Joe Talbot, Director of last black man in san franciscoAnd the group Believe in SF has unveiled a new video promoting the city’s return, featuring Joe Montana, Steph Curry, Dominic Crean and more.
The video, titled “Comeback City,” features what appears to be a coyote — I first thought it was AI, but apparently it’s an actual coydog — as it runs up and down the Golden Gate Bridge and various hills in the city, passing local celebs along the way. Meanwhile, famed PBS narrator and Bay Area resident Peter Coyote does a voice-over, saying, “It’s a town that never stops. Where dolphins stand on two legs, where thoughts don’t stand still. A little weird, all right.”
The dolphins he is referring to are swimmers from the Dolphin Club.
Former mayor Willie Brown and Michelin-starred chef Dominic Crenn are seen walking down the street hand in hand. Joe Montana throws the football. And there’s a funny moment where the coyote/coydog runs by Mayor Daniel Lurie and he says, “What
It’s not clear who it’s for, but as the Chronicle’s Joe Garofoli points out, Believe in SF has raised more than $1.8 million this year and prefers to spend its money supporting Lurie’s priorities — and the video “reflects many of the pro-San Francisco themes Lurie has adopted since taking office, but its target extends beyond the audience that typically consumes political news.”
The creative team behind “Comeback City” is Portal A, the same organization that created the viral “2 Legit 2 Quit” video 15 years ago to encourage then-interim Mayor Ed Lee to run for a full term and reassure voters that he should become mayor.
Portal A says it wanted to create something unconventional, a way to promote the city’s renaissance without relying on homeless numbers or crime statistics or things like that.
“The idea to focus it on coyotes was actually Joe’s,” Nate Houghteling, co-founder of the portal, told the Chronicle. [representing] There’s this outsider coming in, looking at San Francisco from the Marin Headlands and seeing the city shining in the distance, and being attracted to it and feeling a call toward it. Then follow it like an outsider finding his place in the city.”
Even though the filming used two trained coyotes named Yahoo and Takoa, many people watching it will assume it is an AI coyote, so it may be that deliberately avoiding the AI would not accomplish much.
And as Garofoli notes from the creators, the quick shot of Francis Ford Coppola with novelist Dave Eggers and filmmakers Chris Columbus and Roman Coppola (Francis’s son) in North Beach was not initially planned, but the elder Coppola was reportedly passing through while they were shooting the scene.
Is this a nice little video about SF? Sure. Likely to go viral like Ed Lee’s video. No, but maybe some potential tourists will get past it and question the Fox News version of the world in which SF remains an irredeemable hellscape.
Connected: The viral video of the robot going crazy dancing in a restaurant was from Cupertino.