Joe Talbot, the director of The Last Black Man In San Francisco, and the group Believe In SF have just unveiled a new video promoting the city’s comeback, featuring Joe Montana, Steph Curry, Dominique Crenn and others.
The video, titled “Comeback City,” follows what appears to be a coyote — I thought at first it was AI, but it’s apparently a real coydog — as it runs across the Golden Gate Bridge and up and down various hills in the city, passing local celebs along the way. All the while, famed PBS narrator and Bay Area resident Peter Coyote does the voice-over, saying things like, “It’s a city that never stops. Where dolphins stand on two feet, where ideas don’t sit still. A little weird, exactly right.”
The dolphins he’s referring to are the Dolphin Club swimmers.
Former Mayor Willie Brown and Michelin-star chef Dominique Crenn are seen walking arm-in-arm down the street. Joe Montana throws a football. And there’s a funny moment where the coyote/coydog runs past Mayor Daniel Lurie and he says, “What the
It’s unclear who this is for, but as the Chronicle’s Joe Garofoli explains, Believe In SF has raised over $1.8 million this year and likes to spend its money supporting Lurie’s priorities — and the video “echoes many of the same pro-San Francisco themes that Lurie has espoused since taking office but is aimed at an audience beyond those who typically consume political news.”
The creative team behind “Comeback City” is Portal A, the same outfit that, 15 years ago, made this viral “2 Legit 2 Quit” video to encourage then-interim Mayor Ed Lee to run for a full term, and to convince voters he should be mayor.
Portal A says it wanted to create something unconventional, a way to tout the city’s renaissance without relying on homeless numbers or crime stats or the like.
Portal A cofounder Nate Houghteling tells the Chronicle, “It was really Joe’s idea to center it on the coyote as [representing] this outsider coming, looking at San Francisco from the Marin headlands and seeing the city twinkling in the distance, and being drawn to it and feeling a calling toward it. Then following it like an outsider finding their place in the city.”
Even though it was two trained coydogs named Yahoo and Tacoa used in the filming, many who watch this are just going to assume this is an AI coyote, so maybe the deliberate avoidance of AI isn’t going to accomplish much.
And as Garofoli notes from the creators, the quick shot of Francis Ford Coppola alongside novelist Dave Eggers and filmmaker Chris Columbus and Roman Coppola (Francis’s son) in North Beach, was not initially planned, but the elder Coppola allegedly happened to be walking by when they were shooting the scene.
Is it a nice little video about SF? Sure. Is likely to go viral like that Ed Lee video did. No. But maybe a few prospective tourists will find it and question the Fox News version of the world in which SF remains an irredeemable hellscape.
Related: Viral Video of Dancing Robot Going Nuts In Restaurant Was From Cupertino
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source sfist.com ’
