Thirty years of good exposure became an uphill climb

And more – the Bay Bridge to Oakland, Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill, Fisherman’s Wharf, the Ferry Building and the Embarcadero Freeway, lovely Pacific Heights and its panoramic views, wooden Victorian houses and, by the late 1960s, counter-culture Haight-Asbury. Often, Alcatraz Island and its prison in the background. Emblematic one and all. As author Joshua Gleich notes, this is a unique American city architecturally, topographically and culturally.

“As a relatively small city with  identifiable landmarks, it offers a more cohesive set of images than  the myriad neighborhoods and overwhelming filmographies of cities like New York and Los Angeles,” writes Gleich. Quantitative data show that San Francisco had a significantly greater screen presence than several more populous American cities.

There once was a list of 518 films noirs from 1940 to 1959 that delineated the urban setting of each film, and Los Angeles and New York unsurprisingly accounted for more than 110 films each, while San Francisco, although never becoming a film or television production centre on a par with those two cities, remained the third-most-popular city setting for decades.

The data gave San Francisco as the location for 36 films, three times as many  as Chicago, a city with a far larger population and what Gleich wryly calls “a rather famous history of crime”. The Californian city’s screen image encompasses a larger and more influential body of films than not only those set in Chicago but also in Boston or Philadelphia.

The author offers a year-by-year list of 117 films set and/or shot in the city between 1945 and 1975. Just a few examples seen by The Budapest Times – “The Lady From Shanghai” and “Out of the Past” (both 1945), “Nora Prentiss”(1948), “D.O.A.” (1950), “The Sniper” (1952), “The Caine Mutiny” (1954), “The Midnight Storm” (1957), “Portrait in Black” (1960), “The Birds” (1963), “Head” (1968), “Play It Again, Sam” (1972) and “The Conversation” (1974).

So, why exactly this metropolis on the West Coast of America?  Gleich recounts how the question shaped not only the path and argument of his book, but also Hollywood filmmakers’ approach to the city as a location. The simplest answer, he says, is that San Francisco is exceptional in a variety of ways that make it particularly attractive to film.

“As a site with unique scenic qualities and economic advantages, it provides a wealth of case studies for new developments in urban location shooting.” Also, its inimitable energy and a comfortable 600-kilometre coastal drive for the film-makers from the major studios in LA.

Why is the author tackling those three decades from 1945 to 1975? While acknowledging that US filmmakers’ interest in the city had begun far earlier – from 1906 even, when Thomas Edison filmed post-earthquake – after World War Two, factors such as changing economics, technologies, production values and logistics allowed crews to shoot more efficiently and effectively on location, plus guided their choice of  locations and style of location filmmaking.

For instance, in “Dirty Harry” (1971) with Clint Eastwood, the Golden Gate Bridge looms over medics in dim, pre-dawn light as they pull a nude 14-year-old girl’s body from a drainage ditch. Such a scene would have been impossible to shoot a few years earlier, Gleich says, not only for its macabre imagery but also because film stocks would have needed far more light.

“Days of Wine and Roses”, a downbeat 1962 feature starring Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick as a doomed couple descending into alcoholism, showed the Maiden Lane District, a popular tourist destination and shopping district that also has many bars. The night shooting gave a dark and ominous but still beautiful feeling, the neon often defining San Francisco’s nightlife.

In “Experiment in Terror”, also from 1962 and again featuring Remick, this time with Glenn Ford, the film opens with Remick driving across the bright Bay Bridge on an otherwise pitch-black night. Then, at the climax, the Candlestick Park outdoor stadium provides the recognisable location for a shadowy chase and a police helicopter confrontation.

Gleich’s book contains photographs, and two show how faster Double-X film allowed the film-makers to capture Remick’s bright-and-black drive and other darker scenes such as a night exterior shot, while also opening up large interior scenes that might previously have been too difficult to light, such as at the Crocker National Bank.

The boom years for San Francisco were 1968 to 1975. But American disillusionment with the country’s city centres was growing, the “urban decline” of the book’s subtitle. Cities faced race riots and Martin Luther King Jr.’s killing, crime, Vietnam War protests and campus violence. Richard Nixon spoke of cities “enveloped in smoke and flame… sirens in the night”.

Gleich: “Film-makers responded by developing a stark, realist aesthetic that suited America’s growing urban pessimism and superseded a fidelity to local realities.” But there was a public outcry as San Franciscans began to tangle with film-makers, feeling betrayed by Hollywood companies that took advantage of local cooperation while causing traffic inconvenience and other disruptions, only to negatively depict the city on-screen.

A wave of police films made there, inspired by such as “Bullitt”, “Dirty Harry” and the televison series “The Streets of San Francisco”, gave the city “an undeserved Chicago-like reputation”. And there was an actual wave of salacious crimes in the early 1970s, with the reappearance of the Zodiac Killer, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Zebra murders by a radical offshoot of the Nation of Islam that targetted white residents.

“The Towering Inferno” (1974) was shot in San Francisco but marked a trend to high-budget, big-profit blockbusters, and this new scale of spectacle could only be accomplished on the backlots of Los Angeles. “San Francisco courted a film that not ony staged the city’s destruction, but heralded its decline in location production,” Gleich writes.

On-location filmmaking rarely offered full-time work, usually only short-term and modestly paid jobs as extras, required to respond at a moment’s notice. The city remained by and large a location only, reliant on projects originating from Hollywood studios and, after principal photography, the editing and processing would be carried out back in Los Angeles.

But Hollywood was going into recession, releasing fewer features, and there was growing competition from other cities, states and countries aggressively seeking location dollars. Thus, the author’s study ends in 1975, “when the rise of the blockbuster era marked a paradigm shift for the Hollywood industry akin to the shift in 1945.”

Along the way, the author looks at evolving filmic techniques and developments in equipment, union involvement, the realist black-and-white aesthetic versus colour film, a distinction between “vulgar” colour and “delicate” colour, the growing acceptance of handheld camerawork, television productions and any other issues that crop up,

All in all, an authoritative study for we cineastes who enjoy reading about the world of cinema almost as much as watching the actual films and their stars, wherever they are made.