Over the past 150 years,
San Francisco had been the base of operations for Eadweard Muybridge and Philo
T. Farnsworth—inventors of the zoopraxiscope and television,
respectively—as well as filmmakers as well-known as George Lucas and
Francis Ford Coppola, and as lesser-known as avant-garde legend Bruce Conner.
Gary Leva's documentary Fog City Mavericks tries to encompass them all, making a case
for the city as a welcoming place for innovation and art. But while his
argument is hard to dispute, the way Leva makes it is often confounding.
Working
non-chronologically, Leva starts with Muybridge's early experiments in high-speed
photography, then jumps ahead to the founding of Lucas and Coppola's idealistic
filmmaking collective American Zoetrope. From there, Fog City Mavericks keeps returning to the
Zoetrope crew, while zigzagging around to pick up anecdotes about Charles
Chaplin's brief stint in San Francisco, as well as stories from the careers of
filmmakers as diverse as producer Saul Zaentz and directors Caroll Ballard,
Philip Kaufman, Clint Eastwood, and—ahem—Chris Columbus.
The presence of Columbus
in any documentary with the word "maverick" in the title should be cause for
concern, as should Leva spending 10 minutes on the making of Mrs. Doubtfire, while consigning a bunch
of other Bay Area legends to a too-short "also" montage at the end, and
ignoring the contributions of the city's gay community altogether. Leva strains
to tie it all together, mostly via a chipper Peter Coyote narration that sounds
like it was recorded for the San Francisco tourism board. Still, while Fog
City Mavericks
is far too uncritical and mainstream-minded, his interviewees' anecdotes are
interesting, and a line can undeniably be drawn from Muybridge to the
experimenters at Skywalker Ranch and Pixar Animation. And there's something
romantic about Coppola's vision of a San Francisco filmmaking community where
artists "play together like children, making magic."
Key features: None.