The New Fillmore

The 78-minute documentary debuts this month in San Francisco.

FILM | Barbara Kate Repa

JIM TRACY, longtime running coach at the neighborhood’s University High School, never set out to be a film star. But when life conspired to deliver a record-setting team, a diagnosis of Lou Gehrig’s Disease and a community that rallied around it all, he could be no other.

The result is Running for Jim, which screens this month at the San Francisco Independent Documentary Film Festival.

One race in particular provided the dramatic high point of the film. The University High School girls’ cross country team, having recently learned their beloved coach had been diagnosed with the fatal disease, was set to compete in the 2010 state championship, a 3.1-mile race run on a cold damp day in Fresno. Team captain Holland Reynolds gathered the team for the usual rallying cheer: “Go Big Red! Go Devils!” Then they added, more like a prayer, “Let’s do it for Jim.”

The race was a nail-biter from the start. One of the team’s top runners, Jennie Callan, fell at the 100-yard mark and slipped to last place, then rallied to finish 16th in the roster of 169 runners. Other team members also ran their hearts out. Adrian Kerester, who had never run in a state final meet, placed 25th. Lizzie Teerlink beat her personal best time. Bridget Blum led for more than half the race, finishing third.

But Holland Reynolds, the team’s fastest runner, slowed around the 2.5 mile mark, then hit the wall. Three yards from the finish line, dazed and dehydrated, she collapsed and fell to the ground. A race official hovered over her, explaining she either had to complete the race without help or withdraw. An agonizing 20 seconds of film shows Reynolds crawling over the finish line before being swept away to a waiting ambulance.

Her explanation: “Of course I was going to finish. I just knew I needed to do it for Jim because we needed to win state for Jim.”

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Film crew at the Swedenborgian Church, with Nicole Kidman in the doorway.

Legendary filmmaker Philip Kaufman — director of The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and many others — has lived in Pacific Heights for years. His latest film premieres on May 28 at 9 p.m. when HBO broadcasts Hemingway & Gellhorn, starring Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen.

Hemingway & Gellhorn is a love story exploring the tempestuous relationship between writers Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, which was the inspiration for Hemingway’s classic novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Though the story takes place in nine different countries, the film was shot over 40 days entirely on location in San Francisco and the Bay Area, which stood in for Spain, Finland, Cuba, New York, Shanghai, Key West and Idaho.

Key scenes were filmed at the Swedenborgian Church at Washington and Lyon Streets, only a few blocks from Kaufman’s home.

“One scene takes place in a church in Finland that had been converted for wartime use,” says Kaufman. “We were looking for something — maybe not Finnish, but with that approximate feeling. And of course I’d been to weddings there.”

Incorporating archival black and white footage of Finnish soldiers, Kaufman recreates the scene with snow and icicles on the historic church. “Then the color comes back into it,” he says, “and we find Nicole writing letters to Hemingway — actually taken from the real letters.”

Another scene was shot in the wooden stairway of the church’s parish house, standing in for the small British hotel where Gellhorn and Hemingway had their final rendezvous. “It’s where they break up their relationship,” says Kaufman. “It’s their final scene together.”

During the filming, Kaufman walked home to Vallejo Street for lunch, then back to work at the church.

“We can make films here and use local people, yet create a film that could be made anywhere in the world,” Kaufman says. “It’s great. It’s just great working here.”

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Read more: Cannes celebrates Philip Kaufman

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Duane Baughman screens his new film at the Clay.

By Don Langley

The film “Bhutto,” which earned high praise at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, is now playing at several dozen theaters throughout the country. But local producer-director Duane Baughman says it was most important to him to bring his documentary home to the Clay Theater on Fillmore.

He invited his Washington Street neighbors and others he had met in his informal office — the Peet’s coffee shop at Sacramento and Fillmore Streets — to a showing there early in the new year. Baughman also bought out a San Diego theater at the end of January so his parents and their friends could see it in the city where he grew up.
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