 Heber acknowledges that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the Rammutish-Oloni peoples, where the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula, we recognize that the Rammutish-Oloni understand the interconnectedness of all things and have maintained harmony with nature for millennia. We honor the Rammutish-Oloni peoples for their enduring commitment to Oirep, Mother Earth, as the indigenous protectors of this land and in accordance with their traditions, the Rammutish-Oloni have never ceded lost nor forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place, as well as for all peoples who reside in their traditional territory. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homelands. As uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Rammutish community. We recognize to respectfully honor Rammutish peoples. We must embrace and collaborate meaningfully to record indigenous knowledge in how we care for San Francisco and its peoples. Little plug for the library. We're this art music and recreation center. We're on the fourth floor in Civic Center. The Bernard Osher Foundation Art Music and Recreation Center offers material about the visual arts, performing arts, music, sports, and recreation. The center features information on arts, architects, musicians, actors, filmmakers, dancers, other arts professionals, and athletes, primarily those who have lived and or worked in San Francisco Bay Area. There's a link in the chat for specifically to our little web page on our site with more information about the resources that we provide. All right. So our presenter today, Brian Hollins. Since Brian retired from a career manufacturing semiconductor ships in Silicon Valley has kept himself busy pursuing a variety of interests, including home winemaking, attending, appreciating, supporting, performing arts, songwriting, creating and directing videos, and hosting under the pseudonym City Sleuth, which is how I found him. The San Francisco Movie Locations blog, Real SF, a real renaissance man. A few more things with so participant guidelines. All participants were remain muted during the presentation. Communicate with us through the chat. 10 to 15 minutes will be reserved at the end of the presentation for Brian to answer questions that are posted in the Q&A. So put any questions for Brian in the Q&A portion of the Zoom application and anything related to the library or any technical issues go into the chat. We will be recording this today. It'll be an art on the SFPL YouTube channel, which the link is also in the chat. I can't really tell you when that'll be. It goes to media services. They do it. They're pretty quick to turn around, but I can't really give you an idea of when that will be. So just check back to that site if you want to go back or if you want to share it with friends who could make it today. And then we've enabled auto transcription if you need closed captioning, but if you don't, there's an option to turn that off as well. So without further ado, please welcome Brian and he's going to get started with his presentation. Brian, take it away. Thank you. I thought I'd show you a video that I did a while back about it explains how film noir filmmakers use locations to enhance the storytelling. And it's pretty self-explanatory, and I'll just start off this talk with this little video, which I hope you'll enjoy. One more step and I'll kill you. I'll kill you. I'll kill you! Glory don't! I'll kill you! Lock me! Welcome to Film Noir, a different kind of movie that emerged from Hollywood during the gloom of the 1940s and 1950s. These films were not so much entertainment as social studies exploring the grittier, seamier side of society, a world where men wore hats, women wore dames, and people behaved badly. Usually, B movies, their budget constraints pushed directors to use more exterior locations in order to reduce costs. But there was a positive to this. Location shooting offered creative opportunities to enhance the storytelling not possible within the confines of a studio or a back lot. By simply stepping outside the studio walls, the movie makers created a new experiential universe for their audience. How did they do that? Let us count the ways. There's an expression, terroir, that describes the sense of place that a vineyard can impart to its wines by way of distinctive aromas and flavors. In much the same way, locations can represent the terroir of a movie. And there's no better example than Carol Reed's masterpiece. If ever a sense of place permeated a movie, this is it. It was filmed in post-war Vienna, the perfect setting for Graham Greene's tale of mystery and intrigue. Director Reed employed high contrast noir lighting throughout, both above ground where the bruised and rubbled city paralleled Holly Martin's realization that Harry Lyme is no longer the fine fellow he used to be. And below, during a chase in the city sewers, a metaphor for Lyme's adopted underworld activities. Reed also made much use of Dutch angles off-kilter the camera to add a disorienting effect. Appropriately influenced by German expressionism, the harsh light, deep shadows, and glistening streets synergized into unforgettable atmospheric images. Locations were often used to heighten suspense or fear. Most people would never go near dangerous neighborhoods at night, but when they watch a noir movie, they often find themselves there, as in this scene where our pulses quicken and we fear for one of the victims as she is stalked through the menacing streets. The foreboding shadows trumpet her coming fate and we want to call out to warn her, even knowing it's all in vain. There are many more examples throughout noir, as here, when the naive Mrs. Kraft is dropped off at the westernmost edge of town for a rendezvous with a killer. How much? 270, please. Keeps change. Thank you. Are you sure this is the corner? There are no buses or speedcars around here if you get stuck. This is it, all right. Okay, lady. Clammy fog wafting across the desolate sand dunes sets the tone. It seems to migrate from the screen, permeating the audience and inducing clammy palms amongst the