Hollywood in San Francisco: Location Shooting and the Aesthetics of Urban Decline

337 Pages·2018·6.54 MB·English

by  Joshua Gleich

TEXAS FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES SERIES
Thomas Schatz, Editor
HOLLYWOOD IN SAN FRANCISCO
LOCATION SHOOTING AND THE AESTHETICS OF
URBAN DECLINE
JOSHUA GLEICH
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS
AUSTIN
Copyright © 2018 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved
First edition, 2018
Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions
University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819
Austin, TX 78713–7819
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gleich, Joshua, author.
Title: Hollywood in San Francisco : location shooting and the aesthetics of urban decline / Joshua Gleich.
Other titles: Texas film and media studies series.
Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2018.
Series: Texas film and media studies series | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018001198 | ISBN 978-1-4773-1645-0 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1755-6
(pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1756-3 (library e-book) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1757-0 (non-library e-
book) Subjects: LCSH: Motion picture locations—California—San Francisco. | Motion pictures—
California—San Francisco—History. | Motion picture industry—California—San Francisco—History. |
Cities and towns in motion pictures. | San Francisco (Calif.)—In motion pictures.
Classification: LCC PN1995.67.S36 G54 2018 | DDC 791.4309794/61—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018001198
doi:10.7560/316450
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Postwar Location Shooting, the Semi-Documentary, and Dark Passage
2. The Cine-Tourist City: From Cinerama to The Lineup and Vertigo
3. “Sick Tales of a Healthy Land”: Blake Edwards in San Francisco
4. Countercultural Capital: Hollywood Chases the Summer of Love
5. The Manhattanization of San Francisco: Dirty Harry and The Streets of San
Francisco
6. Hollywood North / Hollywood Resurgence: The Conversation and The
Towering Inferno
Conclusion Hollywood’s San Francisco
APPENDIX. Films Set and/or Shot in San Francisco between 1945 and 1975
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE KERNEL OF THE IDEA FOR THIS BOOK emerged almost a decade ago
when I was working on a master’s degree at Emory University. I suggested it in
a paper proposal for James Steffen’s historiography class. He thought it sounded
more like a book proposal, and clearly he was right. This book had a long way to
grow though, and reflects generous, thoughtful attention from so many people
before and throughout its development.
I would like to thank Jeanine Basinger, my undergraduate mentor at Wesleyan
University, as well as Lisa Dombrowski and Scott Higgins. At Emory, Matthew
Bernstein was a role model as a professor and has been wonderfully supportive
well beyond my two years in Atlanta. I would also like to thank David Pratt,
James Steffen, Michelle Schreiber, and Eddy Von Mueller. I am grateful to the
late Dana White for introducing me to the field of urban studies.
Tom Schatz has probably read more versions of this book than I have. He has
been instrumental as a professor, then a mentor, then a dissertation supervisor,
and finally as an editor at the University of Texas Press. Janet Staiger was an
exceptional teacher, mentor, reader, and committee member during my time in
Austin. Thank you also to committee members Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Mark
Shiel, Allan Shearer, and Joe Straubhaar, as well as Lalitha Gopalan for her
unofficial input.
I would also like to thank the archivists and archival staff that supported this
project. These include Sandra Joy Aguilar, Jonathan Auxier, and Jeremy Tipton
at the Warner Bros. Archives, USC; Jenny Romero at the Margaret Herrick
Library; Julie Graham at UCLA Special Collections; and the staff at the San
Francisco History Center. Thanks are also due to the friends who supported me
during research trips. Noah Mark and Jon Moshman graciously provided a place
to stay, a spare car, and welcome company during a frenzied archival trip to Los
Angeles. Eric Gladstone offered housing and occasional research assistance in
San Francisco.
I have enjoyed the opportunity to present sections of this project at various
conferences, most often at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies
Conference, where I’ve learned a great deal from my fellow participants. In
particular, Joshua Glick, Erica Stein, Mark Shiel, Merrill Schleier, Julie
Turnock, Brendan Kredell, Pam Wojcik, Nathan Holmes, Stan Corkin, Sabine
Haenni, Jennifer Peterson, Lawrence Webb, and Noelle Griffis have been
fixtures as panel or audience members, providing invaluable feedback and
context for my work. The Urban Studies/Geography/Architecture Scholarly
Interest Group deserves recognition for their ongoing support for my research.
Special thanks to members of my PhD cohort, in particular, Paul Monticone
and Stuart Davis. Dave Fresko and Ross Melnick have provided much needed
advice and support as well. Thank you to my colleagues at Arizona, Mary Beth
Haralovich, Barbara Selznick, Brad Schauer, Shane Riches, and Anna Cooper,
for helping me balance the completion of this book with teaching and other
responsibilities. And thank you to Jim Burr at the University of Texas Press for
guiding this project through publication.
Thank you to my parents, Charlie and Sheryl, and my sister, Sarah, for their
support and enthusiasm throughout the long process of writing a book while
beginning an academic career. My greatest thanks and love to Ariel, who’s been
there for me across several state lines during the course of this project. And
thank you to my daughter, Violet, whose unbridled energy is a daily inspiration.
INTRODUCTION
GOLDEN GATEWAY
The Golden Gate Bridge is the iconic symbol of San Francisco, captured
innumerable times on film and television. It is also a filmmaking location with
specific demands. In 1947, Dark Passage tried to shoot at the Presidio with the
bridge in the background, but couldn’t because the park was closed on Sundays,
one of many incidents that reflected Hollywood filmmakers’ limited experience
with extensive location shooting in the immediate postwar era.1 A decade later,
Alfred Hitchcock captured the bridge in its Technicolor postcard beauty for
Vertigo (1958) in a style similar to the touristic footage featured in popular
Cinerama travelogues. Bullitt (1968) hoped to take its famous car chase across
the bridge, but the traffic problem proved insurmountable; new San Francisco
mayor Joseph Alioto, an avid booster of location filmmaking in the city,
negotiated an alternative location with the Bridge Authority.2 In Dirty Harry
(1971), the bridge looms over a group of medical workers in dim, predawn light
