THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF: SAN FRANCISCO & THE MOVIES—By Frako Loden

My first-ever peek into the National Historic Landmark Old Mint Building at Fifth and Mission Streets was to preview a new exhibit there running only for nine days: "The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of: San Francisco and the Movies." From June 16 to 24, the ground-floor rooms of this institution will display posters, photographs and artifacts of the love affair between cinema and one of its most photogenic cities, hosted by the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society (SFMHS).

Curator Miguel Pendás first took us to the chamber housing San Francisco's silent-film history, and there Niles Essanay Silent Film historian David Kiehn pointed out the corner featuring photographer / murderer Eadweard Muybridge, who hosted the first moving-picture exhibition here in 1880. You'll be able to watch the highly immersive "A Trip Down Market Street" by the Miles Brothers, who shot it just days before the 1906 earthquake. Materials will commemorate the California Motion Picture Corporation in San Rafael and of course Essanay Studios, celebrating its centenary this year, where Westerns were born and where Charlie Chaplin developed his Tramp character and shot films in Golden Gate Park as well as the studio's headquarters in Niles.



Author / impresario Eddie Muller introduced the film noir room, where the first poster he acquired—of Lawrence Tierney in Born to Kill (1947)—hangs among several others collected by himself and film programmer Gary Meyer. He was thrilled to learn just recently that the former Hearst building at Third and Market where his grandfather was a pressman and which contained a speakeasy, now boasts a cocktail lounge. The gold vault of the Old Mint is now the Maltese Falcon room, containing a figure of Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart), a projected "dream" version of scenes from the film, and the mysterious black bird itself owned by John Konstin of John's Grill, where Dashiell Hammett drank, dined and wrote. True to its status in the 1941 John Huston film, the statuette is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy.

In the room housing materials from more recent studios like Lucasfilm and Pixar, we were told we could take only wide photos and no closeups. Here you'll see inspirational digital sketches for characters like Edna Mode (from The Incredibles), Wall-E, Princess Merida (from Brave), and many others.

In the main corridor hang paintings by Kim Novak, the eternal San Francisco heroine from her haunting turn as Madeleine in Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). Pendás says that Novak was offered a scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago at the same time she was scouted by Hollywood. After her movie career she moved to Oregon, where she now paints winsome Impressionist-style pastels. Pendás says she felt "vulnerable" about displaying her art for the first time, figuring nobody would be interested. Novak will be receiving the San Francisco Cinematic Icon Award at the SFMHS Standing Ovations benefit gala on June 14. Pendás said, "Frankly, I think she's going to be mobbed."

One beautiful spacious room is devoted to San Francisco's independent, experimental and documentary film scene. The Pacific Film Archive lent out materials including a landmark "Art in Cinema" program put on by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art starting in 1946. Another room features films shot in Chinatown, one of the most photogenic locations in the world, from the early days of the tong-war / opium-den / white-slavery mystique to the pivotal Wayne Wang film Chan is Missing (1982), when Chinese Americans started to explore the district from their point of view.

A wax figure of Clint Eastwood standing on a red carpet before a San Francisco International Film Festival backdrop—you can have your photo taken with him—dominates a room telling the history of the San Francisco Film Commission and the 55-year-old film festival through photographs by Pamela Gentile. Another large room explores movies in the themes of "Cars, Cops and Cocktails," dealing with chase scenes, shootouts and drinks unique to the city. Learn cocktail recipes, test your trivia knowledge (what cocktail did Michael Douglas order in Basic Instinct?), and ogle Dirty Harry's .44 Magnum (did he fire six shots or only five?). The main corridor features photos of local movie theatres by R.A. McBride and set photos from Dirty Harry (1971), Take the Money and Run (1969), and Petulia (1968) by Morton Beebe.

