Movie buffs in general, and Alfred Hitchcock fans in particular, gathered Sept. 26 to walk where the famously rotund director once strode in the historic center of San Juan Bautista in 1957 while filming the psychological thriller, Vertigo.
Based on a French novel “D’entre les morts” (The Living and the Dead), the film starred James Stewart and Kim Novak. At the time, Stewart thought the film was inconsequential, but over the years it has been deemed a classic that has resulted in walking tours at both primary shooting locations in San Francisco and San Juan Bautista.
Marcos Vizcaino, senior park aid at San Juan Bautista State Historical Park, described the third annual event as “falling under the spell of Hitchcock,” with an afternoon dedicated to the film, beginning with the guided tour and lecture of the film’s locations within the park.
“They used the plaza stables and the plaza hall next door to the stables for the courtroom scene in the movie,” he said. “And they used both the exterior and interior of the mission church.”
Anyone who has been inside the mission and seen the film knows the two are very different.
“At the time of the filming in 1957, the church was still damaged from the 1906 earthquake (which leveled much of San Francisco),” he said. “It had suffered significant damage, so what they did was just fill up the arches and plastered over everything. And it remained that way over the next 50 years and through the filming.”
For the scene of Stewart climbing the winding staircase inside the tower that did not really exist at the mission, the crew returned to Paramount Studios to film it on a sound stage.
“They did shoot a scene at the mission where Stewart and Kim Novak are standing in the entrance and then they cut to the scene where they went up the tower, which was shot in Hollywood,” Vizcaino said.
He said the filming took a little under two weeks. The mission was picked because Hitchcock wanted a location that reflected dark mood of the movie.
“One of the producers felt this was a perfect place,” he said. “Hitchcock had a tradition at this point of his career of filming in Northern California. Part of it was filmed in San Francisco and they wanted another location that was moody and mysterious. They thought the San Juan Bautista Mission was perfect. The only thing they didn’t like was that it didn’t have a bell tower.”
The tower was created in what is called a matt process, where the mission was filmed through a piece of glass that had a tower painted on it.
“Because they didn’t have a tower and while they rehearsed the scene to get the correct angle where Novak’s character falls out of the tower, they brought a crane out here and hoisted up a dummy to what they thought was the appropriate height of the tower they were going to recreate and then dropped it several times,” he said.
Vizcaino has been leading the tours all three years in cooperation with the Plaza History Association, a nonprofit, to highlight the park and its history that includes the filming of Vertigo.
“Three years ago they decided to do this tour and lecture, and then show the film, which we’re going to do tonight at 8 p.m. on a giant inflatable screen on the grass portion in the park,” he said.
He said the tours’ popularity has grown over the last three years.
“The first year we had about 50 people on the tour,” he said. “Last year we had about 65 people. The response has been very positive. A lot of them come because they’re Hitchcock fans and they’re curious about San Juan Bautista and the mission. They usually have an attraction to this place and this gives them an opportunity to learn more.”
Rory O’Conner said he was taking the tour because he leads free walking tours (www.sfcityguides.org) in San Francisco that include the filming locations for Vertigo.
“I take people around to all the locations, including the flower shop, which is still there,” he said and he described how Hitchcock took all day to film a 57-second scene. “Because of the hot lights they had to keep replacing the flowers that wilted.”
Linda and Richard Raw, from Los Banos, were on the tour because he is a Hitchcock fan.
“We go to as many of the locations where he filmed as we can,” he said. “We were just at Bodega Bay, where he did The Birds.”
Vizcaino said he researched the film by reading historical records at the park.
“Another source was a book that came out recently titled, “Vertigo, the Making of a Hitchcock Classic,” he said.
During the tour, he led the group into the stables. As they gathered on one side, he explained, “The film company used our historic museum artifacts and a lot of folks think those were Hollywood props, but they weren’t. If you watch the film you’ll see that everything that’s in the stable in the movie is still right here.”
In particular, a white horse, which was strategically featured in the film as Stewart stood by it and even patted it, remains as stoic as ever, and has its own tale to tell.
“The horse is actually from the 1890s, and it’s known as a Toledo horse,” Vizcaino said, “which is a mannequin that saddle-makers would use to fashion the saddle. It’s made out of paper-mâché and Plaster of Paris. By 1957, he was looking a little shabby. A couple of years ago he was looking really bad because he was over 120 years old. So, members of our local theater group, El Teatro Campesino, offered to repair him for free and they gave him a facelift.”
During the tour he described how various scenes were filmed and compared them to photographs that he passed around to show how the buildings looked in 1957, compared with today. He read some of the characters’ lines from the movie to show how they described actual buildings and trees in the park.
“When people come back to watch the film, they’ll have a better understanding of how it was actually shot,” he said. “During the tour, I have people stand in the position of where the camera was as I stand where Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak stood.”
