Sacramento Area Hot Spots for Filming Movies

Why Sacramento-based filmmakers need look no farther than their own hometown to find one of Hollywood's best-kept secrets

PART FOUR: Sacramento has also supplied the Hollywood industry with some marvelous locations in more recent films. From the 1980s, The Stunt Man, starring Peter O'Toole, Steven railsback and Barbara Hershey, made use of the Sunset Bridge in Fair Oaks. The 1984 film The River's Edge, starring Crispin Glover and Dennis Hopper was shot along the river in Goeth Park. The 1996 film Wisdom, starring Emilio Estevez, used several downtown locations. In 1998, Clint Eastwood used downtown Sacramento's 24th and L streets to represent New York of the 1950s for his film, Bird. Two years later, he would return to use Sacramento locations again for the film, Pink Cadillac. Eastwood was even able to use the Crest theater to watch dailies, saving on time and logistics.

More recently, News10's Jonathan Mumm presented an interesting visual retrospective of many other films that have used Sacramento and surrounding areas to represent a variety of other geographic locals, as well as a number of different time periods.


Courtesy News10, Sacramento

Herein lies the beauty of our town. Filmmakers see Sacramento as a place of visual and financial possibilities. This is primarily because this town and surrounding locations provides so many different landscapes.

As Sacramento continues to grow, perhaps it will make history again, break new ground, and become a place unique among other industry cities. But it need not change for the worse. After all, filmmakers have sought out Sacramento for its pleasing blend of old and new. If the town maintains that bled, it will always have the appeal of the riverboat town captured on film over 80 years ago in Steamboat Bill, Jr. To live in Sacramento is to live in any number of different environments—New York, Los Angeles, or Everytown U.S.A.

Only in Sacramento can one work or live in one environment and then effortlessly pop, almost as magically as a film's edit, down the block to a deli inside and old Victorian or down to the river for a relaxing afternoon playing hooky on the banks of our own "Mississippi."

And to those who continue to deride Sacramento because they feel it should have a grand continuity, a sameness, a plainness; to those who fee that this town is too eclectic...

...what is the harm in that?