Tomorrow is April 18th, the day 103 years ago that San Francisco was rocked with a 7.8 magnitude* earthquake and subsequently burned to the ground. Initial figures of deaths in the hundreds were doctored and the real death toll, which was in the thousands, was hidden from the public because the city government was afraid people might be apprehensive to move back in and businesses might be scared away. It took two to three years for the city to clean-up and start rebuilding the downtown area and a few more for it's economy to get back on track. The earthquake is still one of the strongest to ever hit the continental United States, though the strongest is still the almost unbelievable in size 9.2 earthquake of March 28, 1964 in Anchorage, Alaska. Thirty years after the fact, the movies got involved.
San Francisco was released in 1936 and starred Clark Gable, Jeanette McDonald and Spencer Tracy. The story of gambling hall owners, singers and priests called... Tim, really didn't matter much. The main thing was to show the earthquake and that's what ended up raking in the dough for all concerned. And Hollywood took notice. Using disaster as a backdrop for soap opera (touched on recently here in a post on the Titanic) quickly caught on and within a year John Ford had directed and released The Hurricane with its spectacular ending using extraordinary miniatures and even more extraordinary wind and water machines that must have made Thomas Mitchell and Dorothy Lamour wish they were in a real hurricane. From that movie to the seventies disaster flicks such as Earthquake and The Towering Inferno to the nineties offerings of Twister and Deep Impact to the 2000's The Day After Tomorrow the sub-genre is alive and well.
It does so well because audiences love seeing destruction and the wrath of nature from a safe distance. It's too terrifying and heartbreaking in real life but fictionalized up on the screen it can be awesome to behold. I grew up in Charleston, SC which suffered a massive intraplate earthquake in 1886. It was felt as far as Chicago, IL, Cuba and Bermuda. Charleston has only had that one big one but it has small earthquakes almost daily and every few weeks they're big enough to feel. Growing up there I got used to occasionally hearing all of nature go silent for a few seconds and then feeling the tremor as the doors rattled and the dishes shook. I also saw my fair share of hurricanes and tropical storms. I was already living in DC when Hurricane Hugo slammed into Charleston in 1989, just days before another huge earthquake rocked San Francisco, but going home to see my parents afterward it was amazing to me that anything had survived, so devastated did the whole area look. Like I said, close-up it's not much fun, but seen in a movie it can exhilarating, even cathartic.
The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was also one of the first big natural disasters well documented photographically, with both still and motion picture photography. Thirty years before the fiction movie was released, newsreel footage was abundent and can be seen below in the first clip. The second clip is from the climax of the 1936 movie, showing the first part of the earthquake unfold. On April 18th, 1906 San Francisco was destroyed by an earthquake. In 1936 Hollywood exploited that event and discovered gold still lay in the hills of San Francisco after all. Over a hundred years later we still don't know enough about earthquakes to predict when they will occur but predicting big-budget onscreen destruction is as easy as checking the calendar. Every summer the aftershocks of that Gable-McDonald romance are still felt, and will be until the world ends in 2012.
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*current estimate.
Further Links:
The Virtual San Francisco Museum
Wikipedia entry on 1906 earthquake
Eyewitness to History
USGS Page on 1906 Earthquake
22 comments:
I love these history and the movies blogs. thumbs up
Thanks so much, I'm glad you like them. I enjoy doing them, my love of history being on an almost equal footing with my love of the movies.
Greg, have you read Simon Winchester's book on the 1906 quake, A Crack in the Edge of the World. I haven't, but I hear it's excellent.
And I really want to see Earthquake.
No I haven't read that. I'd love to though. Fiction recommendations take me forever to get around to but non-fiction I'm all over. I'll check it out.
Earthquake. is pretty bad but not as bad as Meteor. which is tragically bad. Not even "fun to watch" bad, just bad.
Earthquake is certainly bad but watching a bit of it a few years ago, post-9/11 made me feel queasy. Those shots of the office workers trapped in their building hit a little too close to home. It's not a strength of the movie in and of itself but the impact after-the-fact is undeniable.
I've still never seen San Francisco, probably because I was turned off by the whole sinner-goes-saintly-in-the-aftermath angle. Here in California, we tend to think we live in Earthquake Central and then one happens in Italy, where you just don't expect it.
What a week for disaster, eh?
I have the DVD of San Francisco... and it's pretty good but not a must see. If you never see it, eh, no great loss. I actually like Ford's The Hurricane much better and if you don't like the sinner-goes-saint angle you'll love the end of that where the worshippers in the church all die while the lovers escape the awful Raymond Massey in the end. It's a hell of an ending.