as they pull a nude fourteen-year-old girl’s body out of a drainage ditch. The
scene would have been impossible to shoot a few years earlier, not only for its
macabre imagery but also because earlier film stocks would have required far
more light.
These production details and screen depictions point to many of the factors
that shaped the major studios’ development of location shooting practices in the
three decades following World War II. Changing economics, technologies,
production values, and logistics not only allowed crews to shoot more efficiently
and effectively on location, but also guided their choice of locations and style of
location filmmaking. The Golden Gate Bridge is as picturesque today as it was
during the filming of Dirty Harry or Vertigo. But Hollywood’s approach to
capturing San Francisco as a setting underwent fundamental changes during the
rocky restructuring of the American film industry between the studio crises of
the late 1940s and the rise of the blockbuster in the mid-1970s.
How did the dreamy San Francisco of Vertigo become the nightmarish
wasteland of Dirty Harry? The simplest explanation might be that it suffered a
massive downturn akin to postwar Detroit’s, but San Francisco was one of the
most prosperous American cities during the turbulent 1960s and early 1970s.3
Perhaps the different styles of directors Alfred Hitchcock and Don Siegel
account for the disparate images of the city? Yet Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972)
provides nearly as bleak a picture of London as Siegel’s depiction of San
Francisco. It is a unique American city architecturally, topographically, and
culturally. However, with rare exceptions, San Francisco appeared on-screen
with the same style and narrative function as other popular urban locations of the
period.
A primary but underexamined causal factor in Hollywood’s shifting
postclassical style is location shooting.4 A minority practice in the immediate
postwar era, shooting on location became Hollywood’s dominant mode of
filmmaking by the 1970s. Dense, active cities like New York and San Francisco
offered exceptional production values but also posed extensive logistical
challenges for filmmakers and producers. While Westerns shooting on location
in the 1950s and 1960s might have faced harsh environments, those rural
landscapes lacked the cramped interiors and large crowds that plagued urban
location shoots. Yet the actual city offered a spectacle of people and structures
impossible to replicate on the backlot, an attraction that filmmakers and
producers regularly sought to capture. Improved location technologies and a
boom in films set in cities like San Francisco pushed filmmakers to seek out less
photographed locations outside of downtown, beyond familiar sites like the
Golden Gate Bridge and, after 1968, Haight-Ashbury. Urban location shooting
not only provided some of the most influential films of New American cinema
but remained at the forefront of new production practices throughout the postwar
era. While never becoming a film or television production center on a par with
Los Angeles or New York, San Francisco remained the third most popular city
setting for decades. At its peak in the early 1970s, the volume of major
productions shooting in San Francisco threatened to overshadow that of Los
Angeles.5
But something strange happened on the way to the city. As filming on location
in American cities became routine, filmmakers began to seek out their roughest
corners. San Francisco remained a prominent site for Hollywood’s growing
exploitation of urban location shooting. Yet the rising prevalence of filming in
San Francisco during the 1960s and 1970s often degraded the city’s most
attractive vistas while exploring its ugly recesses. A grimy urban aesthetic
emerged and deepened over time in films like Bullitt, Dirty Harry, and The
Conversation (1974). On film, the local image of San Francisco soon matched
the emergent national image of the American city as a blighted battleground.
Although the problem of urban decline was a prominent issue in the 1940s,
cities persisted as cultural centers, providing office jobs and entertainment
districts, including the top movie theaters, for a burgeoning suburban population.
As the suburbs continued to grow, downtowns became less central to the daily
lives of many Americans. The protests and race riots of the mid-1960s indelibly
marked cities as crisis centers, inverting the cultural paradigm exemplified by
the Hollywood Western. Now civilization existed on the suburban periphery
surrounding a core, impoverished wilderness (with African Americans cast in
the role of Native Americans). As urban location shooting approached its zenith,
the filmic image of San Francisco, along with those of most American cities,
grew increasingly dire.
This book traces the intersecting postwar phenomena of location shooting and
urban decline, examining films shot partially or entirely in San Francisco
between 1945 and 1975. A set of industry crises in the immediate postwar years
not only fundamentally changed the American studio system but also
precipitated a boom in location shooting in the form of the semi-documentary.
While the shift to location shooting was not a clean, linear progression, by the
early 1970s it had overtaken soundstage production as the primary method of
feature filmmaking. By 1975, high-concept blockbusters like The Towering
Inferno, whose set pieces and special effects relied on production and post-
production facilities largely based in Los Angeles, heralded a significant retreat
from location shooting. I end my study there, as the decades-long growth of
location filmmaking finally ebbed.
Changing production practices and changing perceptions of the American city
combined to indelibly alter Hollywood’s and America’s images of urban space.
Several historical modes of urban cinematic representation suggest interrelated
paradigm shifts. The practice of urban location shooting had to develop
economically, technologically, and aesthetically to offset the greater control and
efficiency offered by the physical studio. Similarly, location shooting had to
meet or redefine professional standards of realism established by soundstage
production wherein cinematographers favored realistically lit sets over poorly lit
real locations. Finally, changes in how Hollywood shot the city and how
America saw the city came together on-screen. Just as new tools and approaches
for location shooting favored new locations, so did dramatic shifts in popular
perceptions of central cities, imagined as tourist paradises in the 1950s, but as
lawless ruins by the 1970s. The choice of a given city, the choice of locations
within that city, and the organization of urban space through editing were
dictated by preconceived urban narratives, while bounded by the physical and