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Head to nearby Salinas to tour the National Steinbeck Center, where you can see letters and even equipment that inspired East of Eden, and watch clips of the film. The Spreckels Sugar Factory, seen in the opening frames of the film, is still operational, and both Steinbeck and his father, John Ernst-both of whom worked at the sugar factory at different times-would probably still recognize the early-20th-century homes that dot the town’s Historic District. Today, the whole area is still a bit of a time capsule. “The main boulevard was used, but the sugar refinery stands out the most, as it’s the tallest building in the township.” Josephs, archivist for the National Steinbeck Center. “The valley and agricultural fields of the Salinas Valley were used for a number of shots,” says Lisa C.
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The tiny town of Spreckels was the location for 1955’s East of Eden, based on John Steinbeck’s tragic tale of sibling rivalry set in the rural Salinas Valley. Come for the Dungeness crab and views over the water-featuring happy (and non-homicidal) shore birds. To get inside a location from the movie, book a table at The Tides Wharf Restaurant, part of Bodega Bay’s The Inn at the Tides. In Bodega, for instance, you can see the two-story Potter Schoolhouse, where the birds first menaced the town’s children (though you can see it only from the outside-it’s now a private residence). While much of the area was re-created for filming in a studio, a few physical locations remain.
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As it turns out, Bodega is indeed a natural bird magnet that regularly makes Audubon Society rankings for great bird-watching, thanks to the plethora of hawks, egrets, herons, and pelicans to be seen there. When he filmed 1963’s The Birds, based on Daphne du Maurier’s gothic tale, the towns stood in for a few scenes in the English village besieged by the film’s namesake feathered tormentors. The coastal Sonoma County villages of Bodega and Bodega Bay exude a sense of lonely isolation-and that’s part of the reason Alfred Hitchcock liked them. Here, listed north to south, are some of California’s most recognisable cinematic time capsules, and the stories behind them. ( Angels Flight, for instance, recently appeared in 2009’s 500 Days of Summer, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel.) Some areas even play up a location’s famous past, with museums and guided tours. While many locations have faded away, some are still visible-and accessible. Directors of film noir classics couldn’t get enough of the quirky Angels Flight funicular in Los Angeles. Director Alfred Hitchcock created some of his creepiest scenes in remote corners of the North Coast, and under San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. Sometimes California locations helped create a certain look, style, or mood in silver screen classics. One High Sierra location, for example, was cast as a remote site at the base of the Himalayas, various parts of Arabia, and the African jungle neighbourhood of Tarzan. Instead, they took advantage of California’s variety of terrains-including cities, beaches, mountains, deserts, and farmland-to work as stand-ins for far-off destinations. But back in the so-called “Golden Age of Hollywood,” starting with the first talkies in 1927 until about 1960, Hollywood directors didn’t tend to go so far afield when selecting locations.
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Watch the latest blockbuster and you might see scenes shot in a globetrotting array of locations.