REEL SAN PEDRO: Celebrating Great Black Cinema Shot in San Pedro

Pictured is a scene in the John Singleton film, Boyz n the Hood, in which the character Little Chris has his chain snatched while shooting the breeze with friends Doughboy and Monster--a scene shot at 678 W. Santa Cruz Street in San Pedro. This scene helps establish Doughboy’s character and the film's street dynamics early on. Screen captured from Boyz n the Hood

By Rosie Knight, Columnist

If you’ve read Random Lengths News before, or have really watched a major Hollywood movie in the last few decades, you’re probably not surprised to hear that many films have been shot in San Pedro. In an ever-more-struggle-filled year, it’s joyful to return to this column to celebrate some of the incredible Black cinema that features our beautiful town.

If you’re talking about South LA Cinema, there is only one place to start: John Singleton’s iconic, game-changing, Oscar-nominated Boyz n the Hood, the movie that made him the youngest person ever nominated for best director at the 1992 Oscars. The street-level story of a group of young Black friends growing up in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Crenshaw became a smash hit and recontextualized what Black cinema could be. Starring an unbelievable cast featuring Ice Cube, Cuba Gooding Jr., Regina King, Nia Long, Morris Chestnut, Angela Bassett and Lawrence Fishburne (Oh, hi Larry, we’ll be seeing you again later), the film was nothing short of a cultural phenomenon, and it shot a pivotal scene in Pedro.

Still from John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood with Cuba Gooding Jr. and Morris Chestnut.

Still from Boyz n the Hood, at White Point.

While most of the film was shot on location in South Los Angeles, we get to see two local spots in the film, one is a house on Santa Cruz, and another, more idyllic sequence takes place as Furious Styles (Laurence Fishburne) and Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr.) fish at none other than White Point.

It’s not just gritty crime films that feature our beautiful town, though, as Ava DuVernay brought her unique vision to the gorgeous and underrated adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time to San Pedro’s Space Force Base. In one of the film’s most haunting moments, we see a circular cul-de-sac that looks liminal and unreal, but is in fact just one of the residential areas of the base.

There are many other incredible films starring iconic Black Hollywood stars that have filmed in San Pedro. Those include legends like Will Smith (whose superhero satire Hancock shot in Pedro), Djimon Hounsou, Morgan Freeman, and Chiwetel Ejiofor (Stephen Spielberg’s award-winning historical drama about a real-life uprising of enslaved people on the titular chattel-ship is another Pedro-starring feature). Lawrence Fishburne’s underrated neo-noir Deep Cover also took advantage of our often gritty streets. He would return to our South Bay city alongside Orlando Jones in Biker Boyz. And of course, Beverly Hills Cop 2, led by comic icon Eddie Murphy, features multiple shots of the Vincent Thomas Bridge and Terminal Island, two of our most frequently filmed landmarks.

Early Blaxploitation flicks like Truck Turner and Black Gunn also utilized the ’70s streets of our town. It’s not just fictional films either, with the Biggie & Tupac documentary by British director Nick Broomfield featuring multiple spots in Pedro throughout. So this Black History Month — and every other month — why not watch some of this brilliant Black cinema?