California State Route 480 - Popular Culture

Popular Culture

The Embarcadero Freeway was featured in several films, including Magnum Force, Freebie and the Bean, Bullitt, Serial, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, The Lineup, Time After Time, Innerspace, and Koyaanisqatsi. On television, the freeway was seen in such shows such as Full House (in several overhead screen shots) and The Streets of San Francisco. For a sequence at the beginning of the 2007 film Zodiac, which takes place in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the now-demolished freeway was digitally added behind a shot of the Ferry Building. In 1985, four years before its destruction, James Bond (played for the last time by Roger Moore) drove along the freeway in A View to a Kill as he followed his ally Stacey Sutton (Tanya Roberts) during his quest to eliminate the villainous Max Zorin (Christopher Walken). In the 1993 T.V. movie Miracle on Interstate 880, the Embarcadero Freeway was used in place of the Cypress Street Viaduct. The film focuses on the survival of three victims who survived the collapse of the Cypress Street Viaduct during the Loma Prieta earthquake. In a major science fiction alternative-history novel “The Man in the High Castle” by Philip K. Dick, in Chapter 14, the Embarcadero Freeway plays a major part, as a dominant symbol of our noisy and industrialized civilization, in the visions of one protagonist, Mr. Tagomi, who is, at that moment, a visitor from another history, in which the USA has lost the Second World War.