The Vertigo room, showcasing perhaps the most romantic (and geographically accurate) film shot in San Francisco, contains the continuity script and the Vistavision camera used to shoot the film. Most intriguing of all will be the "Contemplating Carlotta" corner, where a bench is set up for viewing a copy of the Carlotta portrait as Madeleine does at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in the film. As you contemplate, you'll hear ambient sounds of old Fort Point, where Madeleine was next compelled to drive her sea-green Jaguar and take a dip in San Francisco Bay.

June 16-24, 11:00 am – 4:00 pm
The Old Mint, Fifth and Mission Streets, San Francisco
Admission $5 SFMHS members, $10 general public
Standing Ovations benefit gala Thursday, June 14

SFSFF 2010: THE IRON HORSE (1924)—Joseph McBride Introduction

The 15th edition of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (SFSFF) pulled into the station with John Ford's romanticized western The Iron Horse (1924), starring George O'Brien and Madge Bellamy. Festival favorite Dennis James—who provided musical accompaniment on the Castro Theater's Mighty Wurlitzer—also provided the only surviving 35mm print of the American version, courtesy of 20th Century Fox. Joseph McBride, author of Searching For John Ford (2001) offered historical context to help the audience further appreciate SFSFF's opening night film.

McBride was recently in Bologna, Italy for the Il Cinema Ritrovato, which is a festival dedicated to the rediscovery of rare and little-known films with a particular focus on cinema origins and the silent movie period. The festival's subject focus this year was on John Ford. McBride recalled that—when he began researching Ford in the 1960s—there were only five or six silent Ford films that anyone could find, including The Iron Horse. Since then, nearly 25 silent films from Ford's early career have been rediscovered, either in partial or complete condition, such that this period of his creative output has become much more visible and available.

McBride recounted that a circus wagon took a company of 200 people from Los Angeles to the Nevada location where The Iron Horse was to be filmed. They departed on New Year's Eve, 1923, and the company published a newspaper on location which included the following poem in its first issue:

There was a young fellow named Ford
Who put all his troopers aboard.
He took all these green faces
To God's open spaces
To make a big feature. "Oh Lord!"

The shoot was quite an adventure. Ford was only 29 years old at the time but The Iron Horse was already his 50th feature film. He had started directing at the age of 17 and would go on to direct a total of 54 westerns in his amazing career, which included 137 films to his credit. Certainly, Ford is acknowledged as the master of the western genre. The Iron Horse was a pivotal film in his career for many reasons but McBride likes to say that The Iron Horse was to John Ford what Jaws was to Steven Spielberg. It made him a famous director, even though The Iron Horse was an ambitious, out-of-control runaway production that went way over budget and over schedule. His studio Fox Film was having a hard time financially but The Iron Horse became a major hit when it opened and made Ford bankable for the remainder of his career.

The Iron Horse was, in effect, Ford's response to Paramount's "super western" The Covered Wagon (1923). Ford's film, however, was about building the First Transcontinental Railway: a great American saga. The company worked on the Pyramid Lake Paiute Indian Reservation near Wadsworth, Nevada [known, perhaps, to participants in the Burning Man festival as the exit from Interstate 80 that one takes to get to Black Rock City]. They drew people from Reno and surrounding areas to be extras in the film. The extras were told to bring their own props and costumes to reflect the period 1860-69. The production crew recreated the building of the railroad in great detail. They built an entire town and moved the town as the tracks were being built, much as it had been done in real life. The company lived in the circus train; in a sense, like real pioneers. This rough and tumble company shot in the snow under adverse winter conditions.

Ford hired old-time Western lawman and expert marksman Ed "Pardner" Jones for sharpshooting stunts. Once, Fox Film's production manager Sol Wurtzel sent a telegram to Ford urging him to speed up the shooting. Ford took the telegram, folded it, and held it up, telling Pardner Jones to shoot right through Sol's name, which Jones did; he was such a great shooter.

Another time, Ford had someone shoot a clay pipe out of the mouth of an actor who wasn't prepared for it and this infuriated Ford's brother Eddie, the film's assistant director, who took a pick-axe and went after his brother. They had a monumental brawl. That's the kind of production it was.

