San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Santa Cruz becomes scenic setting for movies
While Santa Cruz doesn’t always get to play itself in the movies — the fictional Brighton Falls, Santa Carla and San Paulo are some of its more memorable roles — it deserves top billing for atmospheric locations that have enhanced everything from thrillers, sci-fi and horror movies to action flicks, biopics and comedies.
The Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, home to the 100-year-old Giant Dipper roller coaster and the Looff Carousel, built in 1911, lays claim to the most screen time for a Santa Cruz landmark.
In Jordan Peele’s 2019 horror movie “Us,” the amusement park appears in both flashbacks and modern time as the place where Lupita Nyong’o’s vacationing character encounters her eerie twin. The year before, the boardwalk provided a colorful backdrop for “Bumblebee,” featuring the yellow VW Bug character from the “Transformers” series and set in the fictional town of Brighton Falls in 1987.
While instantly recognizable, the boardwalk did undergo a few transformations of its own before those movies filmed — a not uncommon procedure, according to Jessie Durant, the Beach Boardwalk’s archivist.
“It’s just amazing to see with ‘Us’ and ‘Bumblebee’ how they transformed the boardwalk, ” she said.
For “Bumblebee,” that included changing all of the signage to Brighton Falls instead of Santa Cruz.
“There’s so much detail that goes into making it realistic for your audience. Nothing can be overlooked if you want it to be believable,” Durant noted.
Santa Cruz also appeared under a pseudonym in Clint Eastwood’s 1983 “Sudden Impact,” when his Dirty Harry character finds himself on a forced vacation in San Paulo. His path crosses with a serial killer bent on avenging a gang rape, leading to a climactic chase scene that — spoiler alert — involves a fall from the Giant Dipper and subsequent impalement on the horn of a carousel unicorn.
Concerned about the park’s image, the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk leadership hesitated when filmmakers approached them a few years later about using the area as the primary set for a vampire movie with some “unsavory crime,” according to Durant.
“Having the name be different helped convince them,” she said.
Starring Kiefer Sutherland, Jason Patric, Jami Gertz and Corey Haim, 1987’s “Lost Boys” not only put the fictional town of Santa Carla on the map but has led to occasional screenings of the comic horror movie at the boardwalk.
The film has been part of the boardwalk’s Fright Flicks series in October, which last year kicked off with “Us.” This year, “Lost Boys” inaugurates its summer series of free Friday night movies on the beach at 9 p.m. June 14.
“It wouldn’t be the same if ‘Lost Boys’ hadn’t been filmed here, for us or the movie,” Durant said.
Of course, there are more Santa Cruz locations featured in “Lost Boys” than just the boardwalk. A half-mile away, the Santa Cruz Wharf is where the avuncular Max (Edward Herrmann) runs a video shop with an unusually angled storefront, a space occupied today by the Santa Cruz Bay Company gift shop.
Atlantis Fantasyworld comic book shop was made to appear in the movie as if it were on the Santa
Cruz Beach Boardwalk. The store has relocated twice since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake damaged its downtown location. Owner Joe Ferrara, who appeared as an extra in “Lost Boys,” sells exclusive replicas of the movie’s “Vampires Everywhere” comic book prop at the current location, 1020 Cedar St.
The exterior shots of the hillside home where Patric and Haim’s characters live with their grandfather (Wilford Brimley) are of the long-closed clubhouse at the former Pogonip country club, viewable today from city-owned trails accessed from 501 and 410 Golf Club Drive.
The boardwalk only makes a cameo in 2012’s “Chasing Mavericks,” which focuses the camera instead on Santa Cruz’s famous surf breaks of Pleasure Point and Steamer Lane, as well as West Cliff Drive and Lighthouse Point above them.
The movie tells the story of real-life surfer Richard “Frosty” Hesson’s coaching of his young protege Jay Moriarity, who at just
16 years old surfed the mammoth Mavericks waves north of Half Moon Bay. Sadly, Pleasure Point is also where local surfers and Moriarity’s friends and family held a memorial “paddle out” after his death in an overseas free-diving accident just before he turned 23.
The film also covers the time Moriarity (Jonny Weston) spent on land, including working at Pleasure Pizza, 4000 Portola Road, where he convinces Hesson (Gerard Butler) to train him and has a run-in with a rival surfer. The original of three
locations in Santa Cruz, opened in 1975 and now owned by a former Google executive chef, Pleasure Pizza today has a large framed “Chasing Mavericks” poster and photos of wave-riding surfers on its walls as well as surfboards on the ceiling.
Not open to the public, but still in business, is the Pearson Arrow Surfboards factory at 1115 Thompson Ave., where Hesson takes Moriarity to buy his “sacred spear” from surfboard shaper Bob Pearson (Channon Roe). You can visit the
Pearson Arrow store, though, at 2324 Mission St., and find a tribute to Moriarity on its website, www. arrowsurfshop.com. The Shrine of St. Joseph, at 555 West Cliff Drive, is where Moriarity tries to comfort Hesson after a funeral service for another key character in the movie.
For Durant, the decades of moviemaking in Santa Cruz provide not just entertainment but a boon to her work as an archivist.
Films “are a great resource for documenting what the boardwalk looked like at a certain time and place, and you get to see things moving and easy access to moving images of the boardwalk is not readily available,” she explained.
A recent restoration of the 1917 silent film “Mothers of Men,” for example, included some scenes filmed in the boardwalk’s Casino and Cocoanut Grove.
“It was really interesting to see such early footage of that space,” Durant said. “It’s nice that these things can still be discovered and with technology we can reference them now.”