The Aztec Theater on 5th Avenue as seen in the 1979 George C. Scott film Hardcore

It's always interesting to see San Diego through the eyes of Hollywood. I've been watching reruns of the first season of Harry-O, when the TV series still had David Jansen living on a houseboat in San Diego. Shot here in 1974 and 1975, almost every episode has footage of long-gone local places and people. The show moved to L.A. for its second season, mainly due to the lack of a San Diego branch of the Screen Extras Guild. Union regulations forced the producers to ship Harry-O performers back and forth between Los Angeles and San Diego, which proved too expensive to sustain.

Harry-O at the Zebra Club  

The Reader recently posted an archive story detailing the untold story behind the film shoot at the Hotel Del Coronado for Billy Wilder’s 1959 comedy Some Like It Hot. That must have been something, to be around back then and maybe walking along the beach in Coronado and stumbling onto a scene being shot with with Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon.

I once accidentally walked onto a film set of the 1979 ensemble comedy Scavenger Hunt. It features an all-star cast racing for an inheritance, with physical hi-jinks and cameos from actors like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Avery Schreiber. 

The production was filming a scene at the World Famous San Diego Zoo where Schreiber is dressed as a zookeeper and complaining that five of his ostriches were stolen by the competing teams for the scavenger hunt game. My friend and I just happened to decide to sneak into the Zoo that day, hopping a fence just behind an animal enclosure where, unbeknownst to us, Avery Schreiber was standing in front of the pen, shooting his scene.

I remember feeling like we'd been pretty slick with our bootleg entrance, and we were both ready to follow the zookeeper path out to public walkway and just blend in with the paying patrons, a budget-friendly excursion we'd been making weekly for some time. When I saw a zookeeper who looked just like Avery Schreiber, I was glad he didn't seem to notice our sudden appearance on the walkway and actually said out loud to my friend "Wow, doesn't that guy look just like Avery Schreiber?"

Suddenly, a loud clanging noise started up, and I noticed a bunch of very bright lights pointing directly at us all. Damn, I thought, did we just walk into some kind of cheapskate sting operation?! Were we about to get busted by some guy who looks just like Avery Schreiber?

It wasn't until I heard and saw a guy I assume to have been the director completely losing his mind that I realized it really WAS Avery Schreiber - the director-looking guy was screaming at us "Who the hell is that?!? Get the hell out of my shot!" We did just that, jumping into the crowd surrounding the roped off area we'd inadvertently walked into.

I was on one other film set around the same time, only with permission AND a paycheck.   

A Force of One is a Chuck Norris/Jennifer O’Neal thriller with Chuck kicking ass all over downtown San Diego, circa 1979. Some shots were done on 5th Avenue, at the all-night grindhouse theaters where I was working at the time, the Casino and the Aztec. 

Other scenes were filmed where I was living at the Palms Hotel on 12th and Island, which at the time was the floppiest of downtown flophouses.

Today, the Palms is an upscale, brightly-renovated dorm, across from condos, but back then it was a bleak and faded roach farm. I took below photos of the Palms 25 years apart, 1979 and 2004:

One notable scene filmed at the Palms depicts Chuck and Jennifer walking into the lobby, and Chuck wants to do some tough talking at the front desk, at the bottom of the staircase. Jennifer instead applies a little charm (as much as the glacial Jennifer O'Neal can exude charm, anyway, which isn't a whole lotta).

The street level lobby -- which was usually filled with senior citizens watching the already-ancient TV -- was lit to highlight the dreadful worn-out walls AND some of the very same Hotel denizens, sitting on the couch benches (like converted bus benches), staring at the tube. 

I remember there were quite a lot of residents who wanted the “role,” not so much to be in the movie but for the $50 fee. The old guy who used to rent me his car was in the scene. He used the $50 to get his OWN rent-to-own TV for his dinky third floor room, which needed a cleanup just to make room for set.

In the movie, Chuck and Jen then head up the grand staircase maze. 

Note the poor wall "repairs," with masking tape over the cracks and red-painted in various colors that don't even come close to matching the wall paint. So, the duo makes their way into a room (later to be MY room)...

...and Chuck kicks some serious druggie ass.

Elsewhere in the movie, a junkie runs up the stairs and bangs on the door of room 31, screaming “Where’s my fix?!?”

After I moved into that room, the whole time I lived there, every single night, SOMEbody in the Hotel would pound on my door and scream "Where's my fix?!?" Often several somebodys.

On the day of the film shoot, Norris and O’Neal were seen walking around outside a lot, being very cordial to anyone who wanted to talk to them. Which wasn’t that many people. 

The majority of Hotel residents seemed unaware or uncaring about who they were and what they were doing. They just grumbled about having to go in and out thru the back door and not having lobby access for the 15-or-so hour shoot.

The one Hotel pay phone was in the lobby, and thus off limits all day -- that was the real pisser for most of the residents. Well, that and Beasely’s dive bar next door to the Hotel being closed to the public, to instead be used as a roach wagon for the film crew and talent.

