, 'It ain't bad, but it ain't San Francisco.'" Clearly, I agree. But I have to admit that my interests extend beyond the San Francisco Bay Area and, in the past, I've happily explored historic locales in New York and Hollywood as well as a tiny island just off the coast of Southern California.

~

Many thanks to Christopher Pollock for a review copy of Reel San Francisco Stories, an essential resource and valued addition to my library of books on film.

San Francisco's Spreckels Mansion in Pal Joey (1957, Frank Sinatra, Kim Novak, Rita Hayworth)

The Spreckels Mansion in San Francisco's Pacific Heights neighborhood, 2013