FRISCO—The Secret History
Join us on a cinematic journey through the last wild years when San Francisco was still wide-open. The cops ran the town in the Thirties and Bones Remmer ran the town in the Forties.
Battles raged between the factions of dark and light in the hidden realms of San Francisco’s power elite, behind the headlines, from the celestial dominions of Nob Hill eateries and private clubs down to the nether depths of the dive bars in the heart of the Tenderloin, up to the Barbary Coast and jazz joints of North Beach and over to the banks and brokerages in the Financial District …
FRISCO will bring alive that wild and bygone era of the Cool Grey City of Love that seduced the world.
FRISCO—The Secret History
Latest Episodes
Frisco Noir 4 with Rachel Walther: Killers, Cops & the Dark City: "The Lineup" and "The Sniper"
San Francisco has always looked good on film, but in The Sniper (1952) and The Lineup (1958), the city becomes something more than scenery. It becomes a character—a maze of steep streets, fog, waterfronts, alleys and lonely ne...
Henry Miller, Big Sur, and the Examiner's War on Bohemia
Henry Miller came to Big Sur with no money and even less interest in behaving himself. He had already spent years writing books that were banned in America, smuggled into the country and sold under the table, and now he was living in the coasta...
The Water Queen: Dolly Adams and FrIsco’s Gilded Vice
Dolly Adams hit Frisco as a wild and precocious child, already carrying the kind of trouble that would follow a girl in the late 1800s. She became infamous as the Water Queen, and she could stay underwater long enough to make a North Beac...
Nick DeJohn Part 3—The Trial That Fell Apart: The Strange End of the Nick DeJohn Murder Case
The jury's out, sequestered up at the Fairmont like kings in exile, and Frisco holds its breath after four weeks of front page testimony. Part Three opens with the strange coda nobody asked for — a state Attorney General's daughter kidnapped fo...
Nick De John, Part 2: She Heard Too Much — The Grand Jury, the Garrot, the Girl in the Bay Window, and a Barefoot Kidnapping in Golden Gate Park.
Fog rolls into the North Beach basements, and Nick DeJohn is still not talking — a garrot saw to that back in May of '47. Part Two picks up the case cold with Freddie Francisco’s break down of rumors in the Tenderloin whisper stream, jumps forw...
