All About Eve | Curran Theatre, San Francisco — Where Margo Channing's Broadway Actually Stood

Every time Margo Channing walks a stage in this film, you are looking at Geary Street. The unit came north and began shooting inside the Curran on 11 April 1950, and cinematographer Milton Krasner's crew took the auditorium, the lobby and the alley behind the house. The alley was the hardest part. They needed stage-door night for scenes that had to be shot in daylight, so they tented the whole passage under tarpaulins and worked in the manufactured dark underneath, then matched the result to plates already photographed three thousand miles away on West 45th Street.

The theatre was built in 1922 for Homer Curran, who wanted San Francisco to have a house that could take a Broadway production without apology. It seats around 1,600 behind a Geary Street facade that has not fundamentally changed. Touring musicals still play here. That continuity is the point of standing in the lobby: the marble, the proportions, the way the ceiling lifts as you come through from the street are the same surfaces that stood in for a fictional New York playhouse.

Buy a ticket to whatever is running. When the house lights drop and the audience settles, you are sitting in the room where Bette Davis fastened her seat belt and warned everyone about a bumpy night.

Location: 445 Geary Street, San Francisco. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.