Nice Graham Fuller article. But he forget Albert Brooks as the West Coast Woody. Or John Hughes and David Mamet in Chicago (at least in their early work). And he left out San Francisco entirely.

But, seriously, I'm shocked that there isn't a bona-fide San Francisco chronicler outside of Rob Nilsson or dunderheads like Chris Columbus. San Francisco, so gloriously celebrated in "What's Up, Doc," "Bullitt," "Dirty Harry" -- even von Stroheim's "Greed," seems to have nabbed a bad rap. And I suspect it has something to do with the dot com stigma or the nutty SF-LA rivalry. Perhaps too many people fled the riches for the relative security of SoCal. The last Hollywood film that attempted to use this glorious place as a locale was "40 Days and 40 Nights," a terribly unfunny Josh Hartnett comedy that presented the City as some incredibly unreal Bizarro universe in which you could get from Media Gulch to Chinatown on foot and in which any unskilled twentysomething could not only own a spacious apartment, but find a parking spot in North Beach. An unintentionally hilarious tableau that ties with "I Married a Communist" as one of the silliest movies ever set in San Francisco.

But why is this when there's so much confined with so few square miles? Hell, even the Star Trek universe wants Starfleet Headquarters to be located here. Even so, we see the same cliched La-La locales, the same lack of strugglers and Bohemians, the same dearth of Edwardians and Victorians. In a word, current cinema doesn't know what the hell it's missing.

lots of docs shot here. lots and lots.

as far as features, isn't san francisco kind of a movie in and of itself? maybe spike lee will break through that a little with his bayview/hunters point teevee series.

anyway between the new lucas shop and the studios out on treasure island this could become a good place again. the problem might be the vegetation... not enough like the desert, not enough like the rest of america.

Yeah, I was just thinking of that new SF-shot Spike Lee TV series, too! That one was written by a young San Franciscan and utilizes real locations in neighborhoods rarely shown onscreen. There are also quite a few low-budget indie films coming out of here, some of them even pretty good, like: Groove, Finn Taylor's Cherish and Dream with the Fishes, Mission (http://www.greencine.com/webCatalog?id=31040), etc.

SF's always had a better success rate in documentary production, though, and it is in this area that it shines more clearly than in features.

I, too, get tired of mainstream Hollywood productions having their story "set" here, then coming up for a few days of location shooting, mostly unrealistic, and then that's it. My favorite moments are always those geographic impossibilities, like in EdTV, where McConaughey runs from North Beach, turns a corner, and is in the Castro(!). Then he goes into the Castro movie theater and into the bathrooms, which are nice and new(!) But then Taylor's Dream/Fishes had moments like that too, including people walking on the Bay Bridge.

But anyway, yeah, for such a photogenic city, it's surprising there hasn't been an "auteur" come forth that uses it the way Woody uses NYC. (Although he did choose SF as his locale for Play It Again Sam -- when a garbage strike forced them out of NY for the shooting. We're #2! We're #2!)

C

i did not know that. hey waddaya know, we're not the trashiest city in the USA!

my fave "dreamland san francisco" flick so far is woman on top. not only does it nip-tuck the geography, it offers a glimpse of what could have been a delightful spanish colony town.