Posted on 01/16/2005 12:15:50 AM PST by nickcarraway
City hall is once again courting the film industry and recently named a new film commission. Will the initial excitement yield rewards?
A decade ago, when people talked about "Hollywood North" they didn't mean Vancouver. San Francisco's streets teemed with caravans of RVs and movie equipment trucks, Treasure Island swarmed with blockbuster buzz, and production companies were fully booked. Then came an epidemic of "runaway production," when studios, to borrow a phrase from Silicon Valley, outsourced abroad. "Securing locations has changed in the past five years," says Sean House of the Bay Area Film Alliance. "Now it's a bidding war: who's going to offer the best incentives?"
Don't look at us. The city, with its Orwellian permit procedures, overpriced police details, and astronomical rents (not to mention residents' antipathy toward intrusions on city life), lost that war. Hollywood hasn't worked here for five years. It's easy to say good riddance, until you realize more than 200 of the Bay Area's moviemaking-related businesses—almost half—have closed since 1999.
So in September, Mayor Newsom forced a regime change on the out-to-lunch film commission headed by Martha Cohen and promised $350,000 to streamline logistics and incite local production. That may seem a drop in the budget bucket to an industry that, by city estimates, can pump up to a million dollars a day on average into the local economy, but it's also about twice what the film office had to work with last year. Newsom also announced plans to install film liaisons throughout city departments and named eight new commissioners, including Lucas Digital president Jim Morris, arts impresario and Skyy Vodka founder Maurice Kanbar, and actress Joan Chen—not your average bureaucrats. And the new executive director is none other than Stefanie Coyote, who has ample production experience and is married to actor Peter Coyote.
"Everyone's encouraged by this," says Fidelma McGinn, executive director of the Film Arts Foundation, a nonprofit resource hub for independent films. "By backing the talk with an actual budget, the mayor's saying he's serious about making this successful."
But Coyote has her work cut out for her. She comes to an office that's in disarray, that formerly met several times a year, if that, and has a full-time staff of three. And as any salesperson will tell you, it's harder to woo back a dissatisfied customer than to bring in a new one. Factor in a much-depleted moviemaking infrastructure—grips, casting agents, electric and camera rental companies have migrated away—and suddenly the city doesn't look so ideal after all. Coyote knows this. "San Francisco developed a reputation as a hard place to work," she says. "My objective is to take away the penalties producers face for coming here, to travel to Hollywood, market the city, and get everybody reignited."
There's nothing like the movies to celebrate pride of place—who can forget the hazy dreamscape of Vertigo or the noir underworld of The Maltese Falcon? In the global economy, you may not be able to legislate a creative renaissance, but you can support regional creative integrity. Whether the talked-about remakes of Herbie the Love Bug and The Streets of San Francisco come to pass, that the also talked-about adaptations of Memoirs of a Geisha and Rent get made here does matter. And not just for those Us Weekly moments of spotting Winona or Ashley in a tracksuit sipping coffee behind shades. It's time to get down to show business.
The little hobbit, Martha, truly a Willie Brown creation. After Willie won, she jumped ship from
Frank Jordan to Willie and got a plum patronage spot. Never did a bloody thing, but got paid handsomely.
At least her work didn't end up floating in the Bay, like that of a certain other Mayor Brown appointee.
Maybe it's just me, but I thought it was high taxes that sent all of those film companies to Vancouver.
Or, like those ballot boxes from the stadium election. Each time there was a new sighting of a ballot box bobbing in the bay, a few of us would meet and hoist one at O'Reilly's.
I have to add that the real film industry in SF flourished under Moscone, Feinstein and Agnos--- the Mitchell Bros.
Look what happened to them.
What do I mean by that? I mean that most movies shot in San Francisco utilize the familiar tourist spots and the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges and, of course, our hills seemingly built for car chases, which is fine. But a resident watching those films realize that the characters couldn't travel the way we do in real life S.F. For example: In the movies Bullitt, Freebie and the Bean, Foul Play, What's Up Doc? and others, the pivotal car chases are impossible; cars go up ONE hill at NASCAR speed and go DOWN another hill that could be either blocks or miles away!
On the other hand, Experiment in Terror (directed by Blake Edwards of Pink Panther fame) took painstaking efforts to be accurate, for no apparent reason; it wasn't as if moviegoers in Kokomo, IN or Beaumont, TX would have known the difference. From the opening scene where Lee Remick crosses the then-dark, two-way upper deck of the Bay Bridge to the garage of the Twin Peaks home she lived in to the still-existent interior of the bank she worked in to the intersection where Stephanie Powers was abducted to the climax at Candlestick Park, every step of the characters in that movie can be retraced. It's amazing.
If you know your streets of San Francisco, and don't want to buy the DVD sight unseen, watch for it on American Movie Classics cable channel, where it pops up occasionally. You WON'T be disappointed.
Somewhere, I still have a clipping of a two-page color photo from the Examiner's old Sunday magazine, California Living, that showed Jim and Artie Mitchell, their wives, and their children all enjoying Sunday brunch together, the message being that maybe they were the kings of pornography, but deep down, they were just normal folks like you and me.
Now, we know the truth.
They always try to make out such people as salt of earth.
A couple days ago while attending the Macworld Expo in downtown San Francisco I was walking thru a downtown BART subway station. I smelled a god-awful stink and had to hold my nose. Went 50 paces further in the hallway and rounded a corner where the stairs are that exit up to the street. A homeless guy was pulling his pants up, and there was a pile of crap on the floor and the wall behind him. Welcome to San Francisco.
I saw a good Movie tonight, and the location was completely tax free for 99% of the movie. Two people bobbing in the ocean surounded by sharks after being left behind on one of those tourist scuba diving trips.
It was called "open water". Filming in Canada is simular to that if shooting outdoorsy type stuff, nobody around, no taxes to pay.
Governments have to realize that if you tax everything to death, companies will go where it's cheaper, and they end up loosing the tax revenue they would get on money being spent on local labor and goods. Simple math that liberals just can't get through their heads.
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