“On Location” Filming in San Diego County from 1985–2005: How a

Transcription

“On Location” Filming in San Diego County from
1985–2005: How a Cinematic Landscape Is Formed
Through Incorporative Tasks and Represented
Through Mapped Inscriptions
Christopher Lukinbeal
School of Geography and Development, The University of Arizona
The form of San Diego County’s cinematic landscape is shaped by processes of inscription, whereby particular
representational techniques are brought to bear, but also by processes of incorporation, which can be understood as
the off-camera decisions, tasks, and events that allow for filming to take place. One of the primary tasks involves
selecting sites with a high level of production value while minimizing costs and fulfilling the needs of the script.
The San Diego Film Commission (SDFC), which aids filmmakers in the tasks required to produce films, is a
key entity in shaping this region’s cinematic landscape. Where geography often focuses on how a film inscribes
meaning and identity into its form, I show how the form of a region’s cinematic landscape extends beyond a single
filmic event to engage a multiplicity of representations, tasks, and practices. I use a mixed method approach,
including spatial analysis to examine and map the inscripted form of San Diego’s cinematic landscape. In-depth
interviews and fieldwork were used to evaluate how a location’s production value plays a key role in the formative
process of incorporative tasks of an ever-changing landscape. Key Words: cinema, landscape, on-location filming,
San Diego, taskscape.
La forma del paisaje cinemático del Condado de San Diego está moldeada por procesos de inscripción, en los cuales
técnicas representacionales particulares son puestas en acción, pero también por procesos de incorporación, que
pueden entenderse como las decisiones fuera de cámaras, tareas y eventos que permiten que la filmación tenga
lugar. Una de las tareas primarias tiene que ver con la selección de sitios con alto nivel de valor de producción
pero minimizando costos y cumpliendo con los requerimientos del libreto. La Comisión Fı́lmica de San Diego
(SDFC), que ayuda a los cineastas en las tareas requeridas para producir pelı́culas, es una entidad clave en la
configuración del paisaje cinemático de la región. Allı́ donde la geografı́a a menudo enfoca la cuestión de cómo
una pelı́cula inscribe significado e identidad dentro de su forma, yo indico cómo la forma del paisaje cinemático
de una región va más allá de un simple evento fı́lmico para capturar una multiplicidad de representaciones, tareas
y prácticas. Utilizo un enfoque de método mixto, que incluye análisis espacial para examinar y cartografiar la
forma inscrita del paisaje cinemático de San Diego. Se utilizaron entrevistas a profundidad y trabajo de campo
para evaluar cómo el valor de producción de una locación juega un papel clave en el proceso formativo de tareas
incorporativas en un paisaje siempre cambiante. Palabras clave: cine, paisaje, rodaje en exteriores, San Diego, paisaje
de tareas.
C
inema and landscape share a similar problem: an inherent epistemological tension. On
the one hand, they are representational forms
or structured ways of seeing that “encapsulates the
notion of fixity—of a text already written” (Cresswell 2003, 270). On the other hand, cinema and
C 2012 by Association of American Geographers
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102(1) 2012, pp. 171–190 Initial submission, October 2007; revised submissions, August and November 2008, September 2010; final acceptance, September 2010
Published by Taylor & Francis, LLC.
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Lukinbeal
landscape are “arenas of practice” (Cresswell 2003,
270), “a palimpsest—a stratigraphy of practices and
texts” (Cresswell 2003, 278). Cinematic landscapes1 are
made up of the sites where filmmaking occurs, the tasks
involved in filmmaking, and the business practices of
the film production industry that lead to the formation
of cultural products. A single cultural product filmed
in a region never fully defines its cinematic landscape;
rather, a region’s cinematic landscape can never be totalized but always leads to new tasks, new contexts, and
new configurations of meaningful exchange within an
ongoing system of production. The form of San Diego
County’s cinematic landscape is an unfolding process
engendered by the excessive and incongruent ways it is
called forth and put to task. As Rose (2002, 462–63)
explained, “the only thing that landscape ever is is the
practice that makes it relevant.”
To understand the form of San Diego County’s
cinematic landscape requires addressing inscriptive and
incorporative modes of logic. As a structured way of
seeing, I use spatial analysis and cartographic representations to reveal spatial patterns of site usage and how
different production types (feature films, television
shows, television movies) produce different spatial configurations. Film geography has been dominated by the
textual metaphor (Cresswell and Dixon 2002); however, spatial analysis offers an alternative means to address how on-location filming, or location production,
“gets at issues around the translation of tangible urban
topography into the film medium” (Arnwine and Lerner
1997, 6). But, it could more aptly be described as the
transformation of sites into fragmented place narratives
that are to become key to an overall narrative continuity; such places fuse the spectator with the film, creating
a “superior unity” that allows filmic space to be realized
(Heath 1981, 40). Where spatial analysis begins to
address this translation through showing site usage, site
form, and interdependency of filmed sites, it does not
address the everyday business tasks that produce the initial form of a cinematic landscape. Spatial analysis and
cartography can delineate aspects of filming as layers of
spatial information that reiterates an inscriptive notion
of a fixed or finished product. Inscriptive findings augment other methods such as field observation and interviews, which, when combined together, work to expose
the taskscape of location production. I deploy the term
taskscape to emphasize the ongoing, or ontogenic, form
of a cinematic landscape that is not fixed or finished but
is always becoming. A key process of the taskscape is
assessing a location’s production value. Evaluation of a
site links inscriptive logic through the fixity of absolute
locations and their predetermined form, aesthetic, and
usage cost, with an incorporative logic that evaluates
how well a site meets the needs of a taskscape. As
such, the taskscape of location production lies at the
intersection of inscription and incorporation as it is an
arena of practices that leads to fixed representational
forms.
I first review why San Diego County is a film production center tied to the Hollywood film industry. I then
review the site data drawn from 1985 through 2005 and
the role that the San Diego Film Commission (SDFC)
plays in the taskscape of location production and the
mixed method approach deployed in this article. Following this I examine how inscriptive and incorporative
logic conceptualize the form of San Diego County’s cinematic landscape. Finally, I interrogate the form of San
Diego County’s cinematic landscapes through spatial
analysis and cartographic inscriptions and use this information as a platform to investigate the taskscape of
location production.
Hollywood South: San Diego as a Regional
Film Production Center
To understand the form of San Diego’s cinematic
landscape requires positioning it within the political economy of Hollywood’s film industry. Storper
and Christopherson (1985) proposed a four-fold location production model of Hollywood filming in
North America based on developed production centers, second-order centers, edge centers, and occasional
sites. This model characterizes location production in
the aftermath of the vertical integrated Golden Age
(1920–1950) of the studio system.
Responding to these broad macroeconomic changes,
the film production industry sought new cost-effective
ways to reinvigorate its economic base. Production became more flexible in terms of labor and capital and
more specialized with regard to the types of products
produced and the locations used for production (Storper and Christopherson 1985, 1987; Scott 2005).
Flexible specialization after the 1980s led to the rise
of regional film production centers throughout North
America (Lukinbeal 2004; Scott 2005), yet “the reagglomeration of the industry means the Los Angeles
area is the headquarters and technological center for an
industrial complex that has the whole world as its backlot” (Christopherson and Storper 1986, 272). The world
as backlot points to a system of regional networks of
production companies and their associated subcontractors (Storper and Christopherson 1985, 1987; Christopherson and Storper 1986; Coe 2000a, 2000b). Majors
Filming in San Diego County from 1985–2005
usually use subcontracts rather than make long-term
investments in nondeveloped production centers or in
their local labor unions. Thus, nondeveloped production centers are increasingly vulnerable to changing investment strategies (Coe 2000a, 2000b). Consequently,
the dispersion of location production activity is a highly
volatile process. For regional markets to capture and
perpetuate location production activity the development of infrastructure does not always guarantee steady
production.
The fourfold model of location production is based
on the type, volume, and impact of production within
a city, province, or state. Los Angeles and New York
City are the developed production centers in North
America, having accrued significant infrastructural investment and benefit from agglomeration economies.
Second-order centers are locations with extensive regional television and commercial ties; however, since
the mid-1980s their markets have increased in scale, as
they now compete with other centers for the variable
flow of location production occurring outside developed
centers (Lukinbeal 2004). Edge centers are those within
close proximity to developed centers. They thrive on
low-budget production where various economic incentives make it cheaper to film.
