78 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM Did you know the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve served as a Shoˉwa period Japanese fishing village in 2016? For the movie adaptation of bestseller Memoirs of a Geisha, a film crew constructed a small hut along the bluffs of Moss Beach. Over two days, they shot the movie’s somber opening scene, establishing our heroine Chiyo’s A Fishing Village Comes to Fitzgerald Marine Reserve impoverished childhood and the betrayal that sets her story in motion. Beyond that stormy ocean overlook, you’ll also recognize the cypress grove where a cart rattles along uneven ground. The film also shot verdant scenes at nearby Hakone Gardens in Saratoga and the Japanese Tea Garden at San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Over the years, Burlingame’s Kohl Mansion has been the site of a few ghost stories—so is it really a leap to imagine sentient green goo bouncing off its walls? Flubber, starring Robin Williams as a scatterbrained inventor, used the mansion for exterior shots of the fictional Medfield College. But it’s not just an educational institute in this comedy—it’s home to Mercy Burlingame, an Flubber Bounces Around Kohl Mansion all-girls private high school since 1931. No stranger to show business, Kohl Mansion was memorialized in film long before “the talkies,” serving as a key set on the silent 1921 film Little Lord Fauntleroy. Considering that the mansion once belonged to Frederick Kohl, heir to the Alaska Commercial Company, this locale seems a particularly fitting one for the story of a poor little rich boy. HOLLYWOOD COMES TO THE PENINSULA PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF: DON DEBOLD / DENNIS JARVIS
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTcxMjMwNg==