Yet another fire truck responds to the alarm, this one with a dog chasing after it. We saw the same distinctively liveried pooch in an earlier post, playing the role of Tom McDonald’s dog.
Then … The truck was heading south on Hope Street in downtown Los Angeles. On the left side of the block behind it is the Schools And Colleges building at 625 Hope and beyond that the Hotel Acacia on the corner of Hope and 6th Street.
… and Now, this stretch of Hope Street has become a canyon of steel and glass. Facing us at the cul-de-sac across 6th Street is the Los Angeles Central Library which opened in 1924, the year before the movie was released. So, what then is that turreted building at the same location in the movie shot above?
Here it is … it was the State Normal School (the precursor college to UCLA), seen here at the end of the Hope Street cul-de-sac photographed from 6th Street. Built in 1898, the college was leveled in 1922 to make way for the new Central Library, predating when the movie was filmed so archival footage must have been used for the fire truck scene in the Then image above.
Then … Still in downtown Los Angeles we cut to what’s probably a different truck, traveling east along 5th Street with Pershing Square on the left. The firemen on board are from two different LAFD stations: Truck 2 and Truck 7. The building with the vertical ‘FIREPROOF’ sign right of center in the background is the Hotel Clark at 426 Hill Street.
… and Now, here’s the same view today; most of the buildings have been replaced over the last hundred years but the the Hotel Clark is still there.
Speaking of which, this fine 1920s vintage image of the Hotel Clark reveals all of the signs partially visible in the Then image above.
Then … As the truck takes a right around the corner of Pershing Square into 6th Street we see Sid Grauman’s Metropolitan Theatre on the corner of 6th and Hill. When it opened in 1923 it was the largest in Los Angeles with 3,600 seats.
… and Now, The theatre was renamed the Paramount Downtown Theater in 1929, closed in 1960 and demolished in 1962 to make way for an office project that never materialized. The 16-floor International Jewelry Center was built on the site in 1981; it’s still there today.
This is the theatre when the The Last Edition was filmed. Fans of old cinema can read all about it here.
Then … Now it’s the turn of yet another fire engine, smaller but fully laden, to careen through the streets …
But this was filmed on a studio backlot … the same set appeared 2 years earlier in the 1922 Buster Keaton film Cops featuring Buster performing a stunt on a ladder.
… in the 1920s … The set, circled in the aerial view below, was on the United Studios’ backlot at 5341 Melrose Avenue in Hollywood. (Credit goes to John Bengston’s silent movie location blog for revealing this). The park area beyond it is the Forever Hollywood Cemetery.
… and Now, The Paramount Studios complex occupies the studio site today. The lot has been reconfigured continuously over the decades but the cemetery layout unsurprisingly has not. Melrose Avenue runs across the foreground, Gower Street is on the left side and Van Ness Avenue on the right.
The responders converge on Market and Kearny and waste no time dousing the Chronicle headquarters. Lotta Crabtree’s fountain is seen in the foreground surrounded by gawkers.
Then … This shot looking east down Market Street gives us a closer look at Lotta’s Fountain with a good view of the Palace Hotel on the right, built in 1909 on the site of its predecessor after it burned down in the 1906 fire.
… a vintage photo … the fountain was captured in this matching 1920s photograph taken from the same vantage point. The column of the original fountain was much shorter in height; it was extended in 1916.
… and Now, over the last century the fountain has been used as an annual gathering place of remembrance for survivors of the 1906 earthquake. The last survivor, 3 months old when the earthquake hit, died in 2016 at the age of 109. Note that the fountain’s column has been significantly foreshortened compared to when the movie was filmed, reverting in 1999 back to its design as originally built in 1875. The survivors have all gone but the landmark Palace Hotel is still there, minus the external balconies.