As an edge center, San Diego primarily competes
with other West Coast centers for economic runaways
that depart Los Angeles “to achieve lower production costs” (Monitor Company and the Screen Actors Guild 1999, 2). Incentives can include tax breaks,
no location fees on public property, cheap labor, and,
in the case of Canada, the exchange rate (an incentive that has decreased since the 1980s). San Diego’s
main competitors include Vancouver, New Mexico,
Florida, Hawaii, Phoenix, Portland, Salt Lake City, San
Francisco, and Seattle (Cathy Anderson, Film Commissioner and Chief Executive Officer, personal interview,
20 June 2005; Kathy McCurdy, Director of Features,
San Diego Film Commission, personal interview, 20
June 2005). Strictly in terms of economic runaways,
Vancouver is San Diego’s biggest competitor because
both specialize in television production and the competition is ongoing because of Canadian economic incentives (Coe 2000a, 2000b; Gasher 2002). Anderson
(personal interview, 16 December 1998) recalls, “[w]e
were told by a producer that they can make a $3 million
movie in Vancouver for $2.5 million even before you
start negotiating.”
On the aesthetic side, occasional filming sites typically deal with creative runaways or productions that
depart developed production centers “because the story
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takes place in a setting that cannot be duplicated for
other creative considerations” (Monitor Company and
the Screen Actors Guild 1999, 2). Geographic realism in location production refers to the usability of a
site in a fictional narrative (Lukinbeal 2006). In other
words, a site must have enough geographic realism for
it to be transformed into a cinematic place. San Diego
competes with other markets for creative runaways that
can offer a generic beachscape. In this market niche, its
main competition comes from other cities around Los
Angeles, Hawaii, and especially Florida.
San Diego’s proximity to Los Angeles can be seen
in both positive and negative terms. As Anderson (personal interview, 16 December 1998) suggests, “Through
the eyes of the camera San Diego looks a lot like Los
Angeles.” Because the look of a place plays a large role
in site selection, there must be a significant reason for a
producer to film in San Diego. Also, being outside the
film zone limits the amount of time a Los Angeles union
crew will work in San Diego. The film zone is a thirtymile radius centered at Beverly and La Cienega Boulevards in Los Angeles, and members of the Screen Actors
Guild and International Alliance of Theatrical Stage
Employees (IATSE) must be paid per diem for work outside of it (Storper 1989; Dick Counter, Past President,
Alliance of Motion Pictures and Television Producers,
phone interview, 10 December 1997). Within the zone
labor costs are standardized, and outside the zone costs
are higher, so productions typically limit shooting to six
days then return to Los Angeles to wrap up production
(Storper and Christopherson 1985).
As an edge center, San Diego is governed by the
variable flow of creative and economic runaway production; yet, with the rise of regional production centers,
San Diego has been able to produce a large number of
nonrunaway television shows because the independent
production company, Stu Segall, permanently located
there in 1991. With Stu Segall focused on television
productions, San Diego has been able to establish a stable, long-term infrastructural investment and a skilled
“below the line” regional labor pool. San Diego’s skilled
labor pool has become large enough to create their own
IATSE chapter and Stu Segall Production’s studio has
expanded into Tijuana to capture a share of the Mexican film and television market. Although television series often have limited budgets in comparison to feature
films, they have a much longer shooting schedule that
enables employees to expect and retain work for an extended period of time. Stu Segall Production’s focus on
television production allows for year-round activity and
a steady economic base (McCurdy personal interview,
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20 June 2005). Stu Segall’s close proximity (965 m) to
Montgomery Fields Airport allows for “above the line”
labor (stars, directors, screenwriters, and producers) to
fly to and from Los Angeles in under an hour.
Further aiding San Diego’s regional industrial
agglomeration is that Stu Segall Productions has an
annual production cycle of shooting television series
during the fall and winter and then shooting television
movies and feature films during the summer. San Diego
was the third largest producer of television shows in
the United States during the 1990s, which was directly
related to Stu Segall Productions. As of 2010, their studio was larger than twenty-two acres and has produced
“over 800 hours of prime time, network quality television series, 7 feature films and 30 two hour telefilms”
(Stu Segall Productions 2010). Although San Diego
will never grow large enough to challenge the dominance of the Hollywood film industry, it has solidified
an economic base that will permit the ongoing formation of a regional cinematic landscape.
Data, Context, and Mixed Methods
Data are primarily drawn from the SDFC, a nonprofit corporation funded by the city, county, the Port
District of San Diego, and more recently, the San Diego
Tourism Promotional Corporation. The SDFC’s job is
to attract, facilitate, troubleshoot, and permit filming
in San Diego County. Film commissions act to mitigate
problems that arise among film production companies,
local governments, and communities. They also play an
active role in local boosterism by encouraging economic
development and tourism.
In 1997 I began a working relationship with Cathy
Anderson, Film Commissioner and Chief Executive Officer, and Kathy McCurdy, Director of Features, at the
SDFC. These relationships enabled me to have access
to staff, local producers, and film production records on
file at the SDFC. All film permit records and production
notes at the SDFC were reviewed for locational information and geocoded. The geographic information systems (GIS) database consists of 1,788 geocoded points
representing a majority of the sites filmed in San Diego
from 1985 to 2005. The frequency of use at sites varies
greatly and therefore the number of filmed events totals
3,781. Only sites that could be verified were included
in this database.2 For example, Simon and Simon, a television series that was filmed in San Diego from 1980 to
1988, is dismissed because no verifiable documentation
could be obtained. Supplemental GIS data were compiled from the San Diego Association of Government’s
GIS Web site (http://www.sandag.cog.ca.us/). All GIS
data were georeferenced to State Planes Coordinates
and NAD83.
The goal of this research is to reveal the form of San
Diego County’s cinematic landscape through a focus on
location production. To do so requires a mixed method
approach that addresses the epistemological tension between the fixity of inscriptive logic and the fluidity of incorporative logic. Although the tensions between these
two epistemologies often lead to bifurcated information,
a mixed methods approach strengthens inquiry through
triangulation, complementarity, development, initiation, and expansion. Triangulation enhances empirical
inquiry by allowing different methodological results to
“converge or corroborate one another” (Greene, Caracelli, and Graham 1989, 256). Complementarity clarifies
and elaborates results from one method with the use of
another method. Development uses the “results from one
method to help develop or inform the other method”
(Greene, Caracelli, and Graham 1989, 259). Initiation
promotes new questions and perspectives through the
tensions, paradoxes, and contradiction inherent in a
mixed methods approach. Expansion extends the scope
of inquiry through the use of different methods (Greene,
Caracelli, and Graham 1989). Therefore, the mixed
methods approach used in this article does not strive
to present a cohesive metanarrative but rather exposes
different elements, processes, and knowledge about the
form(ation) of a region’s cinematic landscape.
Where spatial analysis is deployed to address the inscriptive logic of filmed sites, it also works as an iterative process to triangulate, complement, develop,
initiate, and expand knowledge about the taskscape of
location production. Spatial analysis interrogates which
sites were transformed in cinematic places but also acts
as an archeological tool to explore the ongoing formation of the cinematic landscape. Mapping and analyzing
filmed sites reveals a stratigraphy of texts written across
the region (Cresswell 2003) that can be inscribed into
cartographic form. Although mapping reveals a snapshot of the data compiled, the process of data compilation has qualitative applications as it questions why sites
are important to the tasks and decision-making process
of assessing a location’s production value. Eighty percent or 1,430 filmed sites were visited and photographed
to document their architectural and iconographic characteristics. This photographic database captures the
form, aesthetics, and surrounding milieu of filmed sites.
While the GIS and photography databases were being compiled, a thorough review and cross-referencing
of all SDFC documentation (production notes, news
stories, and ancillary information) about each production was undertaken. In-depth personal interviews with
Anderson, McCurdy, and Rob Dunson, a former location manager for Stu Segall Productions and now the
Director of Television at the SDFC, were conducted on
16 December 1998, 10 July 2000, and 20 June 2005.
Interview questions focused on the tasks, practices, and
decision making that led to specific sites being selected
for filming and on why specific sites and areas had high
or low frequencies of use. Other questions sought to uncover the process of how a location’s production value
is assessed.
