The unmatched beauty of San Francisco combined with its riches of instantly recognizable structures and locales has attracted filmmakers from around the world for over 100 years. San Francisco has provided and continues to provide the backdrop for some of the most famous movie scenes ever filmed.  It is almost impossible to traverse the sights of San Francisco without conjuring an image from a special Hollywood movie.

San Francisco Movie History

According to some film historians, San Francisco, rather than Hollywood, should have become the capitol of the motion picture world.  San Francisco has always had a love affair with the movies. In fact, some of the most famous names in cinema history, including Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Buster Keaton, Clark Gable, Fatty Arbuckle, and Douglas Fairbanks made many films in San Francisco.

Motion pictures were actually invented in the San Francisco Bay Area. Leland Stanford and Eadweard Muybridge developed a system for showing photographic frames that provided the illusion of movement — the very basis for all filmmaking. This first movie experiment was done using a running horse as a subject at Stanford's racetrack on his estate in Palo Alto in June 1878. Their first human subject was a gymnast at the San Francisco Olympic Club named William Lawton. He thus became the world's first movie star!

The film industry moved to Los Angeles after the Earthquake of 1906 and World War I put many Bay Area movie companies out of business. Los Angeles was promoting its nice weather and offering other incentives for filmmakers to settle there.

Many advances in movie-making techniques were made in the Bay Area. Most notably, the first talking moving, Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer, released in 1927, was filmed near Union Square in San Francisco.  Today, the San Francisco Bay Area is still where it all began and where many innovations continue to happen.  George Lucas' visual effects company, Industrial Light and Magic (formed during the creation of Star Wars around 1976 to 1977), successfully combined the digital world of computers with the cinematic world of movies. The first computer-generated visual effects for movies were created at their facilities in San Rafael   Pixar Animation Studios, located in Emeryville – just across the Bay from San Francisco, took this a step further. They created Toy Story, the very first movie that was created entirely within a computer. They have followed this with several other films.

And, San Francisco continues to attract maverick filmmakers and actors like Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Sean Penn, Chris Columbus, Danny Glover, Robin Williams, Chris Isaak, Amy Tan, and Sharon Stone, all of whom are based here.

Famous San Francisco Movie Locations

San Francisco’s distinguishable landmarks and amazing views make it a natural for all sorts of scenes.  Chase scenes, disaster scenes, love scenes, film noir scenes – you name it and a movie filmed in San Francisco has delivered it.  Here is just a small sampling of the many famous movie scenes set in San Francisco:

• Jimmy Stewart rescues Kim Novak from San Francisco Bay in Vertigo. 
• Clint Eastwood utters his famous line from Sudden Impact, “make my day” in a San Francisco restaurant. 
• Steve McQueen’s Bullitt careens through San Francisco’s city streets. 
• In the Maltese Falcon, Miles Archer meets his death in San Francisco alley. 
• An octopus attempts to take down the Golden Gate Bridge in It Came From Beneath the Sea.
• Sean Connery breaks back into Alcatraz and voices his infamous line: “Welcome to the Rock.”
• James Bond and Christopher Walken tangle on the top of the Golden Gate Bridge in a “A View to a Kill.”
• Frank Sinatra builds his dream nightclub, Chez Joey, in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights in the movie Pal Joey. 
• Lauren Bacall secrets Humphrey Bogart away in her clandestine San Francisco apartment in Dark Passage.
• Robin Williams masquerades as a old-fashioned nanny all over San Francisco in Mrs. Doubtfire
• Christian Slater interrogates Tom Cruise in Interview with a Vampire

Yes, San Francisco can indeed be thought of as a co-star in many of the most famous movies of all time.  Seeing these locations first hand is truly an exciting experience, as it gives the visitor an opportunity to come in contact with the movie up close and personal. What was the director thinking when the scene was shot?  How has the area changed since the last time it was pictured on the big screen?   Why did they decide to shoot that scene in this location in the first place? 

Famous San Francisco Movie Trivia

Of course, with the plethora of movies filmed in San Francisco there is bound to be copious amounts of movie trivia to go around.  Many people know that Dustin Hoffman drove the wrong way on the Bay Bridge to get from San Francisco to Berkeley in the Graduate, but not many others know that:

• Harrison Ford was asked to cut his hair for the film American Graffiti. He refused, stating that his role was too short, and offered to wear a hat instead.
• The dresses that Sharon Stone wears throughout the film Basic Instinct were designed to match, in the same order, the dresses that Kim Novak wears in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.
• The filming of the chase scene in Bullitt took three weeks, resulting in 9 minutes and 42 seconds of footage. They were denied permission to film on the Golden Gate Bridge.
• According to one biography, Robin Williams decided to test out the believability of his Mrs. Doubtfire character during filming by going - as Mrs. Doubtfire - into an adult bookstore and making a purchase. He was able to do so without being recognized.
• During the filming of The Rock, Sean Connery insisted the producers build a cabin for him on Alcatraz as he didn't want to travel from the mainland to the island every day; he got what he asked for.

That’s a Wrap

I had my initial personal brush with San Francisco movie fame in an unexpected manner, and it inspired me to start a company to take people where famous films have been located all over San Francisco.  While jogging in Golden Gate Park on a foggy morning in 1998, I altered my usual route just a bit to run by the baseball fields located in the park.  To my surprise, there were numerous large film trucks all over and many people milling about.  I inquired of a police officer what was happening, and he told me they were filming a scene from Bicentennial Man, a Robin Williams film.  Not one to let an opportunity like this to get away, I queried a few other people and thus landed my role as an extra in the ballpark. Who knows?  Perhaps this could happen to you.  So, the next time you visit San Francisco keep your eyes and ears open to the sounds of the filmmaking industry.  It certainly is all around you.