Napa Valley, California
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Napa Valley Trivia |
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Napa Valley, California
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Napa Valley Trivia |
Napa Valley Film Commission
707.226.7459
Provides assistance to scouts and production companies, whether for feature-length films, TV or commercials.
How to film in the city of Napa
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Director: Francis Ford Coppola (owner of Niebaum-Coppola Winery in Rutherford)
Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Martin Sheen, Sam Bottoms, Laurence Fishburne, Dennis Hopper, Harrison Ford. Some exterior shots were done in the valley, particularly on the boat traveling upriver. Also, a former Napa High student reports that "The sound effects were done at Memorial Stadium using Napa High School students. We did a lot of yelling as a group for the riot scene with the USO. Several students were then kept after the group was released and were taped running on the steps and the grass with and without shoes."
Bachelor, The (2002) (TV)
One full episode of this reality series.
Black Rain (1989)
Michael Douglas, Andy Garcia, Kate Capshaw.
Catholic School (1999)
Short documentary filmed at St. John's Catholic School in Napa
Deadly Harvest (1972) (TV)
Richard Boone, Michael Constantine, Patty Duke.
Exterior scenes at a house just north of Yountville.
Dying Young (1991)
Julia Roberts, Colleen Dewhurst, Ellen Burstyn.
Encore! Encore! (1998) (TV)
Short-lived series starring Nathan Lane
Falcon Crest (1981-1990) (TV)
Spring Mountain Winery—home of the mythical "Falcon Crest Winery"
Exterior winery shots filmed at Spring Mountain Winery in St. Helena and other locations throughout the valley.
Gates of Heaven (1978)
Documentary on Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park, located just outside Napa.
Even if you can't visit the cemetery, buy the movie. The Gates of Heaven (DVD)
Howard the Duck (1986)
Some scenes filmed at a now torn-down "restaurant" on the Carneros Highway just outside Napa.
Hunters Are For Killing (1970) (TV)
Martin Balsam, Melvyn Douglas, Suzanne Pleshette, Burt Reynolds, Larry Storch
Jack (1996)
Scene shot at St. Helena Elementary School
Killer Bees (1974) (TV)
Gloria Swanson, Kate Jackson.
Moonraker (1979)
Roger Moore.
Mumford (1999)
Scene shot in downtown St. Helena
My Old Man's Place (1972)
Once an Eagle (1976) (miniseries)
Pollyanna (1960)
Jane Wyman, Richard Egan, Karl Malden, Adolphe Menjou, Agnes Moorehead, Hayley Mills.
Shoot The Moon (1982)
Albert Finney, Diane Keaton.
The Parent Trap (1998)
Portions were filmed at the Staglin Family Vineyard in Rutherford.
Buy The Parent Trap DVD (1998)
The Unholy Wife (1957)
Rod Steiger, Marie Windsor, Diana Dors.
They Knew What They Wanted (1940)
Tom Ewell, Charles Laughton, Carole Lombard, Karl Malden.
Buy They Knew What They Wanted DVD
This Earth is Mine (1959)
Rock Hudson, Jean Simmons, Claude Rains, Dorothy McGuire.
Walk in the Clouds, A (1995)
Keanu Reeves, Anthony Quinn.
Extensive Napa Valley locations including: Mount Veeder Winery, Napa; Mayacamas Winery, Napa; Beringer Vineyards, St. Helena; Charles Krug Winery, St. Helena; Duckhorn Vineyards, St. Helena.
Buy A Walk in the Clouds (DVD)
Wells Fargo (1937)
Joel McCrea, Johnnie Mack Brown, Lloyd Nolan, Robert Cummings
Wild in the Country (1961)
Elvis Presley, Tuesday Weld, John Ireland, Hope Lange, Gary Lockwood.
Even Bigfoot allegedly visits the Napa Valley. The large, hairy creature, also known as a Sasquatach or Yeti, was reportedly seen a number of times in the Pope Valley area over the period 1978-1989.
Bigfoot was occasionally observed running in the distance. Other incidents involved footprints, screams and smells. It was described as about seven feet tall and covered head-to-toe with grayish-brown hair. One resident even stated that one "had tried to enter their house but was frightened away with a gun blast."