When A Force of One came out in theaters, I went to my own beloved Casino Theater on 5th where I worked at the time, to see it with fellow Hotel denizens Jerry the King of Cans and old Donald the drinker, the only time I recall ever seeing Donald outside the Hotel, other than going to and from Beasely’s Friendly Corner next door (which also made a brief cameo appearance in the film). 

We cheered like soccer hooligans during the Palms scene.

I didn’t remember another thing about the flick until screening the DVD recently. It's not at all a bad flick. Typical Norris fare, full of amped-up (if often inexplicable) action, and with lots of shots of downtown San Diego BEFORE it became the Gaslamp Quarter, back when it still clung to its gloriously seedy sailors-on-shore-leave legacy.

I was still working at the Casino Theater when scenes from the Marty Feldman movie In God We Trust were filmed on 5th Avenue and in front of the Horton Plaza grindhouse movie theaters operated by the same chain that ran the Aztec and Casino theaters on 5th. You can read about that in a Reader article from last year called The Day Marty Feldman Came To Town - here's a few screenshots:

The 1979 film Hardcore filmed scenes in San Diego featuring George C. Scott dodging hunchbacked junkies among downtown's porno theaters and bookstores, with places like Cinema X on 5th Avenue (once the legit Bijou Theater) and the 4th Avenue Pussycat turning up on celluloid. 

You can also catch glimpses of the all-night grindhouse movie theaters like the Aztec and the Casino, both on 5th.

Also filmed in San Diego in 1979 was Loving Couples, a Time-Life Films production starring Shirley MacLaine and James Coburn, and the Charles Bronson movie Borderline, with the action star playing a U.S. Border Patrol officer trying to break up a ring of alien smugglers (the Reader published a behind-the-scenes feature about the production in 1980). 

The Reader also once ran an article about The Day the Monkees Came To Town, chronicling how the first time the Monkees performed in public was at a promotion in Del Mar a few days before their TV show debuted, where the town was renamed "Clarksville" for the day in honor of the first Monkees single "Last Train To Clarksville." 

Less known is that the very first time the Monkees EVER performed music together was ALSO in San Diego – a year before the Clarksville promotion!

In mid-November 1965, the foursome shot scenes for the pilot episode “Royal Flush” at the Hotel Del Coronado, including the country club and bar sequences. Exterior scenes were filmed on the beach near the Hotel; this footage would also turn up in the series original title sequence, as well as throughout the episode “Here Come the Monkees.” 

Scene from The Monkees TV show pilot filmed at the Hotel Del Coronado                                               

Once again, a local accidentally stumbled on the production in Coronado. West Coast Iron Works guitarist Gary Carter was a sophomore at Coronado High School at the time, and he recalls the Friday afternoon he and two friends stumbled across the Monkees on the Hotel Del beachfront. “We noticed them in shorts and Hawaiian shirts, and a guy filming them with a handheld camera,” he says. “We had no idea who they were…during a break, we struck up a conversation with Davy Jones, and he asked us if we could take him to Tijuana! We explained that we were underage and not allowed to cross the border."

Jones invited the teens to dinner with the band that evening in the Hotel Del’s Crown room, along with crew members, potential network affiliates, and – in the case of Micky Dolenz – groupies. “That was when I recognized him as the grown up kid [Micky Braddock] from the Circus Boy TV show,” says Carter, “and he had six or seven of the most beautiful Hollywood starlets anyone has ever seen at his table with him.”

"As the evening progressed, they [the Monkees] started having fun with each other. I don’t remember which one it was, but someone picked up this big bowl of shrimp cocktail and tossed it…soon, it was a full-on food fight, and we had to leave the table to avoid getting food all over us. I was horrified [for the Hotel]…the carpet in that room alone was worth tens of thousands of dollars.”

The messy dinner notwithstanding, Carter accepted Jones’ invitation to return the following day, to watch a TV scene being filmed in the Hotel’s Circus Room (seen in the series pilot). This shoot marked the first time the Monkees ever played musical instruments all in one room together, as they plugged into the prop amps between setups and took a shot at a few old Chuck Berry and folk numbers.

“I got the hint from watching that their show was a satire of the Beatles, which I personally took offense at,” says Carter, who got bored after a couple of hours and departed the shooting.

“On the way out, I stuck my head into the Crown Room, and a bunch of people were still cleaning up the mess from the food fight. They were really pissed off.”

The Monkees were banned from the Hotel Del – collectively and individually – until September 2004, when Davy Jones returned with his band to perform at a private function. “Memories flooded the moment as we checked in and walked down the longest and widest corridors,” he wrote on his website davyjones.net.

“The concert for a couple hundred execs went down well,” says Jones, “and a couple of convention goers helped me sing ‘Daydream Believer’ and ‘I'm a Believer’ to rapturous applause. A good time was had by all. By Thursday, I made my way to the beach and shrunk my vitals. Extreme cold sea.”