Then … Teddy is the Director of Information for the San Francisco Municipal Railway which operates the city’s famed cable cars. Here he rounds the corner of his office building where a large sign references the city’s campaign to save its aging cable car system (director Wilder’s nod to the real citizen’s revolt that saved the cable cars in 1947 - read all about that here).
… and Now, But this (as were several of the movie’s locations) was filmed in Los Angeles. The building is the art deco beauty at 601 W. 5th Street built by the Southern California Edison Company in 1931 on the corner of Grand Avenue, also known as One Bunker Hill or the CalEdison Building. It’s now home to a number of businesses including Torrey Pines Bank. Note the structure and steps that have since been added on the 5th Street side.
… during filming … while the film crew was filming in San Francisco in the fall of 1983 the cable car system really was once again in the midst of a major upgrade. Here’s an example of how 69 city blocks along the cable car routes were affected by the rebuilding. This is Powell Street viewed from the corner of Jackson Street, shared by the north-bound Powell-Mason and Powell-Hyde lines.
… and Now, Those two lines continue to operate along Powell Street today. That’s the Fairmont Hotel Tower in both images atop Nob Hill.
As Teddy parks in his office building basement garage he sees a beautiful woman (Kelly Le Brock) in a flaming red dress crossing in front of him …
… they both get a surprise as she steps over an air vent …
… Thinking she’s alone she sways to the background strains of Little Stevie Wonder’s song ‘The Woman In Red’. Teddy sits there, agape, smitten. The chance meeting is about to turn his world upside down.
Not for the only time in this movie Gene Wilder has referenced a well-known scene from an earlier film, this one inspired by Marilyn Monroe’s famous frolic above a New York City subway grate 29 years earlier in the 1955 movie The Seven Year Itch.
Up in his office Teddy spots the mystery woman visiting an adjacent office. He calls the desk she’s sitting at to ask her out that evening. But unseen by him a co-worker, Ms. Milner (Gilda Radner), picks up the phone. As it happens she has a crush on him; she recognizes his voice and agrees to meet. (Trivia time - Wilder and Radner were engaged at the time and were married one month after the movie was released).
(The next location shot lasts for less than two seconds but there’s enough in it to justify a dedicated post… read on… )
Tom, mortified by the Chronicle’s front page exposé of the bribery arrest of his son, tries to stop the presses but he’s knocked to the ground in a tussle with his boss.
Then … He imagines a busy downtown street, seen here through the doorway of a corner store as a cable car passes by. Lots of people are walking past a newsstand and in his mind’s eye he sees them all snapping up the Chronicle’s scandalous last edition.
… and Now, here’s what a time traveler standing in that doorway would see today. The view looks east across Powell Street along O’Farrell to Stockton (at the Macy’s sign). A cable car passes by just as it did, above, one hundred years ago. CitySleuth is delighted that the old low-tech cable cars are still running. May they always.
This location was confirmed by identifying the two buildings on either side of Stockton circled in red and in blue, and by the sign circled in green…
… Here are contemporaneous vintage photos of those two buildings. On the left, circled in blue above, is D. Samuels Lace House Company (today replaced by Macy’s store). On the right, circled in red above, is the City Of Paris store with its huge rooftop sign, (today replaced by a retail/residential building). In 1925 when the movie was filmed the KFRC radio station (you did spot its vertical blade sign above, right?) was broadcasting from this store. (Note that the City Of Paris occupied the whole Stockton block from Geary to O’Farrell back then - the photo shows at far left an identical rooftop sign at Geary Street.
In the movie shot the sign partially legible in the green circle reads “… INTON …IA”; it’s part of the Clinton’s Cafeteria sign mid-block at 136 O’Farrell, listed below in the 1925 city directory.
Just in case more confirmatory proof is needed … note that this location was a street junction where cable car lines crossed as evidenced by the glimpse of another cable car down the road, circled in red…
A cable car map of the system as it was after the 1906 earthquake confirms that the California Street Cable Railroad ran along O’Farrell across Powell (circled in yellow). This map is fascinating; it shows how extensive the system used to be, extending west to Golden Gate Park in the Richmond and south to Noe Valley before being cut back to today’s 3 surviving lines.