Cinematic Landscape as Both Inscripted
and Incorporated
Representation frames an inscriptive mode of understanding cinema and landscape where a pregiven
form is prioritized over process as the essential formative
property of production. Inscription is “the transcribing
of form onto material” (Ingold 1993, 157). To conceive
of cinema or landscape as an inscription is to recognize a “pre-existing pattern, template or programme,
whether genetic or cultural . . . ‘realized’ in a substantive
medium” (Ingold 1993, 157). Cinematic landscapes as
representations or texts are inscribed as cultural products that draw from cultural images or webs of signification. Through an inscriptive mode of understanding
we can begin an examination of the spatial transformation of turning location production sites into cinematic
landscapes. The central property that remains invariant
throughout the transformation is the location’s look,
or key aspects needed of a location’s look, to produce
enough geographic realism to allow a viewer to suspend
disbelief and accept a narrative as taking place in a
particular locale.
This spatial transformation of sites screens out other
views of the city and county by continually constructing landscape out of disparate stages (sites) and backlots
(neighborhoods). Location production empties out the
everyday meanings associated with daily lived space and
constructs its own landscapes, or “theme-park backlots”
(Swan 2001, 95). In this sense, the local film commission “is part of the same agenda as the ‘malling’ of the
museum and the leveling of obsolete industrial plants to
make way for the next urban theme park” (Swan 2001,
96). Local signifieds are no longer tied to their everyday
signifiers: A hotel becomes a hospital, an administrative building becomes a police station, and a home becomes a hotel. Architectural signifiers and people-less
landscapes act as icons appropriating a sense of place
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onto the diegesis, or narrative account, of its meaning.
Moreover, through the process of creating a film, the
production worker’s labor must be removed to maintain
geographic realism and allow for suspension of disbelief,
reiterating the illusion that a film is a cultural product
rather than a cultural process.
An incorporative mode of understanding cinema and
landscape, by contrast, focuses on the processes through
which form is generated. Incorporation explores cinema
and landscape, “not as something that represents or reflects identity, but rather, as something that makes identity possible” (Rose 2006, 548). Incorporation is where
a cinematic landscape is not scripted as a cultural product, but rather exists as a preontological feature before
scripted modes of differentiation occur (Ingold 2006).
As such, incorporation not only moves away from a referential system of representation but precedes it with a
relational ontology of embodied movements inherent
in the taskscapes of production where landscape’s form
is perpetually in flux.
What is more, incorporation points toward an understanding of a cinematic landscape that resonates
with kinesthetic experiences and their emotional affect. With landscape as a noun we inscribe meaning
onto form; with landscape as a verb we incorporate
meaning into the production of form (Ingold 1993).
Landscape as a verb negates the sign as value, by mobilizing the sign as an affective agent of emotion or as
a kinesthetic experience in a taskscape. With inscriptive logic the sign is equivalent to reality (Baudrillard
1994), but with incorporative logic filmmakers are free
to fabricate “simulacral worlds through assemblages of
heterogeneous images” and locations (Clarke and Doel
2007, 598) where the sign is ascribed value based on its
ability to fulfill the needs of a taskscape.
With the taskscape of location production, the focus is on the array of kinesthetic activities inherent
in the business practices that generate the form of a
region’s cinematic landscape. Tasks can be defined as
“any practical operation, carried out by a skilled agent
in an environment, as part of his or her normal business
of life” (Ingold 1993, 158). Where taskscapes of location production transform sites into narrative places,
these tasks are always stretched and pulled into new
social and spatial contexts, producing new meanings
that exceed the process that calls the form of the cinematic landscape into existence. A cinematic landscape
is, therefore, never fully defined as representational because its meaningfulness is never temporally or spatially
exhausted by a single event, end product, or text. New
taskscapes emerge that allow the cinematic landscape
to unfold.
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Lukinbeal
A region’s cinematic landscape is one in motion, a
kinesthetic experience felt in the taskscape of production. The cinematic landscape resonates through movement and montage, an architectural practice of flow, a
plenum (Ingold 1993). The camera captures and articulates this architectural ensemble by tying it to a linear
narrative producing a simulated landscape shot by shot
(Bruno 2002). Narrative cinema is therefore a “modern cartography,” a “haptic way of site-seeing that turns
pictures into an architecture” (Bruno 2002, 8–9). Sense
of place and architecture link the taskscape of location
production with the ongoing formation of San Diego’s
cinematic landscape. The look of architecture and landscape are the essential reasons why location production
takes place: Filmmakers seek out unique looks in the
landscape that cannot be created on a studio set or
backlot. The cinematic landscape is an architectural
montage of buildings, parks, and other urban and rural
spaces, invested and charged with emotion because, as
Eisenstein (1987, 217) noted, “landscape is the freest
element of film, the least burdened with servile, narrative tasks, and the most flexible in conveying moods,
emotional states, and spiritual experiences.”
Bruno’s (2002) conceptualization of cinema as modern cartography focused on how cinema offers a mode
of navigating, framing, and building spatial ensembles
that link the spectatorial experience with the production of filmic space. In contrast, spatial analysis and
cartographic inscriptions move away from the spectatorial experience of filmic space to expose the initial sites
that are used to establish filmic space. Spatial analysis
offers epistemic value as it is not constrained by a single cultural product or the spectatorial experience but
rather offers a compilation of the multiplicity of sites
that form the foundation from which the form of a region’s cinematic landscape is built. Further, it allows the
multiplicity of sites to be analyzed to reveal spatial patterns of the form of a region’s cinematic landscape as a
whole, as well as how various production types produce
different spatial configurations.
Approaching a Region’s Cinematic
Landscape Through Cartographic
Inscriptions
The County of San Diego is 10,975.7 square kilometers, but the spatial extent of filming is 8,287 square
kilometers, or 76 percent of the county (all analysis
excludes the Pacific Ocean). A directional distribution
weighted standard deviational ellipse analysis was done
to evaluate whether filmed events exceed or fall short of
a spatial normal distribution and shows the directional
trend of filmed events.3 A single standard deviation was
used for all analysis where a spatial normal distribution would constitute 68 percent of the filmed events
within an ellipse. The mean center of the ellipse lies
northeast of Qualcomm Stadium in Kearney Mesa. No
directional distribution is apparent as the ellipse resembles a circle around the mostly heavily urbanized
area. The ellipse represents 861 square kilometers or
10 percent of the total spatial extent of filmed sites. A
vast majority of filming occurs within this ellipse, including 75 percent of the filmed sites and 80 percent
of all filmed events, showing that most filming occurs
within the ellipse, and filmed events exceed the spatial
normal distribution of the ellipse. To better represent
the spatial distribution of filmed events, and how they
exceed the spatial normal distribution of the ellipse,
filmed events were transformed into a raster surface, using kernel density analysis (Figure 1). This produced
four distinct high-density areas all lying within the ellipse: the downtown corridor, La Jolla, Kearney Mesa,
and the Mission Beach (MB), Ocean Beach (OB), and
Pacific Beach (PB) neighborhoods.
Although a majority of film activity occurs within
this ellipse, an average nearest neighbor distance analysis reveals that all filmed sites are highly clustered
with less than a 1 percent chance that this clustering is random (based on an index value of 0.37 and a z
score of –50.92). In contrast, a Moran’s I analysis shows
no global (countywide) pattern of clustering of filmed
events (based on an index value of 0.01 and a z score of
0.34).4
Localized clusters of filmed events with similar incident intensity can be found through the use of a hot spot
analysis. Results from this analysis show that 87 percent
of filmed sites fall within the normal or expected range
of localized site clustering. Hot spot clustering is a recurrent feature within the ellipse, where 96 percent of the
246 hot spots and none of the five cold spots are found.
These analyses show that on a global scale, film sites
are highly clustered but filmed events are not; however,
statistically significant amounts of filming as well as hot
spots occur within the ellipse (Figure 1).
