Seeing what you saw on silver screen

Never mind movie stars. For travelers, movie settings can steal the show.

Films can create places in our minds that are more vivid than even the real locales, such as San Francisco in the 1958 “Vertigo.” After seeing that classic Alfred Hitchcock suspense movie as a youngster in St. Louis, I added the Golden Gate city to my list of must-see places. Even now, when I think of San Francisco, it’s the city of the ‘50s, where Kim Novak, playing shopgirl Judy Barton who impersonates the beautiful, haunted Madeleine Elster, wanders up and down Nob Hill.

California has been portrayed countless times in movies that could serve as travel guides to the state, its history and zeitgeist. In San Francisco, for instance, you can visit Ft. Point, where James Stewart, as Scottie Ferguson, the retired detective with a fear of heights in “Vertigo,” rescues Judy/Madeleine after she attempts suicide by jumping into the bay beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. She lives in the Brocklebank Apartments, 1000 Mason St., near the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill; stares, entranced, at a portrait of the long-dead Carlotta Valdes in the Palace of the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park; and stands with a nosegay at Carlotta’s grave in the cemetery at Mission Dolores, at 16th and Dolores streets.

In the unforgettable climax of the film, Judy/Madeleine falls to her death from the tower at Mission San Juan Bautista, about 95 miles south of San Francisco.

Books such as William A. Gordon’s “Shot on This Site” (Citadel Press, 1995) and “Landmark L.A.,” edited by Jeffrey Herr (Angel City Press, 2002), can help you track down memorable movie settings in the Golden State. As the home of the film industry, L.A. is especially blessed with them, including the Shakespeare Bridge in Franklin Hills, which led to the Emerald City in “The Wizard of Oz,” released in 1939, and the Greek Revival Banning House in Wilmington, which was the governor’s mansion in 1998’s “Primary Colors.” L.A. has provided settings for so many motion pictures that Herr says moviegoers see the city as “a place that can be transformed into anything.”

I’m also fascinated by films that depict the history of California or define it in our imaginations.

Roman Polanski’s 1974 “Chinatown,” with Jack Nicholson as a gumshoe who wears impeccable double-breasted suits, is not only about incest in a powerful Southern California family but also about the critical importance of water in the growth of Los Angeles. Woody Allen’s 1977 “Annie Hall” portrays a widening cultural gap between the East and West coasts, with Allen, as neurotic Alvy Singer, unwilling to wrench himself away from the “dying city” of New York.

Robert Sklar, a film critic and New York University professor of cinema studies, says movies started making people aware of California in the early part of the 20th century, when audiences began following the golden lives of Hollywood stars. Magazine stories and publicity stills portrayed the California of film royalty, with its mountains and deserts, as a place to enjoy “a new kind of leisure -- healthy, athletic, outdoors,” Sklar says.

The idea was later extended to the seacoasts of California by a string of ‘60s sun-and-sand teen frolics starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. Movies such as “Beach Blanket Bingo” and “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini” (shot at Paradise Cove in Malibu) put Southern California in the American consciousness.

Even in the movies, California had its share of trouble, crime, sorrow, deceit and unhappy endings. These were memorably portrayed in the stark black-and-white California cityscapes of film noir: the San Francisco of John Huston’s 1941 “The Maltese Falcon” and the L.A. of Billy Wilder’s 1944 “Double Indemnity.” Those are two of my favorite California movies.

The film that set the place indelibly in my mind is “The Graduate,” a loss-of-innocence tale that hit me at just the right moment when it was released in 1967. In it, Southern California is portrayed as a place of swimming pools, sunglasses and hypocrisy, where 21-year-old Benjamin Braddock, played by Dustin Hoffman, is seduced by Mrs. Robinson, an older woman and family friend, then falls in love with her daughter Elaine.

After breaking free of Mrs. Robinson, he chases Elaine to UC Berkeley in a convertible with the top down, crossing the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as the familiar Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack plays. It’s a great shot, with the wind in Ben’s hair as he rushes away from the tarnished morals and entanglements of the older generation, which seemed to me, as a teenager, to be what California was all about.

L.A. takes another beating in Robert Altman’s 1992 movie industry satire “The Player,” with such memorable local settings as South Pasadena’s Rialto Theater, where lanky Tim Robbins, in the role of the slick movie mogul Griffin Mill, kills an aspiring screenwriter. Later, he takes a call while lying in a vat of therapeutic mud at Two Bunch Palms spa resort in Desert Hot Springs. I loved that scene so much that I had a mud bath at Two Bunch Palms in honor of Altman and Southern California almost immediately upon moving here.

“L.A. Story,” on the other hand, takes all the kooky illogic of a city where weather reports are necessary only every four days and outdoor terraces at restaurants are heated and turns it in to the stuff of romance.

“I was deeply depressed,” says Steve Martin as the movie’s wacky weatherman Harris Telemacher, “but I didn’t know it because I was so happy all the time.” When he falls in love, he goes roller-skating in the L.A. County Museum of Art, which I visit often with Martin in mind.

You’ll see signs along our freeways that look like the one in “L.A. Story.” In the movie, one sign tells Harris how to change his life for the better. I’m still looking for that sign. Until I find it, I’ll have to rely on Hollywood for my happy endings.