Lady Bird's Sacramento (San Francisco: credit, how much, neighborhood)

[Chimérique]

Lady Bird's Sacramento - A Love Letter to Sacramento

What is the neighborhood like where Lady Bird wishes she lived, and what is the neighborhood like "on the other side of the tracks" where Lady Bird lives?

What is this love/hate relationship "we" all have of Sacramento?

Lady Bird takes place in 2002-2003 Sacramento but I've been told it felt more like Sacramento of the late 80's early 90's? What is different about Sacramento of the early 80's and today.

[Chimérique]

"It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento."

Joan Didion

[Chimérique]

Christine McPherson, who prefers to be called Lady Bird — it’s her given name, she insists, in the sense that “it’s given to me, by me” — is a senior at a Catholic girls’ high school. Sister Sarah Joan (Lois Smith), the principal, has read Lady Bird’s college application essay. “It’s clear how much you love Sacramento,” Sister Sarah remarks. This comes as a surprise, both to Lady Bird and the viewer, who is by now aware of Lady Bird’s frustration with her hometown.

“I guess I pay attention,” she says, not wanting to be contrary.

“Don’t you think they’re the same thing?” the wise sister asks.

The idea that attention is a form of love (and vice versa) is a beautiful insight, and in many ways it’s the key to “Lady Bird,” Greta Gerwig’s beautiful, insightful new film, the first for which she is solely credited as writer and director. Ms. Gerwig, a Sacramento native and member of her heroine’s generation — the movie takes place mostly during the 2002-3 academic year — knows her characters and their world very well. Her affection envelops them like a secular form of grace: not uncritically, but unconditionally. And if you pay the right kind of attention to “Lady Bird” — absorbing its riffs and digressions as well as its melodies, its choral passages along with its solos and duets — you will almost certainly love it. It’s hard not to.

A.O. Scott NY Times

Is this the Sacramento you know and Love?

[Chimérique]

‘Lady Bird’ is taking America by storm by celebrating the true beauty of Sacramento

See Marco Breton's write-up on Sacramento and Lady Bird -

Sacramento native Greta Gerwig scores big with 'Lady Bird,' about her native city | The Sacramento Bee

[Chimérique]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awEOLTzRR3w

[CA4Now]

I wish she hadn't titled it "Lady Bird," which will always make me think of Lady Bird Johnson.

[JohnS_15]

Cool I will check this out. Always fun to see the city you live in as the setting for films or novels etc.

[NinaN]

Originally Posted by CA4Now

I wish she hadn't titled it "Lady Bird," which will always make me think of Lady Bird Johnson.

Exactly my thoughts

[wburg]

I don't think Joan Didion has spent a Christmas in Sacramento since Eisenhower was in the White House, so she isn't exactly up on current events here. And having spent several Christmas and Thanksgiving holidays in San Francisco, it was pretty far from bacchanalic there too.

I still want to go see it, but it seems like the Sacramento of the film is based pretty much on the part of Land Park where she grew up--apparently she selected only Top 40 tracks for the soundtrack, because, as she mentioned in an interview, there was no counterculture here, to the point where nobody in Sacramento in 2000 or so had heard of obscure underground bands like The Kinks.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/fea...-story-1055561

Every bit as important as the settings was the soundtrack, and Gerwig toiled to assemble just the right playlist of early 2000s music. "No one in Sacramento knew who The Kinks were," she says of her hometown's lack of a counterculture. She leaned on Counting Crows, early career Justin Timberlake and Dave Matthews, whose hit "Crash Into Me" plays throughout the film. Gerwig also constructed an on-set playlist of '90s and '00s bangers, including selections from Blues Traveler and Alanis Morissette, that she would play in between shot setups.

This strikes me as pretty far from reality, although maybe Greta Gerwig hadn't heard of the Kinks in 2002. It's harder to believe that she thought Sacramento had no counterculture, as there were plenty of her classmates entering, exploring, and participating in the various local underground music scenes during that era. I suppose my point of reference was one day when I was driving past El Camino High School in the early 2000s and saw a teenager in a Dead Boys T-shirt. I noted it because this teenager obviously never heard the Dead Boys on the radio, they were a fairly obscure 1970s punk band that broke up before that kid was born (aside from reunion tours, including a stop in Sacramento that happened this past Monday night.) But due to Napster and iTunes (which launched in 2001), high school kids anywhere could hear about the Dead Boys, and order T-shirts via the Internet if they didn't have them at Tower Records (which was still around then.) Maybe it's kind of a silly thing to focus on, and I'll probably still see the film, but it makes me wonder about the image of Sacramento portrayed in the film.

[Chimérique]

Burg, you should know to take it with a grain of salt when someone not from Sacramento (like that hollywood reporter article) tries to describe or casts judgement on Sacramento.

The Soundtrack is much more than "top 40".

Greta Gerwig is Sacramento through and through. She was born in 1983. Her neighborhood was River Park not Land Park. The RR tracks is the tracks parallel to Elvas which separates River Park from East Sac. Note, St. Francis sits between River Park and East Sac for the most part and the Fab 40's is East Sac.

On the surface you might think Greta Gerwig is rehashing old stereotypes and cliches about Sacramento and perpetuating them, which is is to a point, but she is writing from a place of love and affection, she captures a time and place with emotional honesty and like real life memories she confuses and mixes time periods subtly.

Didion captures a point in time with her quote and other writings, in that sense, she is a great historian without being one or claiming to be one.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Phpd1gDQhUQ