Fog City Mavericks: The Filmmakers of San Francisco (2007)

Though obviously far eclipsed by Los Angeles in terms of output, California’s second city of film has a significant history and reputation of its own. An exceedingly independent city, its just the right distance from Hollywood to allow its filmmakers to have the resources to get things done, but enough sovereignty to do it their own way. Obviously not ever filmmaker succeeds in San Francisco, but many of those who have made the bay area their base of operations have changed movie history. The Coppola’s (Francis Ford and Sofia), George Lucas, Chris Colombus, Clint Eastwood, and the folks at Pixar have revolutionized film making, in story telling, special effects, box office, etc. Essentially a series of mini retrospectives of film makers with strong connections to the area, the dominate strand of the narrative is Lucas and the Coppola family, film school radicals who challenged, and later took over the nations movie making establishment, and in the process made San Francisco into arguably the true creative heart of American film making (after seeing this film I’d say the Bay area is more important then New York to modern American films). Interesting, but kind of conventional in its presentation, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did another Starz produced film doc of my recent viewing, Midnight Movies: From The Margins to the Mainstream. 3 out of 5.