In the 1960s Ford considered writing a book about the making of The Iron Horse and McBride's wife quipped that it would be more pornographic than foreign literature. She was, perhaps, alluding to the brothel Ford set up to service members of the film company. You could get overnight accommodations, a bath, a haircut, and laundry service all for $5. So they weren't totally deprived on location.

They spent two months filming in Nevada, soliciting the cooperation of Paiute Indians from the reservation, along with Chinese who had actually worked on the railroad, and—allegedly—even used the locomotives that met at Promontory Point when the two ends of the line were joined on May 1869 [although other sources claim these were replicas]. McBride opined that Saul Wurtzel deserved credit for letting Ford keep shooting even though he was over budget and schedule. Wurtzel had seen the quality of the footage.

The Iron Horse, McBride characterized, has the authentic look of a reconstructed documentary, which can be said in general of Ford's best westerns: they look like documentaries, even as they're visions of an idealized world with Ford's great eye for composition. Within that, Ford encouraged spontaneous rough-housing acting, usually on the first take, to make the film seem real. He created a vision of the American past that audiences found believable. Today, the plot of The Iron Horse seems kind of hokey; but, it's the film's visual spectacle that remains impressive: the flowing movement of trains, horses, and buffalo, which Ford orchestrated with virtuosity, especially the last 40 minutes of the film as it reaches its crescendo. Added to this, Ford introduced small character touches to keep the film on a human scale. He was paying tribute both to the unification of the United States by the railroad through Abraham Lincoln who had the foresight to do this during the Civil War, and to the immigrants who actually built the railroad: the Chinese, the Irish, the Italians, and other immigrant groups. Ford had an uncle named Mike Connelly who was an Irish shooter who came over to serve in the Union army and to help build the railroad so Ford was honoring his Uncle Mike's story. For the people working on this film, this was real history.

Ford liked to call the film The Metallic Mustang. That was his other name for it. It played for months and moved audiences to tears with its recreation of the American past. After The Iron Horse, Ford made another silent western Three Bad Men (1926), which unfortunately flopped. Then Fox made The Big Trail directed by Raoul Walsh featuring John Wayne in his first starring role and that also flopped. Audiences had lost interest in these super westerns. Ford returned to the western genre in 1939 with Stagecoach, which has been recently released on Criterion DVD. From that point on, Ford was on a roll and he solidified his reputation as—not only the master of the western genre—but, in McBride's estimation, America's national poet and the closest we have to William Shakespeare.

Hopefully, David Kiehn's immaculately-researched essay for the SFSFF souvenir program will be replicated for SFSFF's archives in the near future to keep company with the already generous sampling of essays from past editions of the festival. Adding production details to McBride's introductory comments, Kiehn depicts a grueling and exhausting shoot in a difficult location under hazardous weather conditions. Unexpected snowfalls caused continuity issues, which Ford resolved by ordering hundreds of extras to remove the snow. The dining room steward succumbed to the cold and died of pneumonia. In a classic anecdote of ethnic masquerade, Paiute Indians from the Pyramid Reservation were brought in to double as Chinese railworkers. And a justice of the peace in Reno, Nevada looked so much like Abraham Lincoln that Ford hired him on the spot. Kiehn's essay is rich with such stories.

There are two recent contributions to the wealth of research written on The Iron Horse that I would like to point out. At Long Pauses, Darren Hughes takes advantage of the Ford At Fox DVD Collection to construct a screen capture analysis of the saloon showdown scene in The Iron Horse whereby Darren emphasizes Ford's mastery of standard continuity editing through a careful purview of establishing shots, re-establishing shots, and crosscuts leading to the final showdown. It's a visually striking sequence energized by these edits.

At Parallax View, Sean Axmaker takes on Ford's historical veracity in his first report from the festival, linking back to his earlier TCM essay.

Cross-published at Twitch.