Unreality

A Will Smith movie called "The Pursuit of Happyness" that is set in San Francisco has been filming around town for the last month.



Though some of my favorite movies use their "real" locations brilliantly, this movie is doing the usual Hollywood routine of completely reinventing reality. The set in the above photos for example, are of a Bay Area Rapid Transit station in Duboce Park.



Not only are there no BART stations located in any parks anywhere in the system, but Duboce Park is way off the map for any actual BART route, which any person from the Bay Area would recognize in a second.



In another case of unreality, closer to the Civic Center, I went for a costume fitting on Ninth Street between Mission and Howard.



It was for Bellini's "Norma," where I'm cast as a non-singing Roman soldier and a Celtic Warrior.



The Costume Shop is totally exotic, with a vast warehouse on a number of floors filled with clothing of all description.



For rented productions, costumes often arrive with the set. For productions created in San Francisco, the shop creates them from scratch.



One scene in "Norma" has the Celtic Warriors dressed in what was described to us as a "loincloth," which gave me visions of Tarzan's outfit. Instead, the costume turned out to be more like a thong that resembled the bottom half of Raquel Welch's outfit in "One Million Years B.C." This is going to be profoundly embarrassing.