When comparing San Francisco to its brash cousin to the south, Los Angeles, the latter tends to win in terms of movie history. Grease, Thelma and Louise, La La Land — all these and a thousand more were created in L.A.
But it turns out that San Francisco has an impressive movie pedigree of its own. The San Francisco Film Commission maintains a database of locations used in movies throughout the city, and it includes thousands of entries dating back over 100 years.
The oldest movie on the Film Commission’s list is Charlie Chaplin’s “A Jitney Elopement,” released in 1915. Scenes were filmed in Golden Gate Park and in the Mission, near 20th and Folsom streets. The list goes right up to the as-yet-unreleased “The Matrix Resurrections,” which filmed several scenes downtown and in Chinatown.
We used a process called geocoding to take the Film Commission’s locations and turn them into coordinates. We then plotted those coordinates on an interactive map. Zoom in to find out which movies were filmed in your neighborhood, or use the text box to filter by title.
Please note: Geocoding is an imprecise science. In the same way that you could type a location into Google Maps and have the wrong location come up, incorrect coordinates may have been generated for a small minority of these movie scenes.
Ant Man and the Wasp is shown at Laguna between Waller and Market. The pink for should show the location at Laguna and Jackson as the label indicates.
Where’s DOA?
Who wrote the code for this map? And does it have a github repo for contributions?
Hi Melinda – we do have a GitHub repo and would love to see your suggestions for making the map better. You can find it here: https://github.com/MissionLocal/interactives/tree/main/docs/film-map-san-francisco
To zoom in on the map, double-click. To zoom out, shift-double click.
Apparently, no scenes from MILK were shot in The Castro – LOL!
I saw a scene being filmed on Castro between 18th and 19th. The film crew was holding up pedestrians for a few minutes at a time while they shot the street scene with extras dressed in period clothes.
There were scenes. Sean Penn, in a recent interview, talked about driving down Divisadero to the Castro for filming “Milk”. I guess the interactive map is still a work in progress.
Bullitt should be a curved line.
(Now I have to watch Goliath)
Nice work. SFFC’s database is apparently missing the great film “Colma: The Musical”, which has a couple scenes in the neighborhood including at the Marsh. It does include another HP Mendoza film, “Bitter Melon”, though!
Missed a lot… 1st one that’s easy is Mrs Doubtfire filmed on Broadway and Steiner
then a few scenes from Harold and Maude.
Also @ California and Taylor a taxi scene with Ryan O’Neal and Madeline Kahn for What’s Up Doc. Stood nearby watching as they did take after take after take……