Sightings usually occurred in early evenings, but sometimes in the early morning just before daybreak.
Buy Bigfoot! - The True Story of Apes in America by Loren Coleman.
Boysenberries, a hybrid of blackberries, were developed in the 1920s in the Napa Valley by Rudolf Boysen. They were later popularized by Walter Knott at his farm stand in Buena Park, California that eventually became known as Knott's Berry Farm.
Mary Ellen Pleasant (1814? - 1904)
Mary Ellen Pleasant is perhaps better known as "Mammy Pleasant", but it was a name she detested. She was born a slave in Georgia some time between 1814 and 1817, the illegitimate daughter of an enslaved Vodou priestess from Haiti and a Virginia governor's son, John Pleasants. She was bought out of slavery by a planter and indentured for nine years as a store clerk with abolitionist Quakers in Massachusetts.
Around 1841 she married a wealthy mulatto merchant/contractor from Ohio and Philadelphia named James Smith, who was also a slave rescuer on the Underground Railroad. The two worked to help slaves flee to safety in Canada and safe states. Smith died in 1844, leaving her a $45,000 fortune and a plantation run by freedmen near Harper's Ferry, Virginia.
Because of slaver reaction to her own ongoing Underground Railroad activities, she was forced to flee to New Orleans in 1850 where she met the Vodou queen Marie Laveau who trained her in how to "pressure the powerful to help the powerless" —blacks and poor women—gain rights and jobs. She then went to San Francisco, arriving in April 1852. Because she had no "freedom papers" she passed herself off as white, while she worked as a steward and cook in a white boardinghouse and invested in real estate and various business activities.
Pleasant's training with Marie Laveau proved beneficial. Pleasant became so successful at leveraging social change that many called her San Francisco's "Black City Hall". Her activities and her money helped ex-slaves avoid extradition, start businesses and find employment in hotels, homes and on the steamships and railroads of California.
In 1858 she returned to the East, bought land to house escaped slaves, and aided abolitionist John Brown both with money and by riding in advance of his famous raid at Harper's Ferry encouraging slaves to join him.
She went back to San Francisco where her investments with an influential business partner helped her amass a joint fortune estimated at $30 million. She later led the Franchise League movement in San Francisco that earned blacks the right to testify in court, and to ride the trolleys. Her lawsuit in 1868 in San Francisco against the North Beach and Mission RailRoad was used as a precedent in 1982 to achieve contemporary civil rights. Mary Ellen Pleasant died in San Francisco in 1904. Her body was taken by friends to Napa and buried in Tulocay Cemetery. On her tombstone is inscribed "the mother of civil rights in California."
For more information, incuding a book on Mary Ellen Pleasant by Susheel Bibbs, see http://hometown.aol.com/mepleasant and www.geocities.com/Athens/Atrium/3130/mep.html.
Buy The Making of Mammy Pleasant: A Black Entrepreneur in 19th Century San Francisco by Lynn Hudson.
At the end of World War II, a farm labor camp on the Silverado Trail was converted to a camp for German prisoners of war. The camp was established to provide agricultural labor as many of the usual farmworkers were away on duty with the military. The POW camp was located north of Yountville on the east side of the Trail, where Rector Creek flows down from Rector Dam. The compound was surrounded by barbed wire, had lookout towers with machine-guns and searchlights, and was patrolled by heavily armed guards. Every day, just after dawn, the prisoners were loaded into open trucks and taken to work in prune orchards and vineyards in the valley.
The first 250 German POWs did not arrive until August 14, 1945, over three months after the surrender of Germany, and the same day the Japanese agreed to unconditional surrender.
As an interesting sidenote, during the war German and Italian "enemy" aliens and citizens (All Japanese-Americans had been moved to camps east of the Sierra Mountains) were not allowed within a certain distance from the California coast. The line went approximately through the middle of the Napa Valley. The result was that one German-American resident of the valley, a baker, found his home on one side of the line and his bakery on another. After a number of confrontations, he was finally allowed to pass freely between his home and his workplace.
