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LMGI COMPASS
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Spring 2020
up in hotels. "We kind of had to work around them," said Lee,
"and for the most part, it worked out well. Mr. Tyler would wake
up early, so that was fine, but then he wouldn't be up late, which
was tough on him." With that week of night shoots scheduled,
tough may be an understatement, but they somehow made it all
work and, in the end, Lee was able to leave feeling good about his
relationship with Tyler and the other tenants.
An Ever-Changing City
"When I was scouting," Lee said, "I'd end up talking to multi-
generational native San Franciscans … an Irish family, a
Vietnamese family or a Mexican family, and I'd tell them what the
film was about and every one of them was either dealing with the
effects of gentrification at that very time, or had a family member
who was being pushed out."
In making a film about how the old San Francisco is vanishing
each and every day, Daniel Lee and the filmmakers would often
scout locations only to discover they had vanished in only a
matter of weeks and of the locations ultimately featured in the
film, a number of them no longer exist as well, making the film, in
a way, a time capsule of the city.
The docks at Hunters Point (881 Innes Avenue) in an area called
Indian Basin along San Francisco's eastern shoreline were perhaps
the second most important and most featured location in the film.
The picturesque area appears in the opening moments of the film
and is revisited throughout in a number of key scenes. Like many
of the other locations for the film, securing Hunters Point as a
location was no easy task. "We spent months trying to get access
to that dock," Talbot recalled. Ultimately, the key to securing the
location lay in completing a specific request by the city: replacing
an old, decaying fence around the entire area after the shoot.
"Homeless people were sneaking in and the governing body was
looking for a way to prevent that," said Lee, "it was the only way
we were going to be allowed to shoot there."
Right away there was a pretty major issue. Lee priced out what it
would cost to remove the old fence and replace it only to discover
that it would literally cost as much as two or three of their other
locations on the film!
By that time, Talbot and the rest of the team were in love with the
location, so Lee figured out that he could use a city company to
handle the installation, which would be a rebatable cost. Folding
it into the rebate brought the expense of replacing the fence
down, and that one discovery made shooting at that Hunters
Point possible.
It would not be the last time on the project that Lee would have to
find creative solutions to financial roadblocks. "Having the ability
to think and exist in multiple circles that seemingly don't overlap,
like art vs logistics, certainly helps," said Lee.
As of this writing, the entire area at Hunters Point is set to be
Jimmie (Jimmie Fails) & Montgomery
(Jonathan Majors) outside Grandpa
Allen's house
