1994 Bayside Promotions View of San Francisco Bay Area Film Industry

A scarce 1994 pictorial promotional map of the San Francisco Bay Area, produced by Bayside Promotions. It highlights businesses related to the region's often-underappreciated film industry.

A Closer Look

Oriented towards the north, the view includes San Jose and Silicon Valley in the foreground, with San Francisco and Marin County in the background and portions of the East Bay, including Oakland, at right. Businesses relating to all aspects of the film industry, from casting and rentals to digital graphics and distribution, are labelled throughout. An alphanumeric surrounding the map, which resembles a film reel, corresponds to an index of businesses at bottom. Household names like Pixar, Lucasfilm, Skywalker Sound, and Industrial Light and Magic appear alongside more ephemeral and less prominent names. Aside from businesses, local landmarks such as the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges, the Bay Area's international airports, and sports stadiums are included, their locations very roughly approximated in some cases.

California's Other Tinseltown

Far less often associated with the film industry than Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area has nevertheless played an important role in the history of film from its very beginnings. The Miles Brothers, based in San Francisco, were pioneers in the film industry, setting up the first motion picture exchange and shooting a 'phantom ride' down Market St. in San Francisco (A Trip Down Market Street) on the eve of the great earthquake and fire of 1906, which destroyed most of the buildings seen in the film, as well as the Miles Brothers studio. Another early film company, the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company, was based in Niles Canyon in the East Bay, where they shot a series of popular films, including Charlie Chaplin's 1915 film The Tramp.

The Bay Area has enjoyed a second round of film prominence since the 1970s due to its association with several directors and studios, especially Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. Not only did Lucasfilm and its affiliates produce the Star Wars franchise, it also invested in computer animation and digital graphics, hiring a team that took on the name Pixar and became an independent company in 1986.

Publication History and Census

This map was prepared and published by Bayside Promotions, a local company headed by Art Bodner (illustrated at bottom-right) that produced similar promotional maps of major American cities in the 1980s and 1990s (earlier as International Caricature Productions and Cityscape Graphics). The present map is similar to an equally scarce 1990 map published by Bayside Promotions titled 'Northern California Bay Area - A Production Paradise,' attributed to Rob Zell-Breier and Terry Cheney, frequent collaborators with Bodner. We are unaware of any examples of this map in institutional collections or on the market.