Potrero Hill has starred in dozens of feature films, television shows, and commercials over the last fifty plus years, capturing our photogenic corner of the City, as well as inadvertently documenting its many changes.
The intersection of 18th and Missouri streets often gets a casting call. In the remake of Sweet November (2001), Sara Deever (Charlize Theron) lives at 298 Missouri Street, though the scenes inside her apartment were actually recorded in a set constructed at a decommissioned Treasure Island aircraft hangar. The garden where Sara appears was filmed behind Bloom’s Saloon. Sara and Nelson Moss (Keanu Reeves) dine at Farley’s coffee shop. The now long-gone Daily Scoop ice cream parlor was transformed into a produce stand and convenience store.
Bernice “Bernie” Rhodenbarr (Whoopi Goldberg) lived at the same picturesque corner in Burglar (1987). Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) resides there in Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018). The flat’s interior was meticulously recreated on a soundstage in Atlanta, Georgia. Rudd’s foot does go through the colorfully painted fence on 18th Street, and he vomits playing cards from the steps at 298 Missouri.
A few blocks away, the Victorian at 1243-19th, at Texas Street, stars in Pacific Heights (1990) as “275 Pacific Street,” the dream home of Patty Palmer (Melanie Griffith) and Drake Goodman (Matthew Modine), until Carter Hayes (Michael Keaton) becomes their nightmare.
It’s widely known that 768 De Haro was the residence of veteran police officer Mike Stone (Karl Malden) in the popular television series The Streets of San Francisco (1972-1977) which used Hill locations extensively throughout its duration. A few blocks — and decades — away, the home of Lena St. Clair (Lauren Tom) unhappily married to architect Harold (Michael Paul Chan) is at 610 Rhode Island, near 18th Street, in The Joy Luck Club (1993), Wayne Wang’s film adaptation of Amy Tan’s best-selling novel.
When the action in Godzilla (2014) shifts from Asia to San Francisco, Lieutenant Ford Brody (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) lives with his wife, Elle (Elizabeth Olsen), and their son on the 700 block of San Bruno Avenue. The apartment’s interior is distinctly un-San Franciscan. That exterior shot is apparently the only actual City location presented in the film. Discrepancies like inauthentic BART signs, an “MTA” bus, and “Oakland Bay Area Park” corroborate the rumor that the San Francisco scenes were shot in Vancouver.
In Steven Soderbergh’sprescientscience fiction film Contagion (2011)conspiracy theorist Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law) wearing a hazmat suit wanders around the Hill and North Beach surveying steaming piles of trash, discarded clothing and recycle bins, scattered there by production designer Howard Cummings.
After mobster Johnny Ross (Pat Renella) and police officer Carl Stanton (Carl Reindel) are shot in Bullitt (1968), they’re taken to San Francisco General Hospital, where actual doctors and nurses were used for verisimilitude. Many other films include scenes shot there, including Fearless (1993), Time After Time (1979) and Nine Months (1995).
In Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1971), the Black doctor treating maverick police inspector Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) — who grew up on the Hill — reassures him, “It’s okay. We Potrero Hill boys, we got to stick together.” The second victim of Harry’s nemesis Scorpio is discovered on a hillside lot at Texas and Sierra streets, where the Sierra Heights condominium complex is now. A motorcycle cop assassinates four municipal officials at the 18th Street offramp from Highway 280 in Magnum Force (1973), the second in the Dirty Harry series. And an extended remote-controlled car chase in The Dead Pool (1988), the fifth and final film in the sequence, features Harry and his partner Inspector Al Quan (Evan C. Kim) dangerously careening up and down our steep hills.
Anchor Brewing Company, 1705 Mariposa Street, stood in for a police station inVenom: Let There Be Carnage(2021). It wasn’t the first time the late, lamented brewery was taken over by a production crew; in 1977 Arnold Schwarzenegger guest-starred there in an episode of The Streets of San Francisco.
Phil Kaufman’s 1978 remake of Don Siegel’s original 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers moves the action to San Francisco. One scene toward the end finds Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland) and Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams) realizing that an industrial warehouse is being used as a pod incubator. These scenes were filmed in Building 6 at the Pier 70 Historic Shipyard at the eastern end of 20th Street. Another industrial site: in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) surveillance expert Harry Caul’s (Gene Hackman’s) workshop was Suite 36 in the American Roofing Co. Building, 1616 – 16th Street.
A 2014 French commercial for Citroën C4 filmed on the Hill pays homage to Bullitt (1968) whose classic car chase was shot here, as well as in Russian Hill, North Beach, Bernal Heights, Daly City and McLaren Park. Other films with scenes shot on the Hill include Freebie and the Bean (1974), Foul Play (1978), Chu Chu and the Philly Flash (1981) When a Man Loves a Woman (1994), andEdtv (1999).
Peter Linenthal and Berry Minott’s 23-minute compilation “Potrero Hill & Dogpatch in the Movies, 1898 – 2000” including four short films by Thomas Edison (1898) was first shown at the Potrero Hill Archives Project’s Potrero Hill History Night in 2003, digitized by Mr. Wa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXBGwYbjlBg. And Mr. Wa has edited 52 minutes of Potrero Hill and Dogpatch scenes from 1972-1974 The Streets of San Francisco: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYG1ThMHJ-w.
