San Francisco Films that Get It: Part II

Having a background in both film and hospitality, I have a particular interest in movies depicting San Francisco.  Many times (too many times) Hollywood will attempt to capture the essence of a place, without any real understanding of it.   How many times have you seen a move of a place you are familiar with and see a car on the screen turn down one street, only to appear in a completely different part of town when it rounds the corner from the other side.

Or how many times have you seen a movie of a place you know, only to see the filmmakers get it wildly wrong.  If you remember the film, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen from 2003, there is a car chase scene through the streets of Venice, Italy.

That's right, I said through the streets of Venice, Italy.

Sometimes films attempt to extrapolate the culture and vibe of a place by overemphasizing certain local colloquialisms and quirks.  I have known many people in Minnesota for decades, and they tell me that when they travel, barely anyone even knew where the state was.  Then the movie Fargo came out in 1996, and when people learned they were from Minnesota, what usually followed was a chorus of, "Oooo, Yahs." and "You Betchas."

Unlike Spike Lee's or Wood Allen's films in New York, I think it's safe to say that for the most part films made in San Francisco, at best utilize the city as a backdrop.  Unless it is an historical drama like Milk or Zodiac (which had to be made here because they take place here) most movies made in the city like Ant-Man or The Wedding Planner never really go beyond the postcard veneer.

Yet San Francisco is a dynamic city despite the sum of its Hollywood parts.  Its representation on film has been mostly compartmentalized, however there are a number of movies (some of which you have never heard of) that do capture the idea of what it is like to live within its 49 square miles.  You won't find it in Nash Bridges or Monsters vs. Aliens, but you may discover it in some of these films.

There have been many films which take place in Chinatown but give little of what it's like to live within the neighborhood's 24 square blocks, in the most densely populated part of San Francisco.  In John Carpenter's 1986 homage to Hong Kong action movies, Big Trouble in Little China, very little about the area is even mentioned, yet the entire film is set there.  In the opening sequence, Kurt Russell drives his semi-truck into the neighborhood yet seemingly has little problem parking it in Chinatown.  By that scene, I knew this was fiction.

Chinatown, the Setting for Wayne Wang's First Film, Chan is Missing

For a better understanding of life in San Francisco's Chinese community on film, I recommend two small movies which "get it," and both by the same filmmaker.  San Francisco filmmaker Wayne Wang's first film is the low budget, Chan is Missing from 1982.  The story revolves around a Chinatown cab driver looking for the man he gave money to for a taxi medallion but then disappears.  It is a straightforward story but unveils the intricacies of this tight knit community.  Chan Is Missing was so significant in its depiction of San Francisco's Chinese community, that it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1995. 

The other film about the Chinese community in San Francisco that "gets it," is Wayne Wang's sophomore project Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart, from 1985.  In this film he explores the Chinese community's succeeding generations who have moved out of Chinatown, to the suburban hinter regions of San Francisco they were once red lined from.

With the exception of the 1984 production of Crackers, from French director Louis Malle, I can't think of any film which was shot entirely in the city's Mission District.  This predominately Latino quarter of San Francisco was the city's first neighborhood, long before it was even Mexico, let alone the United States.  2016's La Mission, stars Benjamin Bratt of TV's Law and Order fame, playing an ex-con and recovering alcoholic who learns his son is gay.  The film shares the unique culture of the Mission District, and the challenges of tradition intersecting with personal freedom.  I can think of no other film which gives such an insight in to the neighborhood's cultural tapestry.

Another movie you probably never heard of, but zeroed in on a time that defined San Francisco in the 21st century: the Dot Com Boom and gentrification.  Sucka Free City from 2004 captures the financial and racial differences common in most big cities.  What makes this uniquely San Francisco is that a major theme of the movie is when good people are displaced through no fault of their own. They are forced to move from the neighborhood they have known for years, only to find themselves grasping for any affordable housing. 

Ironically directed by iconic New York filmmaker Spike Lee,  Sucka Free City is one of those rare films about San Francisco which really puts its finger on the pulse of a chaotic time that affected millions across the country, but the nadir of which originated here.

May I now recommend two films that "get it," which you may have seen.  Both take place around the same era. Both were released around the same time, and both explore and deconstruct very specific (and real) events in San Francisco history.

David Fincher's Zodiac, from 2007, chronicles the events surrounding the infamous Zodiac killer, a serial murderer who terrorized San Francisco and the greater bay area in the early 1970s.  Following an unlikely partnering of a political cartoonist and a crime reporter, the film shows how both worked different ends of the mystery.  Add two detectives who are also on the case and what manifests is an examination on the media, celebrity, and the sausage-making details of the work it takes for two cops to work a case which to this day has never been solved.

Director Gus Van Sant's 2008 masterpiece Milk explores the rise and assassination of Harvey Milk, the first out-of-the-closet gay elected official, and whose name is synonymous with Martin Luther King and Caesar Chavez as the face of an oppressed people.  What makes this a uniquely San Francisco film is that it examines, not only the life and political ascension of Harvey Milk, but also how a city evolves from a one that hosted the Republican Convention in 1964 to the Summer of Love just three years later.  Milk gives its viewers a glimpse into a chaotic time of great change in a microcosm.

Sidebar Shout-Out:

Milk's Oscar-winning screenwriter, Dustin Lance Black, wrote the super underrated 2017 ABC miniseries, When We Rise. It is almost anomalous for a major TV network to commit four nights to one miniseries, but this amazing program chronicles the lives of several real people who were here in the earliest days of the gay movement in San Francisco. The story follows these protagonists from AIDS, through Act Up, The Quilt Project, all the way to the Supreme Court's Obergefell v. Hodges ruling.