Tinsel Town South: : San Diego’s Become ‘Anywhere, U.S.A.’ for Filming TV Commercials
When a Japanese producer of television commercials wanted to show that Kirin Beer is popular among Americans from San Francisco to the Mississippi River, he simply came to San Diego--and photographed the steep incline of B Street at 20th, and then filmed the paddle boat Showboat with Point Loma in the background.
When GMC of Canada wanted a television commercial showing a new model truck dropping a fishing boat into a lake of the Canadian Rockies, the film crew came to the shore of Lake Hodges near Escondido.
When the Chicago-based Marshall Field department store wanted to show models wearing the newest line of bathing suits at Lake Michigan, the producer came to San Diego Bay.
When an International Car Wash Assn. television commercial called for a scene showing a car being washed in front of a home that could just as well be in Oregon as in Georgia as in Maine, they found just the right home in Coronado.
When a Midwestern auto dealer wanted a television commercial comparing his cars to the durability of camels in Saudi Arabia, his producer lined up a couple of desert ships and shot the scene on sand dunes off Interstate 8 east of San Diego.
And when the Miller’s Outpost clothing stores wanted a stylistic television commercial capitalizing on the popularity of TV’s Miami Vice, they filmed their actors driving across the Coronado Bridge and along the downtown streets of San Diego at night.
San Diego is not only America’s Finest City, it also may be America’s Most Generic City.
From throughout the nation--and from around the world--advertising agencies and production companies in growing numbers are coming to San Diego to film their commercials.
- They come here for the usually good weather. A West German mail-order house scouted the world to determine where its teams of photographers and models could count on the most sustained sunshine, and they decided to spend five weeks in San Diego every fall.
- They come here because production costs are cheaper. Not only do local directors and producers charge between 20% and 50% less than their Los Angeles counterparts, but it’s cheaper to rent a fancy home here for the day as a backdrop for, say, a car commercial, than to rent a similar house in Los Angeles. “And in L.A., bystanders will actually stand in the way of a camera unless you give them money to move along, because they know that in L.A. you’ll pay them to get out of the way. Down here, if you ask someone to move, they will,” said Mel Hall, who owns the Cinira Corp., a small motion picture company here.
- And they come here because San Diego doesn’t necessarily look like San Diego. “This place is Anywhere, U.S.A.,” says Karen Gross, a local production logistics coordinator who helps line up everything from camera cars to props to actors to catered meals on location for out-of-town production companies.
Not only can San Diego be unidentifiable--someone selling jeans in Houston doesn’t want his customers realizing the commercial was shot in San Diego--but it also can offer such basic shooting locations as beaches, parks, mountains, backcountry roads and deserts, all within relatively easy reach of one another.
“Commercials sell the good life, a feeling, a mood. We can offer that,” says Wally Schlotter, director of the Motion Picture and Television Bureau of the Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce and the city’s No. 1 cheerleader in bringing film crews to the area.
To promote the city’s wide choice of shooting locations, Schlotter’s bureau has distributed a slick notebook of photographs, titled “San Diego On Call,” which graphically shows to location scouts in a moment what the area has to offer, literally from A (airport) to Z (the San Diego Zoo), from high-tech glitz (the Golden Triangle) to old and restored charm (the U.S. Grant Hotel and the Gaslamp Quarter), from desert (Borrego Springs) to jungle (San Diego Wild Animal Park).
The book includes, as well, a reference catalogue giving out-of-towners such information as where to get a rewritten script photocopied at 3 in the morning to where to track down a ’41 Packard to who to see for underwater photography.
Out-of-town location scouts and production companies say that the San Diego public as a whole--and Schlotter’s office in particular--are among the most cooperative in the country.
“Of all the motion picture bureaus we’ve worked with, San Diego’s is the most courteous, the most knowledgeable and the most helpful,” said Matt Merki, who produces television commercials for Miller’s Outpost. “There are so many productions going on in L.A. that the little people like me get lost in the shuffle. We’re treated well in San Diego.”
“San Diego is hassle-free,” said Gerry Cappel, a Los Angeles-based location scout who scours the country to match locations to storyboards. “It’s less expensive to work in San Diego because you don’t need permits that you need in so many other cities, like Los Angeles.