impressionable, awaiting the inevitable. Locations can also bring about a psychological response that can draw us into the moment. You know, I wouldn't like to kill just anybody. Is it someone I know? Oh, yeah. But you'll never guess. I give up. It's me. This is a straightforward business proposition. I want you to kill me. So long, fella. Our gaze is directed past him to the rocks and the swirl below, where the shimmering water and dizzying perspective inflicts the same unease upon us as it did upon him. Alfred Hitchcock messes with our minds at an old Spanish mission where Scotty Ferguson realizes that the woman he's obsessed with is intent on suicide. During the frantic climb up the bell tower, Hitchcock uses a camera shot that simultaneously pulls back while the lens zooms forward to make us feel Scotty's dread fear of heights when he looks down. The disquieting zoom swoon effect pulls us all into the vortex. In the same movie, Hitchcock's sly humor surfaced through the use of location as metaphor when he made sure that Scotty's apartment enjoyed a view of Coyt Tower rising proudly in the distance, admitting later to its intended significance, a phallic symbol. Now on a roll, Hitchcock's gleeful closing shot of a train entering a tunnel served the dual purpose of leaving us in no doubt as to the intentions of the passengers while at the same time thumbing his nose at the industry's production code. Audiences feel a certain satisfaction when they see a familiar location in a movie. They relate. Perhaps they live around the corner or they might have been there on a visit. In any case, the connection somehow in a small way defictionalizes the on-screen action. That's how many might feel when they see Humphrey Bogart get tough at the Golden Gate Bridge. Dramatic situations can be made even more so with the right locations heading. Director Jules DeSalle has said that of all the scenes he's filmed, this was his personal favorite. In it, a runaway truck, a tight hairpin bend, and a treacherously steep slope combine for a stunning denouement. Thousands of golden delicious apples met a fate that paled in comparison to that of a luckless driver. In this example, the choice of an industrial tank farm enabled a cataclysmic yet chilling statement about the futility of ethnic hatred when a white racist and his black partner in crime turn on each other after a badly-bought ice. Well, these are the two that did it. Which is which? Take your pick. But perhaps the most powerful feeling that film noir locations can induce on an audience nostalgia. The passage of time lets us see things as they used to be. The strings of yearning can be plucked by images of gas stations, diners, sodathounts, nights out at long gone places, and swing dancing at the hop. Retro fashions too, also seen here, echoing a time when people dressed up to go shopping. Hats were du regur, and women were their stylish best. And who can blame those who long for lost neighborhoods? Bunker Hill in Los Angeles is a classic example. A 1940s tour of the area revealed an enclave of grand victorians and other large homes built conveniently next to downtown. Over time, the owners moved to the suburbs and the homes mostly devolved into rooming houses for those of low income. A sweeping redevelopment in the 1960s cleared the neighborhood to make way for civic and other high rises. But film noir takes us back to Bunker Hill when Burt Lancaster exits an old streetcar, itself capable of conjuring up nostalgic pangs. By the time the city's sanctioned developers were through, not only the buildings were gone, but so too was the tunnel and the hill itself. The same fate befell San Francisco's old produce market. For 40 years, this area of warehouses and wholesale businesses teamed with activity as trucks rolled in through the night. Then in the 1960s, the market was relocated to clear the way for a major encroachment by the surrounding financial district. There must be many a worker in the sleek new office towers who have no idea that they'd displaced mellow glow apples, cape cod cranberries, cheeky brand asparagus, or the risqué labeled Buxom brand melons. So there you have it. We've seen the many ways that locations have shaped the evolution of the noir style and how psychological prompts and visits to a past era can touch us to the core and remind us that we are not simply observing the human condition. We are part of it. As we revert from the noir world back into our own, we may find ourselves suffering from an emotional hangover, sympathizing for the downtrodden or even rooting for the bad guy. All this for the price of a ticket to a film noir movie. I hope you enjoyed the video. I was just presenting my ideas of how the movie makers might have used, might have chosen the locations to enhance the storytelling. So you can agree or disagree. But this next one here, I wanted to play a very short clip of Eddie Muller. Now Eddie Muller is the Bay Area's own czar of noir. He is the expert when it comes to film noir. And he is a presenter on Turner Classic Movies and he's run film noir festivals for years. He also has a film noir foundation that restores old noir movies, puts them out on DVDs and Blu-rays. And he has a little program. It's like a webinar on his film noir foundation Facebook page every couple of weeks where he answers questions from his readers, any question about film noir. He answers them. And a couple of years ago, I sent in a question about Telegraph Hill and film noir. And his answer was really articulate. And I thought it would make a great segue into my talk, which is going to start right after this. So first of all, his assistant, Anne, is going to read out the question that I sent in. I once heard you describe Telegraph Hill as the nexus of San Francisco film noir locations. I couldn't agree more, but I thought your viewers would like to hear you explain why. And that's from Brian. Is that from Brian Hollins by any chance? That's from Brian Hollins. Very good. Because I want to give a shout out to Brian. He is realsf.com. Brian does a fabulous website. I knew that had to be Brian Hollins asking that question. Anyway, the intersection