In the Mood for Some California Dreamin'? Check Out 10 Great Movies Set in the Golden State

The first film studio was built by inventor Thomas Edison in the 1890s in West Orange, New Jersey — but, as you're probably aware, audiences worldwide don't identify the Garden State as the home of the American movie industry, and haven't for well over a century.

The industry, growing rapidly, naturally gravitated to California — the state that's the subject of PEOPLE's special issue, Reasons to Love California — a land flooded with sunlight and blessed by constant good weather.

You can imagine that the cameras just felt happier there — and were put to work capturing a range of sights, moods and tones up and down the enormous state. Here are 10 golden California movies.

1. THE BANK DICK (1940) W.C. Fields’s classic comedy is about Egbert Sousé, a boozy do-nothing — played by guess whom? — who becomes the accidental hero of a bank robbery in Lompoc, Calif. (Sample exchange: Sousé: “Is that gun loaded?” Mother in bank: “Certainly not! But I think you are!”) It’s worth noting that in the 19th century Lompoc had been a temperance colony — and it would have banned the heavy-drinking Fields’s favorite beverages. The Central Coast town has long been known for entirely other kinds of fields: Its flower farms supply florists and draw tourists to catch lavender, delphinium and more varieties in bloom. But don't bother asking your travel agent to book you a room at the New Old Lompoc House, the hotel where Sousé deposits a very drunk bank auditor named J. Pinkerton Snoopington (Francis Pangborn). It never existed.

2. SHADOW OF A DOUBT (1943) Santa Rosa, the country seat of Sonoma County, is at the heart of this Alfred Hitchcock classic about a lady-killer (Joseph Cotten) on the lam and hiding out with his relations in what he hopes will be a sleepy little town. He's the one who casts a shadow — everyone else in Santa Rosa is too innocent to think about murder as anything other than the brain-teasing premise of a mystery story. In preproduction the director found just the house he wanted to use as the resident of the killer's family, but the home’s owners, daughter Patricia Hitchcock later recalled, “were so excited that their house was going to be featured in a Hollywood movie, they had the place painted and the lawn mowed and weeded.” Hitchcock, who often cited Doubt as his personal favorite among his many classic films, had to re-frumpify the place a bit. 

3. THE BIRDS (1963) Hitchcock again. This eco-horror story about birds launching a shrieking assault on the humans below was partly shot around scenic Bodega Bay, an inlet along the North California coast. To get the atmosphere right, Hitchcock said, “I had every inhabitant of Bodega Bay — man, woman and child — photographed.” The schoolhouse used in one of the film’s classic sequences — crows amassing with plans to peck several dozen children to death — is still there. Bring along some bird feed if you stop by.

4. THE SANDPIPER (1965) One of those Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton vehicles, made during the real-life couple’s first marriage. Here she’s an artist, he’s an Episcopal priest, and they get all hot and bothered. Directed by Vincente Minnelli, this romantic melodrama was filmed on the beaches of Big Sur. “There are actual bonfires, flickering in the dunes,” writes Roger Lewis in Erotic Vagrancy, his history of the couple, “where the hippies strum guitars and hold parties.” He also notes that the film’s makers presented Taylor with a $4,200 Cartier brooch after she asked, “What are you giving me?”

5. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1978) This Donald Sutherland-led remake of the 1956 horror film takes place in a fun, flaky ’70s San Francisco ruined by aliens with a preference for people who are scarily soulless and dull. It's a counter-countercultural nightmare. (The original, set in a town called Santa Mira, is often considered a metaphor for McCarthyism. Pick either one, they'll both make you queasy.) The final scene — a real corker — was filmed at City Hall. Bonus: a young Jeff Goldblum and Leonard Nimoy, let out of his Spock ears.

6. SHORT CUTS (1993) Director Robert Altman’s shaggy yet shattering masterpiece, with an enormous ensemble including Julianne Moore, Robert Downey Jr. and Lily Tomlin, was shot throughout the Los Angeles area, ending with a scene of shocking violence in Griffith Park. The film is based on the stories of Pacific Northwestern writer Raymond Carver, but Altman’s L.A. atmosphere is authentic. “Everything about it — God, that is the city, this is the city I’ve known,” his great admirer, director Paul Thomas Anderson, told writer Mitchell Zuckoff.

7. ANCHORMAN: THE LEGEND OF RON BURGUNDY (2004) Will Ferrell's 1970s-set comedy is about a dumb, sexist, vain San Diego news anchor who impresses the ladies by playing a jazz flute version of Jethro Tull’s “Aqualung.” His broadcast signoff: “Stay classy, San Diego.”

8. ZODIAC (2007) Director David Fincher's unnerving epic about one of California’s most elusive serial killers was filmed in the Bay Area and elsewhere. It somehow makes you feel the entire state has sunk into a paranoid, maybe deadly malaise — even worse than the sensations that register in your mind when you read Joan Didion's rumination on modern California. The film’s most brutal, cold-blooded scene was shot at Lake Berryessa, where the actual Zodiac killer attacked a young couple in 1969. The terrific cast includes Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr. No, none of them plays the killer. Don't be silly.

9. THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO (2019) This funny, strange and fundamentally forlorn film about the city’s gentrification provided a breakout role for Jonathan Majors as a lost artistic soul. A Victorian home at 959 South Van Ness plays a large role, and there’s a beautiful scene in which a street singer delivers a soulful cover of the vintage pop classic “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).” It's much better than the original.

10. LICORICE PIZZA (2021) San Fernando Valley bard Paul Thomas Anderson makes more of his native L.A. than just about any director. This endearingly unconventional coming-of-age story set in the 1970s features Cooper Hoffman (son of Philip Seymour Hoffman) as a child star aging into adolescence and Bradley Cooper as Barbra Streisand’s then-boyfriend Jon Peters. The period details are unusually precise, down to Anderson’s re-creation of the long-gone steak-and-martinis hangout Tail o’ the Cock. (A red-booth restaurant called Billingsley’s stood in.) What the film does not include is the real (and also defunct) Licorice Pizza, the SoCal record store chain that inspired the title. To glimpse that hallowed house of vinyl, peek at the Sherman Oaks Galleria scenes in 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High. 

PEOPLE's Reasons to Love California special issue is now available on newsstands and Amazon.