The data set represents sixty-seven feature films,
sixty-one television movies, and thirty-two television
series accounting for 439 individual episodes. Television shows dominate activity in San Diego, representing 69 percent of the filmed events in comparison to television movies (17 percent) and feature films
(14 percent); however, television movies (ten) and
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Figure 1. Film production activity in San Diego County: 1985–2005. (Color figure available online.)
feature films (eight) use more sites on average per production than an individual episodic television show
(5.27). This difference can be attributed to the length
of the production (half-hour or one-hour episode vs.
a two-hour television movie or feature film) and the
budget of a production. The spatial extent of television
shows (7,479 square kilometers) constitutes 90 percent
of the spatial extent of filming in the county, followed
by feature films (7,010 square kilometers) at 85 percent and television movies (5,707 square kilometers) at
69 percent. The dominance of television show production accounts for its large spatial extent, whereas larger
budgets account for feature films exceeding television
movies’ spatial extent (Figure 2).
Producing weighted standard deviational ellipses for
each production type reveals that feature films display
the greatest north–south orientation. Although the feature film ellipse is only 13 percent of the total spatial extent for this production type, it accounts for 77 percent
of all feature filmed sites and 81 percent of feature filmed
events. The ellipse for television shows has the greatest east–west orientation and is only 12 percent of the
total spatial extent for this production type; however,
74 percent of all television show sites and 79 percent of
television show events occur in this ellipse. Although
television movies produced the smallest ellipse, repre-
senting 9 percent of the total spatial extent for this
production type, it accounts for 78 percent of all television movie sites and 80 percent of all television movie
events. All production types exceed the spatial normal
distribution of their ellipses, showing that a majority
of filming by type occurs within a limited area. A kernel density analysis reveals that the highest concentration of all filmmaking by production type occurs in the
downtown corridor, nearby beaches, and around the Stu
Segall Productions facility in Kearney Mesa (Figure 2).
The main centers of each production type are within
close proximity of each other (the average distance between these mean centers is only 1.8 kilometers) and
in close proximity to the mean center for all filmed
events: The average distance between all production
types and the mean center for all filmed events was
only 2.4 kilometers. Furthermore, the mean centers for
all filmed events and production types were proximate
to the Stu Segall Productions facility: The average distance between each of these centers and the production facility was 6.2 kilometers. Stu Segall Productions
accounts for 75 percent of all filmed events, 98 percent of television show filmed events, 41 percent of
television movie filmed events, and 5 percent of feature filmed events. Mean center analysis shows that
film production is not tied to the county’s population
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Lukinbeal
Figure 2. Filming activity by production type for San Diego County: 1985–2005. (Color figure available online.)
center (the average distance of the filmed mean centers
and Stu Segall’s facility to the population center was
27.8 kilometers) but rather is proximate to the hub of
the regional film production industry in Kearney Mesa
(McCurdy, personal interview, 16 December 1998). Although Stu Segall Productions is the largest film production company in San Diego, multiple film production
companies are clustered in Kearney Mesa, including
Four Square Productions, Western Video, Multi-Image,
and the independent television station KUSI. Where
mean center analysis reveals that filmed events and the
Stu Segall Productions facility are near one another, it
does not address whether the different production types
are clustered, random, or dispersed (Figure 2).
Similar to the analysis of the total data set, each production type had a high degree of film site clustering
(using the nearest neighbor analysis) but a random pattern of incident intensity (using Moran’s I).5 Regardless
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Table 1. Frequency and distribution of filmed sites by production type in San Diego County: 1985–2005
Rate filmed
Percent of total
Nearest neighbor ratio
z score
Distribution
71.0%
23.4%
3.3%
1.7%
0.6%
0.40
0.47
0.75
0.99
1.62
−40.71
−20.76
−3.62
−0.11
3.95
Clustered
Clustered
Clustered
Random
Dispersed
69.9%
24.4%
3.3%
1.8%
0.6%
0.39
0.47
1.19
1.59
2.05
−33.86
−17.55
2.26
5.33
5.32
Clustered
Clustered
Dispersed
Dispersed
Dispersed
78.2%
20.1%
1.2%
0.5%
0.63
0.87
16.41
−13.04
−2.37
16.41
Clustered
Clustered
Dispersed
1 event filmed 19 times
89.2%
9.9%
0.7%
0.2%
0.51
1.06
527,011,405
−18.53
0.70
1.74
Clustered
Random
Dispersed
2 events filmed 19 and 12 times
All data
1
2–5
6–10
11–20
20+
Television shows
1
2–5
6–10
11–20
20+
Television movies
1
2–5
6–10
11–20a
Feature films
1
2–5
6–10
11–20a
aMust
have three points to run analysis.
of production type, nearly 70 percent of all filmed sites
are used only once. Further, there is a statistically significant trend, with infrequently filmed sites exhibiting
clustering and frequently filmed sites being dispersed
(Table 1). Television shows are the only production
type where 5 percent of site usage exceeds six times.
Repeat usage of sites by television shows is related to
their narrative formula, as specific locations aid in establishing filmic space within which their episodic scripts
take place.
Results from hot spot analysis for each production
type show that 87 percent of feature film and television
movie sites and 99.9 percent of television show sites
fall within the normal or expected range of localized
site clustering. All feature film and television movie
hot spots are located within their respective ellipses.
Hot spots for features films are found in the downtown
corridor, the city of Coronado, and the Point Loma and
OB neighborhoods, whereas television movie hot spots
are clustered in PB and La Jolla. Only one cold spot
is found in the eastern portion of the county for television shows. These patterns can be deceiving, however, as the highest values for the fifty-eight feature
film hot spots only range from two to five and account for only 20 percent of the total feature filmed
events. Similarly, of the forty-three television movie
hot spots, the highest values range from two to four
and account for only 21 percent of the total television movie events. Creating kernel density rasters for
each production type and then conducting map algebra
analyses shows that only television shows have areas
where their incident intensity exceeds other production types (Figure 2). This illustrates the limitations
of hot spot analysis to only reveal site clustering of
statistically significant like values. It does show, however, that production types have different spatial use
patterns.
Spatial analysis and cartography offers one means to
inscribe twenty years of written and oral location production data. It reveals where sites are transformed into
narrative places, how a region’s cinematic landscape
is both a collection of clustered sites and frequently
filmed areas, and how production types vary in their
use of sites and areas. This information also shows that
the political economy of film production influences the
spatial pattern of site usage as the hub of the regional
film industry lies near the mean center of site usage.
The quantitative data produced by this analysis offer a
detailed spatial overview of site usage that further complements, initiates, and develops further questions of
the practices inherent in the taskscape of on-location
filming.
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The Taskscape of On-Location Filming
Where the form of a region’s cinematic landscape
can be mapped and analyzed to reveal where sites are
transformed into filmic space, it is only useful when
put into the context of how tasks, decisions, and the
political economy of filming work in the site selection
process. As a region’s cinematic landscape requires absolute locations to build a lexicon of imagery to produce
a narrative script, a site does not signify or reference the
function it has in everyday life. A cinematic landscape
negates the equivalence between a site’s form and a
site’s function. Although a site’s form can be modified
for a film, form is the central property that remains
invariant to the transformation that occurs when an
absolute location is turned into a cinematic place. Site
form is what is valued and evaluated, as it is the central
property that links the taskscape of production with the
formation of a cinematic landscape. Therefore, the essential practice of the taskscape is to assess a location’s
production value.
Production value is the perceived value or quality of
a finished cultural product, which involves the needs
of the script and the economic constraints of a cultural product. A location’s production value can be
purchased, found, or created through filmic style. Production value is an incorporation of capital, business
practices and networks, a good script, cinematic style,
and the resonant qualities of a site. Interrelated elements help to assess and guide the task of selecting
sites with resonant qualities: the needs of the script, the
aesthetics of a location, the budget, accessibility, props
or dressing, multifunctionality, and establishing filmic
space to allow for narrative place making to occur. Site
selection is a task that incorporates labor and location
to produce resonant filmic places.
Through montage and movement, a linear narrative sutures fragmented sites into a simulated cinematic
landscape. Cinema offers “both an instrument and a
route” that redefines cartography as “its map of fragmentary e-movements opened the way to a new geographical imagination of temporal traces” (Bruno 2002,
270). Where cartography inscribes location in absolute
terms, cinema is a “mobile map,” a “complex tour of
identifications—an actual means of exploration: at once
a housing for and a tour of our narrative and our geography” (Bruno 2002, 71). Cinema and cartography offer
different inscriptive methods to map a region’s cinematic landscape. Where cartography and spatial analysis promote an understanding of where the taskscape
of location production occurs, cinema maps and tours
our spectatorial journey and intersubjective experience
of a specific narrative. This mobile map, however, is
dominated by the logic and flow of a script.
