“You’re gonna see why each of these extras was paid an extra $40 in a second,” says tour guide Wylie Herman, as a clip from the 2018 film Ant-Man and the Wasp plays.

It’s a gray Saturday morning in San Francisco, and a small group of Bay Area alumni—the tour was limited to 12—is visiting locations where famous movies were shot. The tour van is equipped with a screen at the front, so passengers can watch a movie clip, then look out the windows at the real location.

Donna Padnos, MBA’82, who serves on the Alumni Club of the Bay Area’s board, organized the event; this is the second time she’s arranged this tour. The club offers a few programs a month, she says—wine tastings, food events, hiking—as well as three book groups.

As the van idles on the Embarcadero, on-screen Ant-Man (who can also become giant) topples backward into the bay. “Forty-dollar bonus,” Herman says, as the passersby are drenched. Extras get a bonus if they get wet, smoke a cigarette, or provide their own transportation on camera, he explains. “Will it stack if you do all three?” quips Jerry Chao, AB’09.

The clip reel moves on to other films shot in the Fisherman’s Wharf area: Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), The Princess Diaries (2001), and the James Bond movie A View to a Kill (1985)—because what better place to hold a secret spy meeting than in one of the busiest tourist areas of San Francisco?

The tour covers a century of movies, starting with Day Dreams (1922), featuring Buster Keaton calmly executing one of his hair-raising stunts on a street car. “This is the same cable car line,” says Herman, who somehow is able to navigate the narrow streets of San Francisco, work a remote, and keep up a steady stream of film trivia, all at the same time.

In the Financial District, we watch as the Transamerica Pyramid, completed in 1972, is reconstructed in a computer-generated timelapse shot for Zodiac (2007). Then its tip is clipped by a missile in Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol (2011) and the exterior is climbed by the eponymous alien symbiote in Venom (2018).

On Market Street, Herbie the Volkswagen in Herbie Rides Again (1974) jumps off the roof of a parking garage. The group laughs at the ultra-cheesy special effects. “Oh Herbie, behave yourself,” says his passenger, septuagenarian Helen Hayes. “You’ve knocked my glasses off.”

Decades of filmmakers have loved the same things about San Francisco: in particular, its hills and stairs make for terrific car chases. We watch Steve McQueen in Bullitt (1968), doing his own stunt driving and periodically poking his head out the window of his green Mustang to prove it. Four years later, What’s Up, Doc? (1972), the screwball comedy homage starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal, uses the same terrain for laughs.

The tour’s first photo stop is City Hall. It stands in for a federal building in the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), when Indiana Jones is downcast at the lack of government excitement for his find. In Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014), menacing simians chase hapless humans around. And the sidewalk in front is the scene of the terrifying reveal—no spoilers—in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). The alumni group lines up approximately where Donald Sutherland was shrieking and poses for a smiling group shot. 

Filmmakers also love the Golden Gate Bridge, “destroyed dozens of times on film,” Herman says. We get to enjoy six of them: it’s besieged by a giant octopus in It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), then an earthquake in Superman (1978), supervillain Magneto in X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), apes in Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), Godzilla in Godzilla (2014), and an earthquake again in San Andreas (2015). It’s also the backdrop for a memorable scene in Vertigo (1958), when Jimmy Stewart, stalker-turned-rescuer, pulls Kim Novak out of the bay after she throws herself in. (Her high heels, improbably, remain on her feet.)

Two hours later, the van deposits the group back at Pier 43 1/2, where the tour began. We emerge blinking and a little dazed. In the distance is the Bay Bridge, where in The Graduate (1967) Dustin Hoffmann drives his red convertible to Berkeley in a desperate search for the woman he loves.

Except we now know—since the car is on the top level of the bridge, to make for a more dramatic helicopter shot—that he’s headed in the wrong direction.