In making his movie Tenderloin, Marin-based director Michael Anderson had a few disadvantages.
First, it would seem that he is not the other, more famous Michael Anderson — the Oscar-nominated British director of, among other things, The Dam Busters, Around the World in Eighty Days and Logan’s Run.
Second, the provenance of our Anderson’s film, while self-evident to denizens of San Francisco, might strike more far-flung viewers as misleading. Alas, this is not a movie about a luxurious cut of beef. It is a movie about the city’s most famously downtrodden neighborhood.
It is also the setting of local filmmaker Rob Nilsson’s 9 @ Night cycle of interconnected, community-made feature films, which premiered here two years ago and remains in its way definitive, a tough act to follow. Which is not to say that there’s only one way (or nine ways) to make a movie about a place like this.
Downtrodden, yes. Famously? Was that the right word? Well, after that article about Tenderloin tourism in the New York Times the other day, it might soon be. And perhaps this fact constitutes the thorniest of Anderson’s disadvantages: the potential for the romanticization of disadvantage.