Golden Gate Bridge producers Laura Longsworth and Ben Loeterman went to great lengths to tell an epic story. They did a lot of their work on location in San Francisco, with director of photography Michael Chin and the rest of the production team.

Get the story behind three scenes from the film, with footage from the production of Golden Gate Bridge.

Car Scenes
In 1922, Joseph Strauss took his bridge boosterism on the road, visiting northern California communities from Sausalito to the Oregon border. The filmmakers located a period car, a 1921 Locomobile, to drive through the Marin Headlands for these shots.

"There's an Art Deco society in the Bay area, and we found the guy who's the car's owner and driver through word of mouth.

The good thing about this car is that it has a huge engine. We were shooting in the Marin Headlands, with steep one-way roads. I was happy because the car didn't have trouble getting up any of the roads.

The National Park Service owns the property where we shot, and a park ranger helped us close the road intermittently over a period of three hours.

During the shooting, I was in the back of the car, on the floor, with a walkie talkie, to communicate with Ben and Michael about when to get the car rolling. It's a good thing I don't get carsick!"

-- Laura Longsworth

Strauss' Office
The Palace Hotel, engineer Joseph Strauss' base of operations while he lobbied for the bridge, still stands in San Francisco. Opened in 1875 and rebuilt after the earthquake of 1906, its famous Garden Court has a soaring stained-glass ceiling.

"It's such a beautiful place. The hotel people didn't know the story about Strauss having his office there, so they were excited about working with us. They were very helpful. The place is incredible; they've done a good job in preserving it."

-- Laura Longsworth

The Bridge Model
Some shots of the bridge were just not possible, especially on a public television production budget. The team turned to a model of the bridge -- 20 feet high, and located in a storeroom at bridge headquarters -- to get footage of the towers.

"Before construction started, Charles Ellis was concerned about the integrity of the towers. He thought some of the math hadn't been done properly. Even though he had been fired from the project, he was at home going over the calculations again and again.

He had conversations with Leon Moisseiff, who convinced the other consulting engineers to do a test of the towers. There weren't wind tunnels in those days. So at Princeton, they built a steel model to scale, in terms of size and strength, and applied all possible stresses they could think of to the tower model. And it stood.

We were interested in using it as a way to convey what was going on in Ellis' imagination. We also wanted to avoid showing the actual bridge until it's built, in the sequence of the story."

-- Ben Loeterman