On location — celebrating the director’s home
“Lady Bird” (R) is now playing in Bay Area Theaters. The Golden Globes airs at 5 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 7, on NBC.
Sacramento is a character in filmmaker Greta Gerwig’s critically praised “Lady Bird,” which charts a year in the life of Catholic high school senior Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson (Saoirse Ronan).
As the film progresses, Lady Bird learns to appreciate the usual coming-of-age touchstones, like her critical but loving mother (Laurie Metcalf ) and devoted but non-in-crowd friend (Beanie Feldstein), while also developing a fondness for her tree-lined, easygoing hometown. This affection stands at odds with her previous dismissal of Sacramento as a provincial place she wants to leave behind when she goes to college on the East Coast.
Gerwig attended a Catholic high school before moving east to enroll in New York City’s Barnard College, and Sacramento has never seemed far from her thoughts. She also featured her hometown in 2013’s “Frances Ha,” which she co-wrote with director Noah Baumbach and in which she starred. Gerwig said she plans to follow “Lady Bird” — up for four Golden Globes Sunday, Jan. 7 — with three more movies set in Sacramento.
“When you know something intimately, and you love it, you feel like you can show something about it that an outsider would not be able to,” Gerwig said by telephone. Her hometown is “a lived-in and livable setting,” she said. “It’s not rural, but it is not like a New York or a San Francisco either. It is somewhere in the middle.”
Gerwig’s camera captures Sacramento’s warmth — not the literal heat of 105-degree summer days but the cozy vibe of a city shaded by trees by day and lit by night, at least in some sections, by old-fashioned street lamps and 1940sera neon signs.
Gerwig said she is not sure whether her future movies set in Sacramento will revisit “Lady Bird’s” characters or tell different stories. Regardless, a quartet of Sacramento films would establish Gerwig as a regional filmmaker along the lines of Richard Linklater (Austin, Texas) and earlycareer Gus Van Sant (Portland, Ore.), both of whom Gerwig cites as inspirations.
Here are some filmmakers who paved the way for Gerwig by bringing attention to places that, like Sacramento, exist in the shadows of more prominent ones. (Baltimore is to Washington, D.C., as Sacramento is to San Francisco). Spike Lee, Brooklyn, N.Y.: In Lee’s current Netflix series “She’s Gotta Have It,” based on his 1986 film, characters lament Brooklyn’s gentrification. But Lee might be at least slightly responsible for that gentrification.
Brooklyn never seemed like the sticks. But to audiences outside New York, a pre-Lee Brooklyn was known as the site of the dingy apartments of “The Honeymooners” and the place the Dodgers left for Los Angeles. The film “She’s Gotta Have It” presented a more enticing borough, where an artist (Tracy Camilla Johns) could date three guys at once and travel in hip circles. Lee’s arty takes on Brooklyn in “Gotta” and later films made it seem like a place that might welcome other arty young people. No wonder they later moved there in droves. Barry Levinson and John Waters, Baltimore: Waters’ no-budget 1970s comedies showed a city full of degenerates. His later films, like the 1988 non-musical “Hairspray” (the 2007 musical was shot in Canada), incorporated sweet, clean-cut kids and clear-eyed commentary on racial and class prejudices.
Waters’ Baltimore seemed more small-town than Levinson’s urban iteration, in “Diner” and “Tin Men,” mid-20th-century period pieces released in the 1980s. Levinson’s characters had ambition and lived in a city that was scruffy rather than Watersgrotesque.
Neither Waters nor Levinson presented the blight seen in HBO’s more present-day
“The Wire.” But like “The Wire,” Waters and Levinson gave onscreen Baltimore a beating heart missing from most films set in nearby Washington, D.C., in which the point usually is policy or intrigue, not place. Richard Linklater, Austin, Texas: With 1991’s “Slacker,” Linklater introduced the laid-back loquaciousness that would become his signature and made a city filled with coffee-sipping postcollegiate philosophers seem like a cool place to be. Perhaps California’s capital will become a hangout spot for the intelligentsia post-“Lady Bird,” as this state capital did after Linklater helped put it on the filmmaking map. Gus Van Sant, Portland, Ore.: Granted, the addict burglars in “Drugstore Cowboy” (1989) and hustlers in “My Own Private Idaho” (1991) were not walking billboards for the Portland Chamber of Commerce. But they were beautiful, romantic figures breathing rain-cleansed air while gazing upon cotton-candy clouds. Also, the drug crew in “Drugstore” found a cheap, cool apartment at a moment’s notice — a calling card for any city. The fleecewearing software engineers who since have moved to Portland might not have Dillon’s character’s habits, but they probably drop “Private Idaho” as inspiration for moving there, even if they haven’t seen it. Alexander Payne, Omaha and Lincoln, Neb.: In the current “Downsizing” and in “Election” and other films, Payne uses the fuzzy-sweater-andcasseroles politeness of his home state as a springboard for eccentric, sometimes shocking ideas. His movies do not encourage visits to Nebraska so much as advise a visitor to look beneath the surface if he or she ever ends up there on a business trip.