of Union and Montgomery there on Telegraph Hill, is the nexus for noir in San Francisco, because if you stand in that intersection, you have Midge's apartment in Vertigo is on the northeast corner, right down the street, like six houses down the street is where Lauren McCall lived in Dark Passage. Down the other side of the street, a little further down is where Valentina Cortesa lived in the house on Telegraph Hill. At the other corner, the southwest corner was Speedy's grocery, which is visible in a number of these films, including House on Telegraph Hill. On the other side of that intersection towards downtown is where Tony Curtis lived in the Midnight Story, which is a lesser known but really good San Francisco film. Down Union Street and around the corner towards the Bay Bridge is where Marie Windsor lived in the Sniper. A lot of stuff is going on right at that intersection, and it was very, very popular for filmmakers because literally if you put your camera in the middle of that intersection, you can see downtown San Francisco to the south, you can see the Bay Bridge to the east, you can see a beautiful view of North Beach and Russian Hill to the west, and you can see the bay. I don't think you can see Alcatraz, but you can see the bay on the other side looking north. So no matter how you stage the scene, you've got the full San Francisco effect from that location. All right, well said, Eddie. And it just so happens that the six locations that he chose would have been my choice too. So what I thought I'd do was take us on a little walking tour through Telegraph Hill and visit each of those locations that he mentioned in the order that he mentioned them. Here they are. They're all grouped around a short two and a half block stretch of Upper Montgomery Street, and we're going to take him one at a time, starting with a location from Vertigo. Though in Vertigo, Jimmy Stewart, his life is ruined by his obsession with not one but two femme fatales, both played by Kim Novak. He also has a girlfriend in the movie, Barbara Balgetta, who plays the role of Mitch, his current good friend. And so we're going to visit Pear Apartment, which is in Telegraph Hill, which is the first one that Eddie mentioned. It's on the northeast corner of Union Street and Montgomery Street. And it starts off with this fabulous, early in the movie, you see this fabulous shot of Midge's studio with Russian Hill splayed out in the background. This right here is Union Street. Down here, you've got Washington Square Park. Over here, you've got St. Peter and Paul Church. Just a fabulous shot. And this was actually filmed in the studio, as indeed the interiors of all the places we're going to visit, all of those interiors were filmed in the studio. But the picture out the window, or the view of the window, was set by a photograph that they took clearly from Telegraph Hill. So we know now that she lives somewhere on Telegraph Hill. And then later, oh, by the way, I should mention getting ahead of myself, if we could bring Midge forward to our time, what would the view look like now? It would look like this, very similar, except up here, the three additional high-rise apartment buildings have been built. So late on in the movie, we find out exactly where her apartment was when Scotty drives her home. Supposedly from downtown to her apartment, which is at the end of this block on Union Street. So here, we're at the eastmost end of Union Street. And it actually ends in a cul-de-sac, Calhoun Terrace, which is going off to the right there. So we can all chuckle if we know that he's actually driving out of a cul-de-sac. And this is how that looks again today. Beautiful view. Some of the buildings side-to-side have changed, but the view itself looks identical, except, of course, up here for the new Oakland section of the Bay Bridge. Now let's take another look at that. That was then. This is now. So then he pulls up and he stops outside of her house. This is the house on the corner, as I mentioned, of Union, Montgomery, addressed 298 Union Street. You notice the concrete wall here, the wooden fence, the little stairs going up to the entrance. The reason why I'm mentioning them is that that building isn't there anymore. But I did find a photograph of it. Here it is, taken in 1970, which looked, so the house here looked exactly the same as it was when the vertigo scene was filmed. And here's that concrete wall, wooden fence, stairs leading out to the doorway. Now the house has a very interesting history. Here's a photograph of it over on the right here. At the end of the 19th century, it used to have a grocery store downstairs here, which is open until about the 20s, it closed in the 1920s. And in 1930, it became a restaurant called the Dead Fish Cafe. And there's an interesting story. The proprietor of the cafe was a flamboyant woman who came out one day, and apparently this is true, and took a pistol out and fired a shot at Coy Tower, which had been newly built up the hill up here somewhere. At the trial, the judge chastised her for not using a howitzer. So that tells us something about how the residents, or some of the residents, at Telegraph Hill felt about the new Coy Tower. So going back to the house again, I just want to point out, first of all, obviously, there's no big picture windows here. And not only that, but the house isn't tall enough to see the full view that we saw through Midge's apartment window. So to produce that view, they must have taken a photograph from either from the roof of this house, but more likely from the roof of the house across from it. Because from there, you get a better view down to Washington Square Park. And this is how it looks today. Quite a change. The house then was pulled down in the 70s, and replaced with this apartment building here. There are a couple of other scenes in other movies that use the same location. For example, in Portrait in Black 1960, Antony Quinn was a doctor, and his office was the same place. Because out the window here, the photographic plate that they used here to set this location is the same plate as they used from Midge's apartment. This is two years later. Down