Needs of the Script
Maier (1994, 63) posited that “the script is the starting point in the designer’s search for suitable locations.”
More to the point, Dunson (personal interview, 20 June
2005) states, “The script usually drives everything. . . .
Stroke of a pen as they always say. Stroke of the pen and
you’re looking for the Taj Mahal.” McCurdy (personal
interview, 16 December 1998) offers a specific example
of how site, script, and location production value unite
in the taskscape:
If the script calls for a police station I know that doesn’t
mean I go to the San Diego Police Department. I make
recommendations that match the look of what is typically
a government institutional building that I know is always
accessible for filming. We can’t go into the San Diego Police Department and film. . . . So if a script calls for a police
station, exterior establishing shot, I will most often recommend the County Administration Building on Harbor
Drive. Because the county is very film friendly [and] public properties . . . are fee-free, so were already saving the
producer a dollar amount and it has that governmental
look to it. So it matches the look, it’s a budget consideration, and I know it’s accessible. . . . Matching the look is
a crucial point because it doesn’t have anything to do with the
reality. (emphasis added; see Figure 3)
With cinematic landscapes, form does not follow the
function of a site’s everyday use; form follows the functional needs of the script.
As appearance sets the atmosphere, the aesthetics
of a site’s form are of utmost value. Location adds production value, through spectacle, extravagance, texture, and historical realism. Aesthetics offers something
“strikingly realistic” or scenically sensational (Bordwell,
Figure 3. San Diego Administration Building, 1600 Pacific Highway. (Color figure available online.)
Staiger, and Thompson 1985, 100). Like the use of stars,
location offers production value through “showmanship” (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson 1985, 100).
Location adds production value through using existing
stars—locations that are referential icons of a city (the
Coronado Bridge, the San Diego Zoo, Sea World, or the
city’s skyline), icons from past productions (particularly,
the Del Coronado Hotel), or local icons that reflect San
Diego’s history. Locational stars can ground narrative
place to “real historical place” (Higson 1984, 3) but
based on the data, the Del Coronado Hotel (filmed
seven times), Sea World (filmed three times), and the
San Diego Zoo (filmed once) might be good at establishing filmic space as taking place in San Diego, but they
are not prominent players in the everyday taskscape of
location production.
The lack of usage of locational stars that play as
San Diego tells us two things about the form of this region’s cinematic landscape. First, San Diego has suffered
from a lack of recognition by Hollywood’s film industry; the city is perceived as lacking production values
that resonate with consumers. In the 1980s, San Diego
fought to keep the television series Simon and Simon
because Kim Lemasters, a CBS program executive, said
San Diego was not sexy enough and accused it of lacking cinematic values that viewers would find desirable
(Boyer 1982). San Diego won the fight to keep Simon
and Simon’s narrative place in the city (Boyer 1982),
but its production base moved to Los Angeles (Anderson personal interview, 16 December 1998). Second,
spectacular, extravagant, textured, and especially historic locations abound in San Diego, which establishes
production value within and across cultural products.
Nine of the eleven most frequently filmed locations
have a long history in the city of San Diego. These
locations are tied to tourism (Balboa Park, 1869–1915;
the US Grant Hotel, 1910; Belmont Park, 1925; Crystal
Pier, 1926), manufacturing (the Wonder Bread Factory,
1924), administration (San Diego County Administration Building, 1938), and maritime history (the Naval
Training Center, 1920s; Miramar Marine Corps Air
Station, 1917; the Port of San Diego–10th Avenue Terminal, 1962; see Table 2). This calls into question what
constitutes a star location. Is locational stardom tied
to reaching a particular audience size or to the monetary return of a particular cultural product? The answer
appears to be in the way Hollywood assessed production value when it came to Simon and Simon. But, in
the taskscape of production, audience size and sales, although important, are secondary to the daily tasks of
site selection. More important to the taskscape of loca-
181
Table 2. Top fifteen most frequently filmed sites in San
Diego County: 1985–2005
Location
Balboa Park, 1500 El Prado
Stu Segall Productions Facility, 4705 Ruffin Road
Naval Training Center, 2620 Historic Decatur Road
Marina Village Conference Center, 1936 Quivira Way
Bay View Medical Center, 446 26th Street
Miramar Marine Corps Air Station, Sparrow Road
Belmont Park, 3190 Mission Boulevard
US Grant Hotel, 326 Broadway
Sharp Cabrillo Hospital, 3475 Kenyon Street
10th Avenue Terminal, 699 Switzer Street
San Diego County Administration, 1600 Pacific
Highway
Wonder Bread Factory, 171 14th Street
Crystal Pier, 4500 Ocean Boulevard
University of California, San Diego
San Diego Trikke Rentals, 706 Pismo Court
Rate
filmed
106
103
77
67
56
38
34
27
21
21
18
18
17
17
17
tion production in San Diego is assessing the aesthetics
of a site’s form, its suitability for a particular script, and
the site’s ability to fit within a production’s budget.
Although each production constitutes a unique
taskscape, routinized practices produce formula fiction,
where narratives are predictable, and their locational
needs are as well, especially with television shows
and television movies but also feature films and genres where narrative elements are often homogenized.
As McCurdy (personal interview, 16 December 1998)
explains,
It’s a formula of what’s on TV right now and that’s what
drives the plot and that’s what drives the story line and
that’s what buys right now. So it all plays into the fact for
many years when I was a location manager for movies of
the week the producer I worked with would call and say
“We’re coming down to San Diego to do another ‘damsel
in distress’” and that’s the formula: the wealthy woman
in her estate home betrayed by her husband and stalked.
Then, she meets someone in the restaurant who comes to
the rescue. And then there’s the confrontation that takes
them to the police station, the courtroom, and the custody
battle over the child at the elementary school. It’s just been
predictable for many, many years and that same formula
can be scaled from a two-hour movie-of-the-week, to a half
an hour episodic TV show such as Silk Stalkings. It is going
to have a majority of the same elements especially for Silk
Stalkings, being a detective show; the police station is one
of their permanent standing sets to stage the narrative.
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Locations required for formula fiction are so standardized that McCurdy (personal interview, 16 December
1998) claims that,
Whenever I get a call from a producer for a movie-of-theweek I can have a conversation with them without ever
seeing the script and I can say, “So this is a typical movieof-the-week?” [And they reply,] “Yes.” OK, so we’re going
to need an estate home, a condo on the beach, a hospital, a
police station, possibly a jail cell, a courtroom, an upscale
restaurant, some street work, and possibly an elementary
school. And they’ll say, “Bingo; you’ve hit nine-out-often.”
These routinized practices play a significant role in
creating the high kernel density areas of the downtown corridor, the beach neighborhoods, and the estate
homes in Rancho Santa Fe (Figure 1) as well as the use
of seven different hospitals (filmed eighty-four times)
and thirty-four different schools, colleges, and universities (filmed sixty-nine times).
Budget Constraints
Anderson (personal interview, 16 December 1998)
notes that “sometimes the bottom line is the most important; the budget will kill any production.” At a base
cost of around $10,000 a day, the Hotel Del Coronado
is the most expensive location to film in San Diego
(Dunson, personal interview, 20 June 2005). Film requests increased sharply after the success of Some Like It
Hot. That success led to the creation of filming policies
and a permit process by the hotel and the city of Coronado. This process has a fee and requires most projects to
go before the city council to be approved. As McCurdy
(personal interview, 16 December 1998) explains,
In a lot of ways we feel that Coronado is doing everything
they can to discourage film production in their community
and it is punitive to the producer unless it is a very highprofile, big-budget production. The majority of the average
things don’t have the time or the money to normally do
that.
In contrast, Balboa Park is the most filmed location
in San Diego (filmed 106 times). All city, county, and
the port district properties in San Diego are fee-free,
but productions are expected to pay cost recovery for
security, maintenance, and other operational costs. This
makes Balboa Park and other fee-free sites attractive, as
they lower production costs, increasing the location’s
production value.