I'll have to see Earthquake again. It may not be very good but I do enjoy watching all the seventies disaster flicks. They're oddly comforting in a way. And I thought the miniature work was very good from what I remember.
Old time miniature work can have an awfully disconcerting quality. You know it's false but it gets to you in a way that CGI just doesn't.
I love admiring the miniatures and the work that went into them. The church destroyed at the end of the hurricane in said movie is fantastic work, surrounding by the models of beach and palm trees as it is.
I love the miniature train station at the beginning of The Lady Vanishes. It's patently false but it just looks so damn good, I want to put it in my living room.
People just have a thirst for that kind of destruction. The best, of course, is Independence Day. "AWESOME!", "millions of people have just died in a single instant but, oh no, is the fucking DOG gonna be okay?!?!?!"
Don't get me wrong, I'm an animal lover and I tend to prefer them to human beings, but still.
We seem to have moved past this phase of moviemaking, somewhat. 9/11 definitely made it NOT fun to watch buildings and cities get leveled, so I can only hope that American film making has a new found sensitivity. Yes, we still have The Day After Tomorrow, but destruction en-masse doesn't seem to be a popular form of escapism as much as it used to.
but destruction en-masse doesn't seem to be a popular form of escapism as much as it used to....
I think watching destruction on an awesome scale will always be popular, hence the anticipation for this.And even after 9-11, people made movies about the event in well under 10 years. Watching the towers crumble was not a stated goal of people buying tickets to Oliver Stones World Trade Center but that form of trainwreck/rubbernecking was there, hiding under the surface. The trailer starts with the window washer seeing the plane's reflection and then hitting the building. In other words, the trailer made sure to emphasize the "you can finally see this on the big screen" aspect before emphasizing the character aspects.
I don't think United 93 did that at all but I do think Stone's movie did.
Definitely can't say I see that, as Greengrass' episodes outside of the plane pretty much structure it as your typical "America attacked" mechanical movie plot line. Complete with babbling Government officials, flashing Radar screens, and 'normal' people becoming here by circumstance. And how about the moment when the second plane hits the WTC? If I remember correctly (haven't seen it since it came out), Greengrass does one of his typical quick zooms in and out (we see it from the perspective of an aiprort tower) and even drops frames as the plane hits the building, emphasizing how awesome a spectacle it is. In Stone's film, you don't even see the first or second plane, it's a silhouette seen from ground level the first time and we're in one of the towers when the second plane hits. I have problems with Stone's film, too, but not because I find it exploitative.
And if you wanna talk about the film's trailer, do you recall United 93's first trailer? Just a flashing radar screen with the voice overs of the passengers freightened out of their wits. It was playing it up like it was Die Hard. People were disgusted by it, especially around here. But as you don't judge a book by its cover, one certainly shouldn't use a trailer as an argument against a picture.
My point is, I don't think we'll see something like the opeing scene of Armageddon for quite some time still. Maybe we will (maybe we have already, I don't honestly know), but I don't think people will get the same giddy kick out of it that they once did. Then again, Cloverfield was made, so it's never too early too trash up a tragedy for some cheap thrills, I guess. This is America, after all.
Sorry for the novel!
You didn't like Cloverfield? I was really impressed with that movie and felt it wasn't exploitative at all.
Anyway, I see your points with Unitied 93. - I guess I was thinking the purpose of Greenglass' effort wasn't as exploitative as the purpose of Stone's but that's a dead end because it's just a matter of opinion at that point anyway.
Honestly, it was just more for the fact that I didn't think the technique itself was implemented as well as it should have been. The Blair Witch Project honestly never felt disorienting to me, but I felt no real sense of New York in Cloverfield, and I freaking live in the Metropolitan area! I did find its 9/11 allusions mostly tasteless, but I think a lot of the criticsms of it are kind of off base, too. It's a very clever digital upgrade of traditional storytelling. I just feel like it was only almost there, if that makes any sense. I simply felt unsatisfied at the end.
So you think Stone's intent was exploitative? I don't presume to know that, all I can do is judge the end result, and I do find United 93 pretty damn tasteless outside of the airplane episode, and I find the airplane episode itself hammy and unconvincing. How an Englander managed to make a film so jingoistic I still don't quite understand.
I cain't hardly wait 'til 2012 'cause Jesus is comin' back and boy is he pissed. And you are all gonna be sorry.