Edwin Pridham and Peter Jensen moved to Napa in 1911 and set up a research lab. They invented the "Magnavox" loudspeaker, the first public address system.
Tribute in downtown Napa's Dwight Murray Plaza to the inventors of the loudspeaker.
Their first public demonstration was in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park on December 10, 1915. On December 25, they played music to a crowd of 100,000 people in front of San Francisco City Hall. Their Magnavox company gained national attention when they provided loudspeakers for a 1919 speech in San Diego by President Woodrow Wilson.
From 1940 to the end of the war, Basalt Rock Company's Steel Division built 115 barges and 40 other ships for the U. S. Navy. The shipyard was located south of the city of Napa on the Napa River, where Napa Pipe Corporation is located today. (You can see the facilities when looking north from the Butler Bridge, which carries Highway 29 over the river.) Ships were as large as 1,700 tons and included self-propelled freighters and fuel oil tankers. LSTs (tank landing ships) were also repaired at the shipyard.
You thought Napa County had only one valley? Guess again. How about 97? That's the count of valleys designated by the United States Geological Survey. Of course 73 of these are small enough to be called canyons, but that still leaves 24 full-fledged valleys.
Next time you're driving through Napa County, don't just visit the Napa Valley. Track down one of these other valleys, too. Some are easy to find. Others? Well, see for yourself.
American Canyon, Anderson Canyon, Apple Tree Canyon.
Bear Canyon, Bear Valley, Bell Canyon, Browns Valley, Brushy Canyon, Bull Canyon, Burrell Canyon, Butts Canyon.
Campbell Canyon, Capell Valley, Carneros Valley, Cedar Canyon, Cedar Valley, Cherry Valley, Chimney Canyon, Coleman Canyon, Congress Valley, Conn Valley.
Daglia Canyon, Dardon Canyon, Decke Canyon, Devils Canyon, Dutch Henry Canyon.
East Bull Canyon, East Chapman Canyon, East Mitchel Canyon, Elder Valley.
Fir Canyon, Foss Valley.
Gordon Valley, Gosling Canyon, Government Trail Canyon, Green Canyon.
Harris Canyon, Heath Canyon, Hoisting Works Canyon, Husman Canyon.
Italian Valley.
Jackson Canyon, Jameson Canyon, Jericho Canyon, Johnson Canyon.
Kidd Canyon, Kimball Canyon, Kortum Canyon, Kreuse Canyon.
Lion Canyon, Little Portuguese Canyon, Little Valley, Long Canyon, Lovall Valley.
Markley Canyon, Mill Valley, Milliken Canyon, Mysterious Valley.
Napa Valley, Negro Canyon.
Oil Well Canyon.
Pickle Canyon, Pope Valley, Portuguese Canyon, Pratt Valley.
Quarry Canyon.
Rector Canyon, Redwood Canyon, Right-Hand Canyon.
Sage Canyon, Segassia Canyon, Seventy Acre Canyon, Simmons Canyon, Snell Valley, Soda Canyon, Soda Valley, South Fork Tully Canyon, Spanish Valley, Spring Valley, Steel Canyon, Steele Canyon, Stone Trough Canyon, Sulphur Canyon, Swartz Canyon.
Tin Can Canyon, Toll Canyon, Tully Canyon.
Wallet Canyon, West Bull Canyon, West Chapman Canyon, West Mitchel Canyon, Wildcat Canyon, Wing Canyon, Wood Canyon, Wooden Valley, Wragg Canyon.
Population
| City of Napa | 72,585 |
| City of American Canyon | 9,774 |
| City of Calistoga | 5,190 |
| City of St. Helena | 5,950 |
| Town of Yountville | 2,916 |
| Unincorporated | 27,864 |
| Total | 124,279 |
Borders
Other
Highest Point—Sugarloaf Mountain 2,988 feet high
Largest Lake—Lake Berryessa 21 miles long
Land area—754 square miles (485,120 acres)
Acres of vineyards—40,000 (approximate)
Persons per square mile, 2000—164.8