here is Filbert Street. Down here is Greenwich Street. So it's part of that same plate. And then in 1962, Days of Wine and Roses, Jack Lemmon drops Lee Remikoff at her house, which is the same house behind her. You can see back here, this is the Calhoun Terrace cul-de-sac. Okay, we're going to go to the next location now, which was in Dark Passage. This is a film about a guy who was wrongly imprisoned. He breaks out of jail, and he's picked up by a mystery woman, young woman, Irene Janssen, who takes her to an apartment on Telegraph Hill and shelters him while he has plastic surgery to his face to try to avoid detection by the police. So this one here is just one block. Irene's apartment was here, just one block up. It's at the top of the very steep Filbert steps. And here she is, pulling up in front of her apartment house. The house is called the Malloch House, named after the guy who built it in 1936. And it's a really interesting place today. It hasn't changed at all, really. It's got this, it's in the art modern style, built in the middle of the Art Deco period. It's got these wonderful scrophito engravings on the walls. It has an interesting elevator made out of glass bricks. And her apartment is up here. It's apartment 10 on the third floor, which has a terrace over here, which looks out to the east. And also in the window, you may not be able to see it clearly here, but there's a picture when I was there of Humphrey Bogart in the window, cut out as Bogart. And there's a close up of it. So obviously, the owner knew everything about this film. So we now see Irene taking Bogart to her front door. There's number 10 down here. And look at these fantastic Art Deco details, the railings, the etchings on the glass. And if we go to that place today, and you can walk in, it's quite open. Here's what you see. Unchained, just beautiful, beautiful building. Inside the building, again, I mentioned earlier, all of these interiors are filmed in the studio. So what they do, I'm trying to, I don't know if you can see that thing up there, it's in the way. What they do is set locations through the window, using photographs. And so when I saw this photograph, I thought, now, wait a minute, that is not correct. Because the Royal View, I took myself when I once visited this apartment, and that is not working. Okay, there it is. Let me go back. Okay. Okay, great. So this is the Royal View out of Apartment 10 in the Mallick building. It's a view of Yerba Buena Island and the Bay Ridge. And yet this is the view they used. Very strange. Where did that view come from? Well, took me a while to figure it out, but I did. So here's the apartment. The correct view, looking east, is towards Yerba Buena Island. They actually went to the trouble going down Montgomery and towards the end of Altar Street to the back of a building here called Number 40 Altar Street, and they took a photograph looking due north across the Filbert steps to Angel Island. And that's the picture that they used for that window view. So let's look at it again here and show you. Here's the window view. This is a photograph that I took just a few days ago, looking north from Altar Street. It still doesn't match quite right, right? But if you reverse that photograph, flip it horizontally, now we have a match. And that's how they did it. One thing I wanted to do was to play with Photoshop and replace this view here with the view they would have seen if they used the correct one. This is what we would have seen. Don't you think that looks a lot better? Why they did what they did is beyond me. Now later in the movie is another shot. They did the same thing. Here's a view in the movie looking down from the patio. And in the background you can see what appears to be a pier, probably the Embarcadero. And they have these two cottages here with Gable cottages. One of them has scallops around the edge. And when I was looking for that, I came across this photograph, vintage photograph, clearly the same scene. We've got the Embarcadero back here and we have those two cottages right here. They are alongside the Fulvid steps. And so you could see how steep those steps are because those two houses are right next to each other. Here's the steps coming down here. So they actually took, this is the scene again. I've gone back. They took a photograph that must have looked like this. Just ignore what's in the foreground here. That's the representation of the patio. But they took this photograph and then they flipped it horizontally and used that for the movie. In this case, it's probably originally they did it because the worldview from the patio, which I took, is right here. Not very attractive, huh? I think they did the right thing here but not with the window view. And here's a shot in the movie of Bogart's character coming up. He's had his plastic surgery and he's coming up the Fulvid steps and he's going past one of those cottages. The one with the scalloped edges here. That's 228 Fulvid Street. One of the oldest, I think it's the second oldest building residence on Telegraph Hill. And this is how it looks today. Then and now. At least it looked like this a few years ago and I took it. If you go there now, the trees have grown so much, it's not easy to see it. All right. Here's a view looking into the apartment. This was a, again, it was done in the studio and they went to great lengths to produce this wonderful set. There's lots of scenes filmed inside it. So this is looking in from the terrace, looking into the living area on a rainy evening. You can see that it's two levels. There's a interesting spiral staircase here that goes up to the bedroom. Now the Royal Apartment is quite different. The Royal Apartment is on one level and the bedroom is at the end of this corridor here. I had to show you this because I think this is a fabulous picture of Lauren Bacall. It's a studio publicity still. She's wearing the outfit that she was wearing in that shop we just showed you. And standing next to her she was a secretary desk. It's just a wonderful picture. And the other thing I wanted to kind of share with you is that when I finished finding all of the