Although San Francisco is a relatively short drive from Hollywood, movies were seldom filmed there before World War II ended. Bay Area settings were usually reproduced, aside from set-up shots, on studio backlots. Technology and a heightened taste for realism changed that. San Francisco was the chief beneficiary among American cities of the postwar shift toward location shooting. It became the third city—after LA and New York— for film production.
The story of filmmaking in the Bay Area is told in a new book, Hollywood in San Francisco. But its subtitle, Location Shooting and the Aesthetics of Urban Decline, signals that its author also has other themes in mind. In Hollywood in San Francisco, Joshua Gleich offers a summary of technical developments—including lighter cameras and light-sensitive film stock—that made it easier (if not necessarily cheaper) to work outside the studio backlots. He also pursues an underexplored idea: did all that urban grit proffered by film and TV producers in the early ‘70s make big cities look more dangerous than they really were? Gleich is probably wrong should he assert that filmmakers appealing to suburban anxiety painted New York in colors direr than reality, but he might be correct in applying his theory to San Francisco, a city that not only maintained urban integrity in the face of suburbanization but saw an influx of new residents for its socially tolerant attitudes.
San Francisco has much to recommend as a location for films that could as easily be shot in any metropolis. The architecture is unique, the topography lends itself to car chases (Bullitt) and the Golden Gate is only the most universally recognized among several local landmarks. And yes, San Francisco is a short drive from Hollywood and benefitted from mayors who promoted film production.
A taste for realism, perhaps stimulated by the harsh experience of World War II as much as Italian neo-realist cinema, might also have underlined the growth of location shooting. But as Gleich notes, “filmmakers are more than capable of constructing urban fantasies while shooting on location.”
Gleich is an assistant professor in the School of Theatre, Film and Television at the University of Arizona, Hollywood in San Francisco is published by the University of Texas Press.