As San Diego is dominated by television series and
movies that typically have smaller crews and budgets
than features, fee-free public locations or low-cost private properties are frequently used to minimize overhead. For this reason, large service corporations are
rarely filmed, whereas small businesses are frequently
filmed. As Dunson (personal interview, 20 June 2005)
explains,
You can use a 7–11; it’ll take you three months maybe to
get approval to use it. Whereas if you go to a mom-andpop little 7–11 type store you can make a deal with mom
and pop. You don’t have to wait for the lawyers to become
involved or the corporate people to become involved. It
can happen today. So that’s why we do that. It’s just too
much of a turnaround.
The form of a cinematic landscape requires sites that
fit the needs of a script and have showmanship qualities, but these sites must fit within the constraints of a
production’s budget and related timeline for filming.
Budget constraints can affect the script as well, as
was the case with the television show Renegade. In its
first year Renegade frequently filmed in the rural eastern
portions of the county. In subsequent years they had to
change their script to respond to a policy implemented
by the California Film Commission:
Their narrative was affected by economics after the first
season. Reno was on the lam, so he was out in the county,
which was supposed to be Arizona, it was supposed to
be Nebraska, I mean every episode was some whole new
geographical association. Now what happened is when
that series started we were able to have county sheriffs
work film production detail on county roads. After that
season, the California Film Commission implemented a
statewide policy that stated you could not use local law
enforcement outside an incorporated city; you had to use
CHP [California Highway Patrol]. . . . CHP is a whole
lot more expensive per hour than our county sheriffs. So
after the first season, and this new policy came into play,
production was at risk. They weren’t going to be able
to afford to shoot the show the way they did during the
first season. So it became a creative decision, “we’re going
to have to write appropriate to more urban, downtown
locations.” And, it shot up in the next three seasons more
in the incorporated city of San Diego. (McCurdy, personal
interview, 16 December 1998)
Spatial analysis complements and expands our understanding of Renegade’s narrative transition due to
budgetary factors. A kernel density analysis shows an
increased use of downtown locations in the second
through fourth years of production. Renegade’s most frequently filmed location, the Marina Village Conference
Center (MVCC), located on Mission Bay, also became
an essential component of its narrative following its
first year of production (discussed in the next section).
Production steadily increased at this location over the
four-year period as it became a referential icon, grounding filmic space to fictional Bay City, California. By
comparing Renegade’s first year of production with its
subsequent three years of production, there was an average 21 percent decrease in the spatial extent of filming
and a 45 percent average decrease in ellipse size. The
first year of production was the only one where there
are fewer filmed events than expected in a spatial normal distribution for an ellipse showing that filming was
more dispersed than in subsequent years. Although the
spatial extent between the first and subsequent years
shows the greatest change in the northern portion of
the county, the furthest site in the east county remained
near Pine Valley, a regularly used location for the series.
The extent and orientation of Renegade’s four ellipses
along with the kernel density analysis shows that the
eastern portion of the county experienced diminished
filming in each year, but in the northern portion of
the county filming contracted in the second year of
production then increased in subsequent years. In the
eastern and northern county as well as on state land,
filming moved onto private ranches or into incorporated cities. This is shown by the 30 percent reduction
in the use of land requiring CHP supervision over Renegade’s first four years of production (Figure 4). In this
case, state policy could have potentially increased production costs. To maintain a high location production
value required adaptation of the script.
Accessibility
A key aspect to the taskscape of location production
is a site’s accessibility. Accessibility refers to proximity to
major transportation arterials, the ability to locate large
semi trucks that transport supplies and people on site
or within close proximity, available on-site parking for
the crew and equipment, and, in the case of television
shows, ongoing access to a site throughout a year-long
series.
Filmed ninety-three times, Rancho Santa Fe’s (see
Figure 1) average home price in 2004 was $2.6 million,
making it one of the most expensive places to live in
the United States. Stu Segall frequently used Rancho
Santa Fe for the television shows Silk Stalkings, Renegade, and other productions. In 1992, Rancho Santa
Fe was so saturated with filming that homeowners became upset. To mitigate the situation, the SDFC and
the Rancho Santa Fe homeowners’ association created
a set of film guidelines. Without these guidelines, the
183
homeowners’ association might have declared the area
off-limits to film production. As McCurdy (personal interview, 16 December 1998) recalls, two issues needed
to be addressed:
Number one that the crew has to base camp outside of
the ranch and shuttle the crew in because they have very
narrow rural streets, that’s part of the charm and ambience
of the ranch, and we can’t line vehicles up and down the
street. The vehicles need to be contained on the private
property as much as possible and shuttle the rest. [Number
two] They didn’t want them coming in before 7 am in
the morning and they really don’t want them filming after
10 pm at night. So, we worked that out and the local
location managers acknowledge and know the best houses
to approach, the largest acreage that could hold the largest
volume of people and trucks.
In residential areas like Rancho Santa Fe, La Jolla,
Mission Hills, and OB, the regular presence of filming has affected the quality of life of residents and the
practice of location production had to be modified.
In downtown’s Gaslamp Quarter, accessibility for
film production is limited by an already busy retail,
restaurant, and nightlife district. Finding street parking is difficult on any given day and filming only exacerbates the problem. Local merchants must weigh the
cost of losing regular sales (and parking) in comparison
to a location fee. As McCurdy (personal interview, 16
December 1998) explains,
The Gaslamp Association feels that film production is
competing with their right to do business in their community. While the SDFC has worked to create policies
to mitigate the impact of filming, limited accessibility impacts the ability to film in this commercial district.
Even though the Gaslamp has accessibility problems,
McCurdy (personal interview, 16 December 1998) argues that it has a high location production value:
the Gaslamp is a real star. . . . The whole look of the
Gaslamp . . . [the] character and texture that it brings to a
scene. It’s the unique Victorian architecture, it’s that night
life, it’s that closeness of the buildings and the streets,
it’s the personality of it more than anything. So it really
doesn’t have to play as San Diego, it’s what it brings as a
character to a particular scene.
Locations often are mutually constituted by high and
low production value, which requires a taskscape to
reconcile narrative conceptions with the practical issues
of a site’s usability.
Location production value is increased through accessibility when television shows establish standing sets.
With a standing set a long-term contract is signed
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Figure 4. A comparative look at Renegade’s use of space during its first four years of production. (Color figure available online.)
between a property owner and a production company,
allowing ongoing filming at a site for the duration of the
contract. The Naval Training Center (NTC, filmed
seventy-eight times) and the MVCC (filmed sixtyseven times) represent the third and fourth most filmed
locations in San Diego. Stu Segall Productions used
both as standing sets. NTC was officially closed on 30
April 1997, but the city had interim use of sixty-seven
of the 550 acres of land since 1995. Stu Segall’s television series Pensacola Wings of Gold used this location
for nearly every episode during its four years of production (1996–2000). From 1993 through 2002 Pensacola
accounted for 81 percent of filming at the NTC. During the same period of time Stu Segall Productions used
the location for four other television shows and movies,
accounting for an additional 15 percent of the total.
Used in combination with Miramar Marine Corps Air
Station, where the show accounted for all filmed events
(thirty-eight), Pensacola was able to suture two sites
together to produce a simulated version of the Naval
Air Station in Pensacola, Florida. The NTC has ample
parking, access for large semi trucks, provides historic
realism as a former working naval base (and is listed
in the National Register of Historic Places), and has a
unique sense of place with its Mission Revival architecture and panoramic views of San Diego’s Bay.
The MVCC served as a standing set for Renegade after the series was forced to adapt their narrative. In the
series, the site played as the office of Bobby Sixkiller, a
bounty hunter who worked with Reno, in the fictional
Bay City, California. The MVCC was initially built to
be a tourist retail mall, but it never prospered partially
because of its isolated location just off a major thoroughfare. McCurdy (personal interview, 16 December
1998) describes this as an excellent location production
site:
You’re going to be dealing with a property management
that’s going to be very happy to get any kind of location
fee with their overhead. So you’re going to be dealing with
a property management company on a contractual basis:
“x” amount of dollars for so many days, plenty of parking,
nice easy location. A little sound problem, possibly. No
residence in the area to be concerned with. . . . You’ll
introduce yourself to the Marina people, and some of the
boat owners, and a couple of the businesses. But easy, great
location . . . and the standing empty restaurants! You can
walk into those and prep them out easily. A great location.
The MVCC provides easy access and parking, has
very few tenants who might be disrupted by filming,
has a variety of looks, and the property management
company overseeing this facility needs the business and
therefore was willing to offer a good deal on a lease.
