‘Sacramento’ movie celebrates city’s charm. How director, star says it came to be

Naming the movie “Sacramento” started as a joke.

“The honest answer is because it’s on the sign in Los Angeles,” said Michael Angarano, who stars in, co-wrote and directed the film that opens nationwide in theaters on April 11. “It says 5-North Sacramento.”

Roughly a decade ago, Angarano acted in a television pilot that wasn’t picked up as a series. He went for a drive with a fellow actor from the pilot, Chris Smith. They saw the Interstate 5 road sign that would lead to them writing the screenplay for “Sacramento.”

The 84-minute film is about two characters, Rickey and Glenn, played by Angarano and Michael Cera, respectively, who drive to Sacramento. (Another major name in the cast, Kristen Stewart, plays Cera’s pregnant wife who remains home in Los Angeles.)

In time, though, a joke would evolve into something much more for Angarano. And Sacramento as a city would become a place close to his heart and essential for telling his story. The only question now is what the film might do in turn for the city it portrays.

Discovering the city of Sacramento

There’s a line in the trailer for “Sacramento” where Cera declares the city, as his and Angarano’s character are en route, a place “I have no desire to be in.”

The truth might not have been that far off for Angarano or Smith.

It is funny how life sometimes works in California, a state vast enough that a person can go much of their life without visiting sizable portions of it. Angarano, 37, grew up in Southern California as a child actor. He had a role in “Almost Famous,” which filmed partly in Sacramento. But Angarano remembered his scenes being filmed in Los Angeles or San Diego.

And he didn’t make it to Sacramento before he and Smith began working on their screenplay.

“When we started writing the film, that inception point, we hadn’t been to Sacramento once,” said Angarano, who spoke to The Bee during a virtual media junket on March 31. “And then when we started, when we had a real script and we were like, ‘Okay, this could be something,’ one day Chris Smith and I took the road trip from LA to Sacramento.”

They stayed in town several days, doing touristy things and research. Later, Angarano would return to help scout the film and, in the spring of 2023 according to media reports at the time, to shoot on-location. He’d still only been to Sacramento a handful of times when he spoke to The Bee. At that time, Angarano was preparing to be in town for a local screening for his film at Tower Theatre on April 9.

Some things in the movie Angarano or his team found on their own, such as “Sacramento (A Wonderful Town),” an obscure, ABBA-esque song from 1972 by Scottish band “Middle of the Road.” Angarano said the song was found through a search in Apple Music.

The film has elements that a moviegoer not from Sacramento might not care about but that a local would have to look past. One example is Angarano and Cera’s characters driving over the Tower Bridge on their way into town, a move that would require a driver to exit I-5 at J Street, travel over the bridge into West Sacramento, make a U-turn and traverse the bridge once more.

Other nods in the movie feel more organic. While it’s not the love letter that Sacramento native Greta Gerwig wrote to her city with the 2017 film “Lady Bird,” it’s also not just shots of the skyline like what appears following commercial breaks during nationally-televised sporting events.

Angarano said he provided location scouting notes to find the places only a local would know. Tyler Semons lives in Curtis Park and was one of two people to do location work for “Sacramento.”

“They knew they wanted to shoot in Old Sacramento on that dock… and they knew that they wanted to get the Tower Bridge in there,” Semons said. “But they were also very accommodating on suggestions I had.”

One of Semons’s tips: shooting at his neighborhood’s iconic Gunther’s Ice Cream, whose marquee appeared on-screen near the end of “Lady Bird.” The script for “Sacramento” had called for filming at a grocery store, with Semons submitting Taylor’s Market and Corti Brothers as possible locations before plans shifted.

The crew filmed for roughly four hours inside Gunther’s, with Angarano’s castmate and real-life wife Maya Erskine working a scoop behind the counter.

“They were really respectful,” said Marlena Klopp who co-owns Gunther’s with her husband Rick Klopp. “I mean, we stayed open. They didn’t make us close anything.”

A recent Instagram post by Gunther’s drew more than 1,500 likes. Klopp said customers had been mentioning the film frequently. Other Gunther’s customers were surprised about the film, though, such as Tyler Alford, who sat at a table outside the shop on a recent afternoon.

Asked of her thoughts on Gunther’s appearing in a film, Alford replied, “It just proves my point that it’s an amazing place.”