Didn't Spielberg get in trouble for "evoking" 9/11 with the falling debris in "War of the Worlds?" Personally, I don't see a problem with artists using images that are in the national consciousness; I didn't find those images or the ones in Cloverfield particularly offensive.
Enjoyed reading this, Greg. Mainly because I've got a personal connection to this date in history. My great grandfather was killed in the 1906 quake.
He was a sailor from the UK working on a large merchant ship that was supposed to dock in San Francisco in the early morning hours of April 18th, but the the ship never made port. It was assumed that the ship was lost at sea during the 1906 earthquake and the entire crew was killed.
My mother wanted to write a book about the event and she started doing some research about the earthquake and ships lost at sea before she died. She had a hard time finding info about it, but I've been thinking about following up on her research just to see what information I can find about my great grandfather and the ship he was on.
I know that I've mentioned before that I'm trying to do some background research on my family, but it's not easy since I'm just about the only living member of it. My great grandfather really interests me though since I know he traveled all over the world before he died or "vanished." After he died my great grandmother packed up and moved to California and I suspect it might have had something to do with my great grandfather's death.
I sometimes naively wonder if he ended up being washed up on some tropical island (Mutiny on the Bounty style) and lived happily for years afterward. Maybe I have Tahitian relatives somewhere?
And I have to agree with Rick here. As someone who lost a family member in the 1906 earthquake I personally find it really offensive that anyone would take offense by a film or book that uses these events (or any similar historic events such as 9/11) to tell a story. Knee-jerk reactionism is almost primitive in it's simpleness. Censorship of any kind - even when it's masquerading as "sensitivity" - is absurd and should never be condoned. Frankly, "exploitation" is a term that's tossed around much too casually these days.
Personally, I don't see a problem with artists using images that are in the national consciousness; I didn't find those images or the ones in Cloverfield particularly offensive....It all comes down to the execution, for me. I love Spielberg's War of the Worlds, I find it to be one of the most effective channelings of 9/11 imagery in American film making, maybe the most. But Spielberg is a film maker of the utmost sensitivity, so his 9/11 imagery wasn't merely window-dressing to a mechanical action movie. The point of his movie was post-9/11 consciousness. I simply found Cloverfield's use of 9/11 imagery to be tacked on and, ultimately, trivializing. But, again, that wasn't even my main problem with the movie. Certainly didn't mean to imply my problem was with the imagery itself.
Should I not talk about liking Spielberg on Greg's blog? Isn't that punishable by death?
Rick and Ryan, I don't find the imagery offensive and thought Cloverfield did an excellent job with it, so I'm with Rick. Like I said in the previous comments, a director like Oliver Stone feels like someone who sees an event and thinks he can stir up something by putting a movie around it. I think if you're going to use the imagery and story, put it to good use.
Essentially we disagree on which movies did that. I think United 93 and Cloverfield did and World Trade Center didn't.
And you can talk about Spielberg here. I don't hate the guy, I just think as a director he is overly reliant upon visual cliche and sentimentality much of the time. I think he is supremely talented with action sequences and adventure/sci-fi movies on the whole but I'm not much enamored of his dramatic work.
Kimberly, how fascinating to have a mystery like that surrounding someone in your family. I wonder what happened to his ship, and if you'll ever find out. I hope you do.
I've never bothered to look into the family history of my family. My parents were first (my Mom) and second (my Dad) generation Americans, their families coming from Greece and Italy. I wouldn't even know where to begin. I don't even know the family name. My paternal grandfather came from Ferrara, Italy and I'm assuming the city name became his official name at Immigration when he arrived. And the name Ferrara is the Italian equivalent of Smith so the results would be too many to sift through. My mom's side is easier and we know many of our relatives outside of Athens so much of the history there is already filled in.
I don't find it offensive, just kind of pointless and trivializing. What do you think Cloverfield does with the imagery besides using it for chills & thrills? I enjoyed the movie enough, but I found myself more amused by it for being clever than affected by any kind of poignancy.
My biggest problem with Stone's film is its poorly written script. I think he did a fine job with it, but I think the most effective depictions of 9/11 on film are the ones that deal with it either indirectly (25th Hour) or allegorically (War of the Worlds, No Country for Old Men). My opinion, of course, but I think any movie set on the day itself is going to rely on familiarity and sentiment, for the most part. Maybe we'll get a good one someday, but I'd be skeptical of ANY movie that used the attacks themselves as the selling point, so to speak. Even a dramatically clumsy movie like Reign Over Me sums up the emotional state of the attack better than the moment-to-moment dramatizations of the day.
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