The MVCC has a high degree of location production
value to Stu Segall Productions, which accounted for
97 percent of all filming at the site, using it for five
different television shows, with Renegade accounting
for 64 percent of the total.
Props or Dressing
Locations are rarely exactly what one is looking for
in a script (Maier 1994). Because locations and scripts
have their own particularities, this inevitably “means
185
making some compromises in one’s conception” (Maier
1994, 71). Minimizing the amount of props or dressing
of a location required to fulfill the needs of the script
lowers overhead and maximizes a location’s production
value.
Hospitals are required for many scripts, but they are
one of the most difficult locations to film at in any
city (Maier 1994). In San Diego, two hospitals, the
Bay View Medical Center and Sharp Cabrillo Hospital, rank in the top ten of the most frequently filmed
sites (Table 2). Bay View Medical Center is the most
frequently filmed site for television movies and second
most filmed site for feature films (sixth for television
shows). According to McCurdy (personal interview, 16
December 1998), the Bay View Medical Center became
a prominent filming site because it went bankrupt in the
early 1990s and closed for five years:
It was as if the marshals came in one night, put the lock on
the door, and no one ever walked into that hospital again:
literally, fully propped and dressed, pictures of people’s
kids still on their desks. Everything you could imagine you
would need as an art department to prop a hospital scene
was there and we started a working relationship with the
company that was holding it during its bankruptcy and
it was such an easy, accessible location, already dressed
and prepped that it was again in the formula for every
movie-of-the-week. Every movie that I location managed,
we used that hospital, and for episodes of Renegade and
Silk at the time . . . it’s a common element in the narrative
formula of television that works, and it was a property that
was so accessible, relatively reasonable on cost—it fit their
budgets. And, we could walk in and out of it like that with
no concerns, because hospitals are difficult locations to
secure.
While filming at the Bay View Medical Center has
slowed significantly, Sharp Cabrillo Hospital has become a prominent site since 1999. In need of a second hospital site, Dunson (personal interview, 20 June
2005) took a physician from Sharp Cabrillo Hospital
to Bay View Medical Center so that he could see how
filming could be done without major disruptions. Sharp
then became a regularly used site for television shows.
Dunson explains that having two hospitals is extremely
useful because “I [now] have a newer look and an older
look and that kind of covered the gamut of hospitals.”
These hospitals have a high location production value
as they are easily accessible, reasonably priced, needed
for formula fiction, require little or no dressing, and, in
the case of the Bay View Medical Center, can function
to stage different scenes for a single narrative.
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Multifunctionality
Multifunctionality refers to the ability of a site, or
sites in close proximity, to be used in the same script
to represent different narrative locations. As McCurdy
(personal interview, 20 June 2005) notes, Belmont Park
in Mission Beach (the seventh most filmed site in San
Diego) is a richly textured beach environment offering multiple scenic options for filming: Sand, surf, the
boardwalk, an old wooden rollercoaster, shops, restaurants, grassy parks, and streets pulsating with social life
can all be filmed with a “turn of the camera.” Similarly,
the MVCC offers a variety of themed cottages, propped
restaurants, a marina, lush landscaping surrounding the
waterfront, and a desolate road running along the San
Diego River that has been used for car chases and accident scenes.
The proximity of Bay View Medical Center to Grant
Hill Park adds location production value through maximizing the amount of shooting done in a single day. As
Dunson (personal interview, 20 June 2005) explains,
What we usually do is go to the hospital to film, but the
first set of the day is at Grant Hill Park. What that allows
us to do is to get up into the hospital, get all our equipment
up, get lit, rehearse and everything so that minutes in the
day aren’t wasted in the moves. Then we’ll leave the park
where we have very little equipment going, go into the
hospital, shoot our scene, and then while we’re shooting
our last scene in the hospital, we’ll start to look outside
and start to get the street work ready and that allows you
to come right out of the hospital, go right out to your
street scene, and then that lighting is being broken down
and coming out. And, it’s a real fine choreographed thing
throughout the day and shared responsibility by a lot of
people to make sure that it happens properly. (Figure 5)
Production value can also be created by using
sites to “double” for locations outside of San Diego.
Lukinbeal and Zimmermann (2006, 319) claimed that
“these crimes against geography allow film makers to use
one location to ‘double,’ or stand in for, another location. The process of ‘doubling’ is a film production
practice done to save money.” As mentioned earlier,
San Diego frequently doubles for Florida, in the television series Silk Stalkings (which plays as Palm Springs)
and Pensacola Wings of Gold, and even the feature Some
Like It Hot. But doubling also occurs at a more localized
level and is a regular practice in creating filmic space.
Along with the San Diego Administration Building, a
mansion in Rancho Santa Fe and a Kaiser Permanente
medical facility have doubled for police stations. In Pensacola Wings of Gold, a residential home that was right
Figure 5. Proximity of Bay View Medical Center to Grant Hill
Park adds location production value. © Google 2009, Map Data
© Google 2010. (Color figure available online.)
on the beach was used to depict the residence of the
young pilots. Accessibility to the location in OB is often difficult so to limit the impact of bringing a “circus
and its . . . controlled chaos” to the beach community,
Dunson (personal interview, 20 June 2005) found an
alternative house elsewhere in San Diego that could
double for interior shots, thus limiting the impact of
filming in OB and on the homeowners. Filmic space is
not tied to absolute location, as sites can serve multiple
functions and setting. Through the practice of suturing
sites and sights, filmic space is unified through narrative
continuity.
Establishing Space
Sites are essential to organizing filmic spatial relations and maintain “correct” continuity between and
among the disparate scenes that make up a narrative
(Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, 1985, 146). Establishing shots, which typically occur at or near the beginning of a film, explicitly functions as “establishing
space” (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson 1985, 196).
These shots provide locational and temporal cues that
emplace characters and their actions. This is the “phenomenon of priming” (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson 1985, 59), the building of a visual lexicon and a
“process of hypothesis-forming” (Bordwell, Staiger, and
Thompson 1985, 59) where the “the task of the filmmaker . . . is to make the viewer pose a visual question,
and then answer it for him” (Hochberg 1978, 208).
Hochberg compares this construction of space to a cognitive map, but as the map is navigated by the viewer, it
is inscribed in the filmmaking process. This is contrary
to the claims that classical cinema follows the “attention of the spectator”; rather, “it actually guides that
attention carefully by establishing expectations about
what spatial configurations are likely to occur” (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson 1985, 214, italics added).
The most common way of establishing filmic space necessitates a scalar logic within and across scenes. The
establishing shot sets the scalar extent within which
the narrative action will unfold. Subsequent shots focus on exterior architectural and landscape elements,
providing context. Then, shot scale is reduced to the
specificity of characters and narrative actions. The practice of establishing space partially explains the density
of hot spots of feature films in and around downtown
San Diego as these locations can play as San Diego or
can be edited to play other urbanized spaces throughout
the United States and the world. The same could also
187
be said for television movie hot spots along the coast as
they provide visual referents for formula fiction.
To establish filmic space as San Diego, McCurdy
(personal interview, 16 December 1998) asserts that,
“It’s the icons; always the icon value. It would be the
aerial shot of the Hotel Del Coronado, the [Coronado]
Bridge, the Sea World sign, [and] the zoo sign.” Marty
Katz, producer of the feature film Mr. Wrong, refers to
regional icons as a means to establish a signature for the
city:
Be it a mixture of landmarks like the Hotel Del Coronado,
maybe the Gaslamp Quarter, the Coronado Bridge, Sea
World or Balboa Park, these sorts of icons. Or, we might
tie into locations like Mission Bay. We might even do
a helicopter thing under the main titles, where we fly
over the city. . . . You need to make it feel like San Diego
is a city that has a history, a flavor, that it feels like a
community. (Letofsky 1995, 1)
Reestablishing shots return viewers to known or
stereotypical places (i.e., beaches, downtown) and do
not require the specificity of the initial establishing
shot. These shots reaffirm the positionality of the viewer
within the broader cognitive map of the narrative. Repetition of the use of sites through reestablishing shots
elevates locations to icons, vital spatial referents that
anticipate how the space might be used. Repetition of
the use of sites is so important that camera setup, position, angle, and focal length are often replicated encouraging the spectator “to ignore the cutting itself and
notice only those narrative factors that change from
shot to shot” (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson 1985,
58).