Other “Sacramento” locations came together on the fly. The film opens at Sly Park, just east of Sacramento, about a year before the road trip. While Angarano said he envisioned Rickey had made this drive before as something of an itinerant character, Semons said the opening was originally planned for Yosemite.

When plans to film in Yosemite fell through, Sly Park came up as the closest thing within 30-45 minutes of Sacramento, Semons said. Angarano’s first day of shooting at the park was the second-to-last-day of filming for “Sacramento.”

Staff at Sly Park have been low-key about “Sacramento” coming out. Emily Bertram, who supervises the park, said she’d only recently learned from a local film commission of “Sacramento” being filmed at the park. Her predecessor was on the job during filming but has retired, Bertram said.

Putting Sacramento on the map once more

“Sacramento” is one of a few recent movies to have been filmed locally between “No Address,” which opened in February and the Paul Thomas Anderson-directed, Leonardo DiCaprio-starring, $140-million blockbuster “One Battle After Another,” slated to open in September.

In general, movies have a powerful ability to shape public discourse about a city, like the declaration in “Lady Bird” that Sacramento is the Midwest of California. Even shots where Sacramento has stood in for other places, such as Old Sacramento being used to portray Japan in the 2005 film “Memoirs of a Geisha” are remembered locally.

Films can also drive tourism. At North Sacramento’s Thrift Town, a filming location for “Lady Bird,” people interested in the movie still visit the store a few times a week, said manager Brenda Cisneros. The film helped inspire Thrift Town owner Sam Alkakos to reopen the store in March 2021, after it closed for a time under different ownership early in the pandemic.

When the band Bastille came through Sacramento in 2023 to play a show with Duran Duran and Nile Rodgers & Chic at Golden 1 Center, lead singer Dan Smith spent some of his time perched on a stool at Temple Coffee at Ninth and J streets working on music for a television program by Sir David Attenborough. But Smith and his bandmates also did a “Lady Bird”-themed tour of Sacramento that they posted to social media.

“I did interviews as far away as the UK with the BBC when ‘Lady Bird’ came out,” said Mike Testa, president and CEO of local hoteliers group Visit Sacramento. “So it definitely drives a lot of attention to your city when it’s portrayed in a movie. And I think this one has that potential, especially because the name is actually ‘Sacramento.’”

Still, that doesn’t mean that there weren’t apprehensions as the film neared production. When Semons was approached about doing location work for “Sacramento,” he had some concern before signing on.

“My big fear when coming into this and knowing nothing about the project was that it was going to be a movie just poking fun at Sacramento and just trying to portray it in a negative light,” Semons said. “And so early on, I said, ‘I’m happy that you guys are filming here, but if that is the kind of project that this is, I’m going to have to pass on it.”

Jennifer West, film commissioner for the city of Sacramento, knows the fears, too, about a project taking shots.

“I think we kind of always have those concerns, especially as a city employee,” West said. “Like, is it going to be a hit piece or is it going to be a feel-good piece, that kind of thing. But the more I worked with them, it didn’t appear that it was going (in a hit piece) direction at all.”

While shooting was going on, Semons provided restaurant recommendations, with Angarano and his team enjoying a meal at Kru in East Sacramento. West said she believed that Angarano fell in love with Sacramento. “People are surprised,” West said. “Like, you have one idea of what Sacramento is and then you come and spend even just a little bit of time here and people are blown away and think, ‘Oh my gosh, this is fantastic.’”

Financing for Angarano’s film came together precariously, at one point almost necessitating shooting in Georgia, an increasingly popular location in recent years.

“As we were getting closer to that, I realized no, like, we shouldn’t do that,” Angarano said. “There’s something in the texture of this story that became interwoven into the fabric and the texture of that road trip from Los Angeles to Sacramento and the actual city of Sacramento itself that became indispensable for the film.”

Some of it had to do with the name of the city itself, with its religious origins and the fact that Angarano and Cera’s characters go through what becomes a spiritual experience.

In meetings, Angarano would be asked why Sacramento, as opposed to New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco.

“My response would be like, ‘Well, maybe you just don’t get it,’” Angarano said. “It wasn’t until we faced actually, maybe this story can take place anywhere, it wasn’t until we faced that potential when we realized that it had to be there.”

This story was originally published April 11, 2025 at 5:00 AM.