locations from this movie, it was before I started the blog and what I used to do then was like self-publish a little booklet of the then and now photographs. And I sent one of those booklets for Dark Passage to Lauren Bacall via her agent. And I also sent a picture that I prepared from the film and asked the agent to please ask her to sign it. And don me, sign it she did. So she sent me this beautiful little momento. And not only that but she included a photograph of herself. This is funny because she was probably in her 80s at the time. She sent me this photograph of her when she was a late teenager reclining on a sofa. Another one of those publicity shots. Good for you Lauren. Okay the next location we're going to was in House on Telegraph Hill. And in this film an Italian actress Valentina Cortese plays the part or the role of a lady who was in a concentration camp. And at the end of the war she assumes the identity of a fellow inmate who died before they were released. So she comes over to America. She gets married to Richard Basehart's character. And he takes her to San Francisco to live in his deceased aunt's home, the house on Telegraph Hill. And that house is another block further down. This is where the Malik House, Orange Place was. At the end of the block, excuse me, at the end of the block where the old Julius Castle restaurant was, is Victoria's house. Let me show you how they did that. Inside the house this is done again in the studio. It was an elaborate set. It was an elaborate Victorian house full of Victorian period furniture. And this little story here, the producer who did the movie tried to rent furniture from somebody who he knew who had a similar mansion down in Southern California. The guy wouldn't do it so the producer just simply made him an offer. He couldn't refuse. He bought the house, used the furniture as film, put the furniture back, sold the house, except he kept those chandeliers for himself. Now here's the house. There's only a couple of times in the movie where you see the entire house. This is early on and then later you see it again. But clearly this is not a real house. This is a painting. And why do they do that? Because when they did the shots, the exterior shots, and here's one of them here with Victoria and her young son, they actually built a facade around the Julius Castle restaurant in order to produce the effect. And what they would do, because it took several days to film these scenes, at the end of the evening when the restaurant closed, they would build a facade. Then the next day they would film shots, they would shoot scenes. And then in the afternoon they take it down again. In this photograph, this is in the afternoon, you can tell by the shadows down here, they're taking the facade down again so that the restaurant can open up for the evening. So here's a picture of the restaurant as it looked when they were facadeing it. And this is it today. You see it looks virtually identical, except for the approaches, the steps over here, this detail around here is a little bit different, but the building itself then and now looks exactly the same. And rumor has it that the owners are planning to reopen it shortly as a restaurant again. When they do, I'll be first in line. That restaurant, by the way, was open for over 80 years before it closed. Now here's a shot of Victoria's Garden. She's looking down on a lawn and in the distance, talking to her son though, in the distance you can see downtown, ferry building, Bay Bridge. And today this is the same lawn. Now the question is, where was it? Now it wasn't at Julius Castle because the castle didn't have a lawn or a garden. Instead they went up the granite steps to Koi Tower looming over everything over there. And they filmed it next to Koi Tower where there's a lawn here. There's a great 1940s Moulin Studios image. And I've put an arrow in here showing you where the garden was. And up here, this is where Victoria stood for the over the shoulder shop. And this is that same place here, if you go there today. There's one other movie that used this location that I know of. And it was Paul Joey in 1958, Frank Sinatra, Kim Novak, Rita Hayworth. And Rita Hayworth had this big fancy house that was actually set at Koi Tower. They used a lot of photographic trickery to produce that effect of the house. But this is her terrace. And they built that on same lawn. You can see in the background, downtown, over here, ferry building, and the Bay Bridge. All right. The next location is Speedy's. Speedy's Grocery, which is on the corner, the kitty corner from where Mitch's Place was, a 301 Union Street. Now Speedy's was an iconic place, an essential place for the community for over 80 years at this location. It was opened by the Speedy Archie family, the Keeley Speedy Archie and his wife. This is Emma Speedy Archie, the wife and her daughter here in the 1926 photograph taken inside the store, which opened by the way in 1923. Now in a house on Telegraph Hill, you get to see Speedy's here. It was called the New Union Grocery at that time. And this is William Lundigan. He played the role of a U.S. service officer who interviewed Victoria when she left the concentration camp. So he meets, he's now living in San Francisco and he runs into an outside Speedy's Grocery. And here they are. She's helping herself to some patrols here. And you can see the view behind it. It's a great view. This is Union Street. This here is the Russian Hill Skyline, the same skyline that you saw from Midge's apartment earlier. That was then. This is now. Still a great view. The only different trolley being these apartment buildings here which have been built since then. That was then. This is now. There are a couple of other pictures where you see Speedy's. This one here, a man who cheated himself in 1950. There's Speedy's here on the left. The guys, by the way, going into the doorway here are going into the house that the owners, Speedy's, lived in. Kele Speidiachi. No wonder they called it Speedy's. And in the woman, woman on the run, you can see in this scene Speedy's on the corner in the background. That was then. And this is now. At least