But wait, there’s more … kudos to ReelSF reader Notcom for pointing out that the headlines of the newspapers on the stand precisely date when this scene was filmed…
Two different newspapers report the death of politician William Jennings Bryan … the date was Monday, July 27, 1925.
And finally, this ad in a newspaper dated April 11, 1925 tells us that the corner store from which the scene was filmed was the Lundstrom Hat Company store; they had opened up there, their 9th location, just 6 weeks prior. Thanks to the vicissitudes of fashion, there aren’t many of those stores around any more.
Here, photographed the year the movie was filmed, is the actual newsstand that was at the Stockton/O’Farrell street junction. The photo indicates it was at the northeast corner which is kitty-korner from the southwest corner location in the movie shot but who knows, perhaps it was moved there during filming.
Enraged, Tom grabs a spanner intending as it were to throw it in the works.
The movie opens with an establishing shot of the Golden Gate Bridge - we are in San Francisco. The view looks from the ocean side into the Bay; the misty outline of Angel Island is discernible under the span on the right.
We tag along with a nautical guide as it leads us into the city …
Then … A birds-eye view shows San Francisco’s crowded Financial District/Downtown area clustered around its tallest building, the 52-story Bank of America Center completed in 1969. Over on the right the Bay Bridge reaches out to Yerba Buena Island on its way to Oakland.
… and Now, it’s even more crowded today because of the encroachment of the Financial District into the South of Market neighborhood. In 2018 the 61 story, 1.1 billion dollar, bullet-shaped Salesforce Tower assumed the tallest building bragging rights. In the center Market Street, arrow-straight, points directly to the Ferry Building at the Bay’s edge.
Then … Finally we arrive in Nob Hill. The camera slowly pans from the Park Lane Apartments on the left past distant high-rise apartments atop Russian Hill, ending up at the classy building on the right where we see an apparently suicidal man standing on a ledge.
… and Now, that building is the Brocklebank Apartments at 1000 Mason Street (map). The photo below looks over the rooftop of the Pacific Union Club to the Brocklebank. On the left is the Park Lane Apartments and at far right the Fairmont Hotel from whose roof the above panorama was filmed (photo by Ron Henggeler. Check out his excellent website of San Francisco and Marin County photographs).
… and Now, here’s a closer look at the Brocklebank, again with the Fairmont at far right. The elegant building is approaching its centennial - it was built in 1926.
In 1958 Alfred Hitchcock chose the Brocklebank for the home of Kim Novak’s character Madeleine in ‘Vertigo’. Below, she walks to her green Jaguar parked in the courtyard. (Trivia time - San Francisco’s favorite journalist Herb Caen lived in this building and was a less-than-proud owner of a white Jaguar - persistent reliability problems prompted him to refer to it as “the white rat”).
Then … The seagull alights right next to the man on the ledge. This view looks out from the Brocklebank to the Pacific Union Club at lower right, the Huntington Hotel in the upper right corner and the Fairmont Hotel’s international flag array at lower left.
… and Now, viewed from behind the Brocklebank, here’s a recent Google aerial of those buildings. This wider view also shows Huntington Park on the right and the Mark Hopkins Hotel at upper left.
The man on the ledge is Theodore ‘Teddy’ Pierce (Gene Wilder). But why is he there? And why is he wearing a bathrobe? And what’s the significance of the seagull next to him? Even he doesn’t seem to know, asking himself in voiceover … “How the hell did I get up here?”. This scene is a flash-forward; all will be explained as the movie unfolds.
(If you are wondering if that really was Gene Wilder nine stories above the Brocklebank’s courtyard, not so - a stunt man was used for the wide shots. Gene filmed his close-ups at ground level on a Hollywood backlot).
