Filmmaker is living his S.F. dream
If Kim Bass looked over from his director’s chair perched on Treasure Island and across the choppy, bright blue San Francisco Bay just a few yards away, he might be able to spot the Ghirardelli Chocolate factory where he used to sling scoops of ice cream. But Bass doesn’t make hot fudge sundaes anymore. The “In Living Color” writer and creator of Nickelodeon’s “Keenan and Kel” makes movies now.
“I started washing dishes,” confessed
Bass on a break from filming shots for his latest film “HeadShop,” a comedy-drama that takes place in Oakland. “Then I bused tables, and finally … I got to make the sundaes. I got my paper hat.”
Forty years ago, when he was 20, Bass briefly lived in a rooming house on Polk Street where he slept on the floor until it was his turn to use the lone bed. He served tourists ice cream during the day and dreamed of making movies and television at night. “All I ever wanted to do is tell my stories,” beamed Bass.
Bass, who grew up in upstate New York, was back in town for just a few days, here to shoot exterior shots for “HeadShop.” The majority of the Oakland and San Francisco scenes were filmed on the famed Desilu Studios in Los Angeles. And to hear Bass tell it, the film was never intended to be shot in the Bay Area anyway.
“It was originally going to take place in Atlanta,” Bass rather sheepishly explained. Bright-eyed and energetic, Bass wrote the script in just three weeks. It was a tragic twist of fate that drew his attention to the Bay Area. While reading about Oakland’s Ghost Ship warehouse fire that took the lives of 36 people in December, Bass was struck by the income disparity between living in Oakland and San Francisco.
“I thought, you know, San Francisco is such an iconic city, and look what’s happening economically in San Francisco,” said Bass. “The difference between San Francisco and going across the Bay Bridge to Oakland is more than noticeable.”
That very visual difference, determined Bass, worked beautifully as a metaphor for his lead character, a therapist named Latrice who is forced to leave her life of privilege in San Francisco and set up shop in Oakland. The proximity between Latrice’s seemingly glamorous past juxtaposed against her more workingclass present was exactly what Bass was hoping to achieve. “She makes a change literally and metaphorically crossing that bridge,” said Bass.
“It’s all about ‘The Bridge,’ ” said actress Nicole Ari Parker of the day’s shooting schedule. The small film crew planned to hop from Treasure Island to Oakland and back to Telegraph Hill. Parker, who plays Latrice, spent much of her day in the driver’s seat of a Mercedes convertible, wallowing in her metaphoric move across the bay.
“Kim is so creative. It’s not just, you know, doing the regular standard shots that you need,” Parker said. “He is really getting some of those beautiful shots that capture emotion.”
Parker, whose credits include appearing in such films as “Boogie Nights” and “Soul Food” and playing Blanche DuBois in a Broadway revival of “Streetcar Named Desire,” leads a cast that includes Loretta Devine, Marla Gibbs, Michael Jai White, Deon Cole, Jay Jablonski and Evan Ross. And although the cast is certainly all-star caliber, it’s designed to be a reflection of the diversity of Oakland. “I like to think of it less as a revolution and more as a realistic depiction,” said Parker of the actors in “HeadShop.” “It’s just that someone decided to depict what a real city block would look like.”
Production had set up in a windy Treasure Island parking lot, but the crew was on a tight schedule. Bass’ sister Carla, an Oakland resident and film crew member clad from head to toe in Oakland A’s apparel, was tapping her watch. Parker was whisked away and sent to a small trailer to get her makeup done, and Kim Bass was ordered to get the show quite literally on the road. The accomplished director, with a handful of projects up in the air, was all too happy to sit in that director’s chair and reminisce about ice cream sundaes at Ghirardelli Square.
“He loves it up here,” Parker said as she motioned one perfectly manicured and accessorized hand over toward the bay.
Bass will have his chance to return. The director and screenwriter has purchased the rights to the life story of Philip Goldstein/Graham, a real-life World War II hero who has spent the past 60 or 70 years as a regular old San Franciscan, keeping his gripping war tales to himself. Only recently, the 97-year-old Graham wrote an autobiography titled “Jewboy vs. the Luftwaffe,” a book that fell into the hands of Bass. The energetic filmmaker has found his next story to tell.
“I thought movies were made by magic people,” said Bass of his childhood ambition. “And I said, ‘Mom, when I grow up, I want to be one of the magic people.’ ”
“I thought, you know, San Francisco is such an iconic city, and look what’s happening economically in San Francisco.” Kim Bass, filmmaker