it was back when I took this photograph at a time when the, when Speedy's Grocery was in between tenants. So I've taken lots of pictures of Speedy's when I've been up there. This one I took in 2006, just when it was still open as a grocery and two years before it closed. And since then, there have been two other tenants. First of all, there was a boutique clothing store. And was that a good idea? Choosing place like Telegraph Hill at the top of Telegraph Hill? I don't think so because it didn't last long. But it's been replaced by the current tenant, which is the Cadre Art Framing Store. All right, let's move on to the midnight story. Tony Curtis plays a traffic cop in this movie. And he gets close to finding, to solving a murder case when he's kicked off the case. He then befriends the suspect. And the story goes on from there. It's, as Addy mentioned, it's a lesser known film from San Francisco, but it's a good one. It's not easy to find. And the only copy that I've come across is the best quality. But anyway, if it comes up on TCM, look out for it. So Tony Curtis plays a character called Joe Martini in the film. And he befriends the suspect who takes him down and takes him in as a lodger in his house. And the house is right here at the south end of up in Montgomery, right above the Montgomery steps at 1227 Montgomery. I'm going to start off talking about this house with this vintage photograph. The house in question, Joe Martini's house, is right here on the right. And this is back when upper Montgomery was, as you can see, completely unpaved. They hadn't built the steps. There was a steep hillside on the other side here. It's a mess. But I had to show you this because it's because of those two kids. But also because of the view back here. Take a look at this really fine view of downtown looking south down Montgomery Street. In the film, Joe Martini has dropped off at the house by his new friend, the murder suspect. And here's that same view in the background. And this is interesting because this is 30 years after the vintage photo I showed you by now the street is paved. There's a wall across the bottom here that makes it into a cul-de-sac for traffic. And then the steps that lead down to the lower section just beyond it. And the house that I just showed you, Joe Martini's house, lodging house, is here. Well, you can't quite see it because of this overhanging building, but you can see the stairs leading up to over here. So what's interesting is that this is 30 years later. Yet the downtown scene looks almost the same unchanged in 30 years. And that's because in the intervening years, you had the Depression, you had Second World War, you had the austerity of the 50s. Nobody was investing in anything. This is how it looks today. Of course, downtown has changed a lot since then. And here's that wall that I mentioned here that defines the cul-de-sac. This is a great picture of Tony Curtis in between takes sitting on that wall with the downtown view behind him. And when he looked up to the side, you can see the house that he's staying in, 1227 Montgomery. And there's another view, in fact, a slightly wider view in the house on Telegraph Hill here where Victoria has survived a runaway car crash, which coincidentally was right in front of this house that we're talking about, 1227. Now, in this one, you can see that this was an elevated single story house with a basement below it. The house today changed a little bit. This part is the original house. There's a new story above it. And there are three garages below it. Over here, we have Montague Place. So that was that. And this is now. Now, there were scenes filmed inside the house in the movie, but they were on set. But there's another movie that came out 27 years later, I think 22 years later, Invasion of the Body Snatchers starring Donald Sutherland. And here he is standing above those three garages on the terrace there, looking out across Montgomery Street. In that movie, there's lots of scenes filmed actually inside the house and also in the garden of the house where you'll see, if you watch it, it's a great neo-noir. That's a remake of the 1956 noir of the same name. So I recommend that you watch it. It's a very good movie. Lots of shots of San Francisco in it. Now, this is kind of comical. The reason I put this here, I mean, this was then, and this is supposed to be now, but this illustrates the frustrations of doing what I do. You know, the single biggest impediment to my getting matching shots is this kind of thing, trees and shrubs. Also, in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, you see this really great shot of downtown. And over here, you'll see the house to Martini's house, Donald Sutherland's house. Okay, we're up to the final location, which is in the Sniper. And it's the house of Jean Dahl. She's the first victim of the Sniper. You actually can see her here being stalked by the Sniper on the Montgomery steps. So Jean Dahl is played by Marie Winsor and the Sniper is played by Arthur Franz, a guy who did a great job, which is first moving. So that house is just around the corner from where we were. We were down here in the Martini house. Up here was Midge's place, Vertigo, just around the corner. Another cul-de-sac is Calhoun Terrace. And Jean lived in 36 Calhoun Terrace. So let's go there. So in the movie, I put together these shots, composited these shots together to give you a view of both levels of Calhoun Terrace. The hill is so steep that when they finally graded everything and put in returning walls, they made it into two separate levels. Jean's house is this one down here with the whimsical photo window. And this is it today. What's interesting about this shot is that all of the houses on the upper level changed, whereas the ones on the lower level haven't. This is Jean's house right here. This was then, and this is it now. Now there was a scene inside the house again filmed in a studio that had a pretty accurate window view, because indeed you do see Yerba Buena Island and the Bay Bridge in the distance. Why? Because I've been there and I've taken the photograph. Now, I'm going to photoshop it in now