Vickie Rozell

Director/Dramaturg, Author, Editor

The movie Harold and Maude has achieved cult status and is still beloved, especially in the Bay Area where much of it was filmed. Despite receiving mixed reviews when it came out in 1971 at a cost of $1.5 million, the movie remains popular over forty years later.

Colin Higgins, a 28 year-old Stanford graduate with an MA in Creative Writing, wrote the screenplay. He was raised in Australia, but his parents moved to Los Altos, CA, when he enrolled at Stanford. Higgins made two short films while attending UCLA graduate school (Retreat and Opus 1). He initially planned for Harold and Maude to be his half hour Masters thesis, but decided to write it as a full-length film instead. Paramount Pictures bought it, an exceptional achievement for a writer’s first full-length screenplay. Part of the contract was for Higgins to be considered to direct the movie. In the end, Hal Ashby directed the film, but Higgins remained a producer and the only credited screenwriter.

The original script called for the movie to take place in Los Angeles but Ashby felt that moviegoers had seen more than enough pictures set there. They considered other locations, but finally settled on San Francisco. That brought the production team to the Bay Area where they spent about 13 weeks, based in San Mateo on the peninsula south of The City.

The first scene filmed was one of the funerals, which was filmed at St Thomas Aquinas Church in Palo Alto on the corner of Waverly and Homer streets--chosen because it is a beautiful example of Carpenter’s Gothic architecture. The production company used numerous other local locations, many of them clearly recognizable in the movie. Two of the most obvious are the appearance of the old Dumbarton Bridge, where Harold and Maude encounter a motorcycle cop, and the military cemetery where they picnic--the Golden Gate National Cemetery located beside Highway 280 in San Bruno. In addition, scenes were filmed at Holy Cross cemetery in Colma, a railroad car on Oyster Point Boulevard in South San Francisco, the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, Sutro Baths in San Francisco, and the mud flats west of Highway 80 in Emeryville. The marching band was also local, hailing from Sunnyvale High School.

One of the most frequently used locations was the Rose Court Mansion in Hillsborough, which represented the Chasen mansion. Most of the interior scenes of Harold’s home were filmed inside it, using the music room and the library. In addition, the Chasen’s butler in the movie was played by the mansion’s actual butler, Henry Dieckoff.

Of course, the movie also has its share of stories from the filming. A stunt person on a motorcycle went over the edge of the Dumbarton Bridge and ended up at Peninsula Hospital in Burlingame, where one of the last scenes of the movie would later be shot. Ruth Gordon, who played Maude, never learned to drive, so all the scenes with her driving were shot with the vehicles being towed. And the wrap party was at the home of Steve Silver, creator of the San Francisco institution Beach Blanket Babylon and who not only designed the interior of Maude’s train car home but her “self-portrait” as well.

Higgins called the final product, “a romance—funny, serious, and poetic.” At movie’s end, in true romantic fashion, Harold drives away on Highway 280 to Highway 92, then over Pescadero Road to Highway 1 north, eventually ending near Mori Point, and from there into motion picture history.

© Vickie Rozell, All Rights Reserved

Reproduction only with permission