“And just one call to the film bureau is all you need to line things up. They’ll do everything from getting the police for traffic control to making the arrangements so we can shoot in front of the Old Globe.”
And San Diegans are less callous toward the film industry than is Los Angeles, Cappel said. “We needed to shoot a boat launch. In L.A., I would have had to call seven boat dealers to find someone to cooperate. We went to San Diego and only had to call one dealer to get what I needed. San Diego cooperates.”
Tom Kakazu, another Los Angeles-based location scout who works closely with Japanese producers, said he steered the Kirin Beer commercial to San Diego “because so many film crews shoot in L.A. and we wanted a new look. There are no problems in San Diego, and not the crowds to contend with. People don’t make themselves obnoxious in San Diego.”
Besides, he said, the commercial storyboard called for steep hills such as Japanese tourists have seen in San Francisco, and a Mississippi River scene. “We could have gone to Louisiana and San Francisco, but it was easier to just go to San Diego for both scenes,” he said.
Gross, the local production coordinator, said that North Torrey Pines Road is probably the single most photographed highway in the United States for new car commercials and showroom videos, what with its pleasing curves and grades and the beach backdrop.
So why aren’t even more commercials photographed in San Diego?
“We’re far enough away from Los Angeles to be considered a separate city, but we’re still in the shadow of the biggest media city in the world,” said John DeBello of Four Square Productions in National City. “It’s not easy to grow a flower in the shade. There’s a mindset that Hollywood is where it’s at. It seems that having a Hollywood address on your business card is more important than who you are. We’ve come in at 50% (of the bid by a Hollywood firm) and still lost the contract, not based on the strength of our sample work but because the other guy wore Gucci.”
Rob Summer, president of Western Video & Film, says that some out-of-state production companies will film once in Los Angeles but then turn to San Diego for subsequent jobs “because they can get around town here easier and don’t need all the location permits.
“But others will still go to L.A. so they can ‘play Hollywood.’ It sounds sexy and great. ‘Hollywood’ is the magic word,” he said. “When I pitch jobs, people might think I’m calling from a phone booth and don’t realize that we’ve got 35 full-time people and a 20,000-square-foot facility.”
Said Cinira’s Hall, “Our biggest problem in San Diego is in getting people to have confidence in who we are and what we can do for them. We say we’re as good as L.A. but cheaper. But ad agencies are not all that concerned about how they spend their clients’ money, so that’s why so many will still go there.”
In fact, not even San Diego-based advertising agencies are sold on San Diego and turn, instead, to Los Angeles production companies.
“We use L.A. because there are better cameramen, better directors and most of the production facilities are in L.A.,” said Hal Maynard, creative director at WFC Advertising, which has offices in San Diego and Phoenix. “There’s more talent in L.A. San Diego is a small town with small budgets; L.A. is a big town with big budgets. That’s what it boils down to.”
Others note that San Diego production companies do not have some of the exotic camera and lighting equipment that their Los Angeles counterparts do, that there is no film processing house in San Diego to develop 35-millimeter movie film, and that crews have to rent expensive camera cars from Los Angeles for the day if they need to film a moving scene.
Local boosters argue, on the other hand, that 35mm movie film can be processed in Los Angeles and returned to San Diego overnight, and that it is cheaper to rent a camera car, exotic cameras and the like for the day from Los Angeles than for a local outfit to buy such equipment and then have to charge even higher rates for its use, since they are not often needed.
Los Angeles-based commercial film makers have little reason to come to San Diego, especially if the commercial can be shot in one or two days, said Jerry Bernstein, president of the Assn. of Independent Commercial Producers.
“We’ll go down there if our client is there or if we’re doing hidden-camera commercials because a lot of test marketing is performed in San Diego,” he said.
“But the biggest problem with San Diego is that while it’s a nice place to shoot, it’s too far to go back and forth in one day and still get in a full-day of shooting. That little bit of distance really can come into play.”
Answered Gross, “There are some inconveniences in filming in San Diego but they’re not insurmountable.
“What I find myself selling most about San Diego is the quality of life we have here. I tell them, if you’ve got something that can be shot in L.A. or be shot here, wouldn’t you rather come here?”