to show you, except that there is a little bit of a difference. See if you can spot it. This is the movie. This is how it should look from the window. And this told me that this these scenes were filmed in a studio, by the way. So what it is, is the parallax effect. You notice these piers, how far they're separated from the island and see how close they are from here. But what it means is that for the movie, they took the photograph further down the hill. No idea why. Well, Marie Winsor, Jean Da, obviously, rubbed this guy up the wrong way when they meet, because he's waiting for her outside her house across. He's on the upper level of Calhoun Terrace here. When she leaves to go to work, she works in a nightclub. Actually, the club is down in North Beach. So, Harry is waiting for her to come up the house. This is the same scene today. The only difference here, really, is that those steps that led up down to the street are now enclosed to protect, protecting from the weather. He then stalks her. So here we are again. We also saw this in the video, where he's following her down the Montgomery steps. So the top of these steps is where the Joe Martini house was. So that was then. And this is now, looks just the same as you might expect. And this is the wider view of the steps, just to give you some perspective. He continues following her. This is down on the flats. This is where Telegraph Hill meets North Beach, Bannon Place. And this is a terrific Au Noir shot here. The only thing, it's classic. The contrasting bright lights and dark shadows. The hunter is lit up. The hunted is in silhouette. Great shot. That was then. Look how sinister it was with that lighting. This is now. You know, it looks pretty harmless in the daylight, don't you think? Then and now. I just want to close now by showing you another scene from the sniper. This is the sniper running up the Filbert steps. The bottom end of the Filbert steps at Sandsome Street. And he's fleeing from the cops. Back here in the background, there's a warehouse at that site. Here's that same shot today. What's interesting to compare these now is that back then, the steps were just ruckety old wooden steps. Very, very steep. It must have been a little risky to go up them. And in dark passage, by the way, you see those same steps. Now they've replaced it with concrete and metal steps, which is a good thing. Although if you walk up them, it won't be long before you get into the wooden steps again as you continue up the hill. And by the way, there are 274 steps from Sandsome Street here up to Irene's apartment on Montgomery Street. So I recommend you take it and be good for you. And that's it. That concludes the talk. Let's say, oh, good. The timing is pretty good. I went pretty fast. Hopefully not too fast for you. No, that was awesome, Brian. Thank you so much. So let's let's head over to the Q&A. And we got a couple of questions over there. Yeah, Brian, thank you. That was really great. And Trent, there are some questions coming in. Should I stop sharing here now or what should I do? It's up to you. I mean, it's a nice, it's a nice image. Or if you'd rather just people see you, you can you can come out of it and people will just see a bigger version of you. But let me do that. Let me do it. Because I've been hiding. I've been losing the bars. I've been hiding behind the slides for the last 45 minutes. Okay, Brian, everyone's loving loving the program. Great presentation. Thank you, Brian. And SFPL. There's a few questions that are coming in. Kimberly wants to know, is there a Telegraph Hill noir walking tour? The answer is yes, there is indeed. I've never given one. But I know they exist. I haven't taken one, either. So I just suggest you go online and I'm sure you can find the information there. You can find out anything online. Okay, Janice would like to know, lately Canada is the filmmaker's stand-in for San Francisco. Is it due to San Francisco permit costs, bad city logistics, red tape? How come? Yeah, it is production costs that drives it. I think Seattle, too, is a popular place. But it is purely driven by money. It's cheaper to go up there than San Francisco. And so it's as simple as that. Joseph would like to know, are you a native San Franciscan? Because he can hear a slight accent. Yes, it's a transatlantic accent. I was brought up in England, in Liverpool, actually. And I came over here during my 20s. I was offered a job in Silicon Valley by a company called Fairchild Semiconductor, which I think a lot of people know. It was one of those mothership companies that spun out lots of companies. So that was it. I got this great job offer, came over. I've been here ever since. And I've been a citizen of the US for quite some time as well. Brian, I'm seeing a question from Robin Curtis. I'm not quite sure if it was meant for you or for us, but the question is, will you present the woman in red with Jean Wilder soon? So I don't know if that brings a bell to you or not, or if that's, it might be, I'm not sure, if Robin wants to, in the chat, maybe give us some more details. We can try and answer that question. Well, yeah, from my point of view, I've heard of the movie. I haven't seen it. So I don't have any current plans to include that. And just in general, I mean, I have a big list of movies. It takes a lot of time to research each one. It takes a lot of time to enter all of the posts. And I've already done 36 movies. There's probably 400 posts over 1,000 locations in my website. It's just a slow process. And I've got plenty of candidates and I'm slowly going through them. And that one isn't on the list. Maybe I'm remiss here, I'm missing something, but that's the current status of that. Are there any kind of on deck that you want to plug that may be coming to the site soon? Well, let me mention one that I'd loved, but on the site. It's called Nora Prentice. And it's similar to Vertigo in a way in that it's about a respectable man who makes the mistake of being obsessed by a woman. And it just totally ruins his life in really interesting ways. And I'd love to put that. I've actually found all of the locations. The problem is that the only