The Tri-Valley on film: from Mary Pickford to the Starship Enterprise

Hollywood has been coming over the hills to the Tri-Valley for more than a century. Pleasanton stood in for New England, Livermore's rodeo grounds and nuclear lab played themselves and a starship, and a Danville restaurant hosted one of the best-known scenes in 1990s comedy. Here is the Tri-Valley on screen, from the silent era to Star Trek, checked against the newspapers of the time.

1915: Chaplin walks off down Niles Canyon

In 1915 Charlie Chaplin was making films for the Essanay studio in Niles, at the mouth of Niles Canyon. At the end of The Tramp, his little tramp shuffles away from the camera down a lonely country road, a shot that became his signature. That road is Niles Canyon Road, the route that still winds east toward Sunol. (Silent Locations)

1917: Pleasanton plays New England

For Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, a story set in Maine, Mary Pickford, then the biggest star in the movies, needed a small New England town. Her studio found one in Pleasanton, "as New England as the oldest New England village, even to the types of houses, the little hotel and the sleepy village streets," as the Alameda Times-Star put it. Some of the film's exteriors were shot here.

The papers also ran a story, likely from the studio's publicity office: Pickford's location man checked into the little hotel and said he needed rooms for her company for about two weeks. The owner warned him that no show could draw a crowd for two weeks; the last traveling troupe had stayed one night and regretted it. He had never heard of Mary Pickford. (Alameda Times-Star, Oct. 1, 1917; AFI Catalog)

1920: Chaplin's discovery comes to town

In the fall of 1920, two special railroad cars carried six-year-old Jackie Coogan and a large company of actors north to Pleasanton. Chaplin had spotted Coogan in a hotel lobby and cast him in The Kid, which hadn't even opened yet. In Pleasanton the boy starred in Peck's Bad Boy, and the company planned to stay two weeks to shoot most of its outdoor scenes. (San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 31, 1920)

1952: A real rodeo in Livermore

Nicholas Ray's The Lusty Men starred Robert Mitchum as a broken-down rodeo rider. To make it feel real, the company filmed actual rodeos on the circuit, from Pendleton, Oregon, and Tucson to Livermore, and used working "rodeo tramps" to play themselves. The Oakland Tribune's critic liked the rodeo footage more than the stars: Mitchum and Arthur Kennedy, he wrote, looked as if they'd be uneasy on the pony-ride donkeys in Golden Gate Park. (Oakland Tribune, Dec. 5, 1952; AFI Catalog)

1981: Tron goes inside a nuclear lab

In May 1981 a Disney crew spent a long weekend at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with Jeff Bridges, shooting scenes for Tron. The lab's Shiva laser, then built for fusion experiments and among the most powerful in the world, became a set, and the crew moved on to one of the lab's computer centers. Everyone on the 85-person crew had to pass security checks. (Oakland Tribune, May 2, 1981; AFI Catalog)

1992: Mrs. Doubtfire's dinner at Bridges

The big restaurant scene in Mrs. Doubtfire, where Robin Williams switches between his own clothes and the nanny's costume, was shot at Bridges on Church Street in downtown Danville in late summer 1992. Director Chris Columbus said San Francisco had no upscale restaurant that would let them shoot for more than a day, so they went to Danville. The crew repainted columns, swapped the art and covered the windows to make midday look like night, and kept the air conditioning so cold for Williams, sweating in his padded costume, that one extra put it at about 40 degrees. The restaurant closed for about a month, and Williams signed autographs in costume on Hartz Avenue. (Oakland Tribune, Nov. 23, 1993; Danville San Ramon, 2010)

2011–2012: Livermore plays Spain, and the Enterprise

HBO's Hemingway & Gellhorn turned a ranch on North Livermore Road into the trenches of the Spanish Civil War. A year later J.J. Abrams brought Star Trek Into Darkness into the lab's National Ignition Facility, with special permission from the Department of Energy. Its giant laser hall became the warp core of the Starship Enterprise. (IMDb; NBC News)

One that didn't happen

You may read online that Star Wars: Episode I filmed the grassy plains of Naboo in the Livermore hills. Lucasfilm says those hills are in Nicasio, in Marin County, near Skywalker Ranch, and we found no local report of a Star Wars shoot here. (StarWars.com)

Chaplin turns up in the Tri-Valley one more time: when Eugene O'Neill sold Tao House in 1944, the news described the Nobel winner as Chaplin's father-in-law.