The technique of establishing space through establishing shots is more strongly associated with feature
films than television shows and movies. With 86 percent of all productions in San Diego related to television
shows and movies, establishing shots are frequently replaced with montage sequences that relegate location
to a backdrop for narrative action. In these montage
sequences, a rapid succession of scenes establishes the
social ambience of the narrative that is to unfold. With
television shows, repetitious use of these sequences
occurs at the beginning of each episode, guiding the
viewer’s expectations about the narrative formula.6 For
Pensacola Wings of Gold and Renegade, their standing
sets provide a primary spatial referent to ground their
narrative. For Silk Stalkings, the Palm Beach Police Station provides a primary spatial referent for this detective series. The station is an exterior shot of the Kaiser
Permanente medical facility at 3840 Murphy Canyon
188
Lukinbeal
Figure 6. Kaiser Permanente medical facility in San Diego and Silk
Stalkings’ Palm Beach police station. (Color figure available online.)
Road in San Diego located just 2.7 kilometers from
Stu Segall’s facility (Figure 6). Each television series
establishes its own series of locations that ground spatial relations to their specific narrative. When montage
sequences replace establishing shots, sites that can establish space as San Diego only have a high location
production value for narratives that play San Diego,
which is not a common occurrence. This is evident in
the data as the locational icons identified by McCurdy
and Katz are infrequently used for filming (even the film
Mr. Wrong, which plays as San Diego, has no establishing shot).
Conclusions
The form of San Diego County’s cinematic landscape
is inscribed in cultural products but produced by the
taskscape of location production. Whereas inscriptive
modes of logic have typically focused on how ways of
seeing work to (re)produce or contest dominant scopic
regimes through an analysis of cultural texts (Cresswell
and Dixon 2002; Lukinbeal and Zimmermann 2008),
I use inscriptive logic as a means to represent cartographically and analyze spatially the form of a region’s
cinematic landscape.
Spatial analysis shows that 80 percent of all filming
occurs within only 10 percent of its total areal extent.
The highest density of filming occurs in the downtown
corridor, along the main tourist beach neighborhoods
of OB, MB, PB, and La Jolla, as well as around Kearney
Mesa where the Stu Segall Productions facility is located. Filming exceeds the spatial normal distribution
of a weighted standard deviational ellipse regardless of
production type. The mean centers of all ellipses are
proximate to the regional hub of film production in
Kearney Mesa.
Filmmaking in San Diego County is dominated by
the production of television shows, the only production
type that has concentrated areas where filmmaking exceeds movies or features use of space. Television shows
have a slightly greater tendency to use the same site
multiple times, which is related to how they establish
filmic space and through the use of standing sets. Hot
spots only exist for television movies and feature films.
Television shows had no hot spots and were the only
production type to have a cold spot. The lack of hot
spots for television shows reveals a greater dispersion of
film sites with similar incident intensity. For movies and
features, hot spots might have some relation to the locational needs of scripts that utilize formal fiction. Hot
spot analysis shows that there exist different patterns of
site usage by production type.
Filmed sites are highly clustered for all data and by
production type, but the frequency of use of filmed sites
is dispersed. Overall, most filmed sites are infrequently
filmed, regardless of production type. Further, a statistically significant trend exists between site usage and
their spatial pattern with infrequently filmed sites being clustered and frequently filmed sites being dispersed.
Through assembling a GIS database, the sites that
form the foundation of a region’s cinematic landscape
are revealed. Spatial analysis along with cartographic
inscriptions complement, develop, initiate, and expand
the qualitative inquiry of how the taskscape assesses
location production value. Although the needs of a
script and budget constraints are primary elements in
the assessment process, aesthetics, accessibility, props
and dressing, and how filmic space is established all contribute to a location’s production value. The taskscape
of location production mediates between the daily task
of site selection, the perceived value of a site for an individual scene, and the compilation of sites used to make a
single cultural product. Assessment of production value
also mediates the taskscape of location production and
the reception of the finished cultural product by an audience, often measured by its economic return.
Incorporative logic focuses on the tasks that generate
form through a focus on process. From this perspective,
a region’s cinematic landscape is not a linear story of
industrial agglomeration or revealed through inscripting data onto a Cartesian grid for analysis; it is a story of
taskscapes performed by people continually creating the
form of a landscape. The process of transforming sites
into cinematic places hides the labor that goes into
the taskscape of location production and also hides the
everyday social spatial meanings of the lived realities
of people at these sites. Furthermore, the form of a region’s cinematic landscape is a taskscape that is never
fully actualized or permanent. Rather, taskscapes are
practiced places or, in the words of de Certeau (1984,
117), “space is a practiced place.” The business practices of individuals in the film industry along with the
SDFC mediate the taskscape of production that generates the initial form of San Diego’s cinematic landscape. But the formative process does not end there.
The taskscape is a work in progress as new activities and
associations instigate the form as forever becoming. Location production sites represent an unfolding universe
of practices that create the placescapes of San Diego
County’s cinematic landscape. Over time, the thickness of place making forges a montage of architectures,
production practices, social networks, and representations. San Diego County is the scroll across which this
montage is written, rewritten, scratched out of memory,
or afforded production value. Valuation is determined
by the taskscape of location production and what registers with viewers’ desires, emotions, experiences, and
preferences. The challenge for an incorporative mode
of logic is to engage taskscapes of production as animated spaces and social processes that continually form
a region’s cinematic landscape.
A prerequisite to understanding how a region’s cinematic landscape is formed and represented requires a
mixed methods approach that engages the epistemological tensions inherent in conceptualizations of cinema
and landscape. It is only through fragmentation that
a region’s cinematic landscape is formed. Rather than
seeking continuity through a single epistemology that
might appear to offer cohesion, a region’s cinematic
landscape is formed and made meaningful through a
montage that resonates between cultural industry and
cultural representation, form and process, inscription,
and incorporation.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to many people for making this article possible. I am indebted to the assistance of Cathy
Anderson, Kathy McCurdy, and Rob Dunson at the
San Diego Film Commission. Without them, this research would not have been possible. GIS research
assistance was provided by Scott Kelley, Drew Lucio, Jennifer Peters, and Jagadeesh Chirumamilla. The
transcription of some of the interviews were done by
Ann Fletchall. Sincere thanks go out to those who
189
helped with drafts of this work: Stuart Aitken, Deborah Dixon, Larry Ford, Keith Clarke, James Proctor,
Kevin McHugh, Karen Lukinbeal, Daniel D. Arreola,
John Finn, Audrey Kobayashi, and the anonymous
reviewers.
Notes
1. I use the term cinema to include three mutually related
cultural products: television shows, television movies, and
feature films. I do so because the taskscape, or “the entire
ensemble of tasks” (Ingold 1993, 158) of location production related to these products share many similarities.
2. Locational data for three feature films that occurred before 1985 are included: Some Like It Hot (1959), Stunt
Man (1980), and Scavenger Hunt (1979). Prior to 1985,
locational data were not collected in a consistent manner.
3. The phrase filmed site is used to reference an absolute
location where filming has occurred. A filmed event refers
to a site that has been used on more than one occasion.
4. Manhattan rather than Euclidean distance was used for
all pattern analysis because it better reflects travel along
street networks that would be used by film producers when
shooting on location.
5. Feature films had a nearest neighbor index score of 0.5,
a z score of –20.01, and a Moran’s I score of 0.29, and a
z score of 0.03. Television shows had a nearest neighbor
index score of 0.37, a z score of –42.02, and a Moran’s I
score of 0, and a z score of 0.03. Television movies had a
nearest neighbor index score of 0.594, a z score of –16.11,
and a Moran’s I score of 0.05, and a z score of 0.44.
6. Montage sequences used at the beginning of episodes can
be found on YouTube for Renegade (http://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=x94hc46MfX4&feature=related; last accessed 24 September 2010), Pensacola Wings of Gold (http:
//www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPqBbB2MlKk; last accessed 24 September 2010), and Silk Stalkings (http://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssN9cLnlahk; last accessed
24 September 2010).
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Correspondence: School of Geography and Development, The University of Arizona, P.O. Box 10076, Tucson, AZ 85721, e-mail:
[email protected].
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“On Location” Filming in San Diego County from 1985–2005: How a

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