copy I can find is just awful quality. And it's so bad I don't want to put those out of focus pictures on my website. And I've been waiting for years, literally, hoping that somebody will release it as a DVD in a restored fashion. I've actually spoken to Eddie Muller about getting it restored if he can help. And he knows that Warner Brothers, who owns the movie, has a good copy of it. I think it's been shown on TCM in the past. But he said getting them to put it on DVD is not an easy job. I mean, they have their own agenda. It's pretty that way. So I hope it happens. And if it comes out with a good print, then I'll immediately add that to the site. Okay. I have others. Let's see this. I can't remember what they are now. There's a movie called The Falcon in San Francisco, which is, I think it's a 1930s movie, which is very interesting. I've already researched the locations from that. And so that will be coming up shortly. Wonderful presentation, Brian. Augustine is saying loved it all. Beverly says this is phenomenal. People are loving this. John would like to know, how did you get started with this kind of research? Ah, yes. So what happened here was that I actually, my wife and I actually lived down the bay in the South Bay, but we got a place in San Francisco a little over 20 years ago, and we've been making lots of visits since then. And so in one of those early visits, I went to see the remastered movie, Vertigo, in the 72 millimeter remastered version. Just a fantastic, fantastic job they did redoing that film. And while I was watching the film, I realized that Jimmy Stewart's house, which is on, it's on Lombard, Lombard and Jones, it was just three blocks away from where our place is. We're in Russian hell up there. And so I went there the next day and I was standing there looking at the house, which at the time looked exactly, exactly the same as it did in the movie. And I was looking at the house and I was imagining Alfred Hitchcock sitting next to the camera filming Kim Nova and Jimmy Stewart across the ways, you know, in front of the house. And it was kind of an interesting reverse deja vu moment. And I thought, you know, this is kind of fun. I'm going to go and find all of the locations in this movie. And I did. And that's what started everything else. Do we have time for a few more questions? How you doing, Brian? I'm doing fine. Okay, great. Everybody's loving this. This is a question from Matt. Oscar winner Oppenheimer filmed in Berkeley. Do you know if they filmed any scenes in San Francisco or where they filmed the Jean Totlock scenes that would be on Telegraph Hill? No, I haven't seen that film yet. But I must before the Oscars. And I'm sorry not to move familiar at all with it. Sorry. Another question from Randall. Amazing that you got a shot of the interior of the entryway for Lauren Bacall's building in Dark Passage. Did you get permission to photograph the entryway? Or did you just venture in any elevator access? I just ventured in, which you could do as well. It's open to the public if you like. I didn't use the elevator. I don't know if you'd need, I don't know if I could have used the elevator. I didn't try. I just walked up the stairs to the third floor. And, you know, there's nobody around. So I did it. I wanted to get that matching photograph. Gary wants to know if you had to pick one noir for the Desert Island, what would it be? And thanks for a great talk. Well, thank you. It would be vertical. I mean, I just love that movie. I mean, I love it as a standalone movie. I'm a big Hitchcock fan. And that was his pan to the city of San Francisco. Beautifully photographed. Kim Novak, so much fun. My wife and I have met her a couple of times. She's really charming. And it's very much don't let the technicolor fool you. It's very much a film noir, very, very dark story. So I would pick that one. Okay, a question from Lena. Are you a film buff in general, or is noir your singular passion? Yeah, I'd say probably the latter. I'm a film. I'm not a film buff in general. No, I don't watch a whole lot of movies. But I do watch a whole lot of film noirs because I love film noir. Bill really enjoyed this presentation. And I have a question. If you, Brian, had to pick one location outside of San Francisco that you think would be a top film location for this genre, film noir, what would the location outside of San Francisco be? Yeah, that's a tricky one. I'd have to think about that. I mean, there are some of the films that I've done have scenes outside of San Francisco. So it's kind of been done before. Harold and Maude, for example, is one of my favorite movies. And that's that shot all over the Bay Area. It has two scenes shot in San Francisco, but most of the film is shot just different sites all over the Bay Area. Vertigo, there are scenes which are filmed outside of San Francisco, down on the 17 mile drive, for example, and at the mission at San Juan Batista. So, you know, I think people have already beat me to it in picking locations. I'm dodging your question. All right. Well, thank you so much, Brian. It was a really awesome presentation. A lot of information really well put together. And, you know, I will definitely think of Telegraph Hill in a different way next time I'm walking down there. Yeah, it's been super, super interesting. Thank you. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. We check our website for you have the links in the chat. So you'll find, you know, this presentation recorded. Again, I'm not quite sure, but you can just check the site periodically for this if you want to go back and look at it. Check out our website for we have a bunch of materials on Film Noir, whether it's the films itself, like the Midnight Story I posted in the chat. We have the Blu-ray version available, but a lot of other DVDs streaming and, of course, books on Film Noir into that. So I think that's about everything. Thanks everybody for joining. Brian, if you want to hang on just a few minutes, as everyone kind of leaves, we can do kind of a post thing. That would be that. Okay. Farewell, everybody. Yeah. Bye-bye, everybody. Take care. Bye-bye, everyone. Thank you.