How An SF Subculture Birthed Birthed A Cult Classic Film
By Dan Gentile
The seminal San Francisco rave film “Groove” starts with a party promoter laying out the ethos behind throwing an underground event: “Remember, no obstacles, only challenges.” The same could be true for the film’s production, a DIY affair that overcame disasters ranging from firing its star on Day 1 to a literal earthquake, and featured the type of naivete that could come only from a group of first-time filmmakers.
Celebrating its 25th anniversary this year with two screenings at the Vogue Theater this weekend, the film chronicles one night in San Francisco’s underground dance music scene, as party promoters take over an abandoned warehouse for a night of drug-fueled debauchery. Writer and director Greg Harrison was a product of the rave scene himself, finding his first housing in the city via the SF Raves email list and moving into an in-law unit sight unseen in Noe Valley based on its reputation as a party spot.
“I found the world so fascinating and the people so fascinating. It was this kind of post-hippie San Francisco idealism merged with new tech and new music, but most importantly, a creative scene — just people wanting to make and create. As a filmmaker, that energy was infectious,” Harrison told SFGATE. Harrison has gone on to work on advertising campaigns for the likes of HBO and Netflix.
The film features all the hallmarks of a classic San Francisco rave. The promoters break into an empty warehouse, create a second location that people travel to in order to learn the actual address of the party, and ward off a raid by the cops (the officer is played by a young Nick Offerman). David, played by Hamish Linklater, is the newbie to the scene riding a roller coaster of his first trip on ecstasy, being guided by a cast of more experienced ravers.
“You would come into the rave scene, and you’d have elders who would kind of take you under their wing, show you the ropes, watch out for you and take care of you,” DJ Forest Green told SFGATE. Green, who still DJs in the Bay Area, was living in a rave warehouse in East Oakland and met the crew when they were scouting it as a location. She ended up as one of the several real-life DJs performing in the film, which included Dmitri from the Lower Haight (pictured on the iconic poster holding a disco ball) and house legend John Digweed. The soundtrack is a time capsule of the scene, with tracks from locals like DJ Garth & ETI and household names like Orbital.
“A lot of the actors were staying on my floor. We used our cars as picture cars. We used clothes from our friends. It was a real family affair,” said producer Danielle Renfrew Behrens, who most recently worked as co-executive producer on the show “Poker Face.”
The DIY nature of filmmaking also applied to fundraising. With a goal of $250,000, Behrens and Harrison sought out money from unconventional sources. Two-thirds of the money came from people under 30 who had made their money in the dot-com boom, sometimes in increments as small as $5,000.
“The cool thing about the raves in the ’90s was that they were all intertwined with tech, with the tech creators out here — they were raving, and they were writing code,” said Green, citing the SF Raves message board as a pivotal rallying tool.
“When we sold the movie for 60% profit at Sundance within a year of people investing, they were like, ‘We love independent film investing, it’s so less volatile than the tech market,’” Harrison said. “And we were like, ‘You have no idea how lucky we just got.’”
Filming took place locally, and back then, the options were much more plentiful than today, with the same derelict buildings that sparked underground parties coming in handy for filming. “Could you imagine now having multiple empty warehouses on the water to pick from?” Behrens asked.
They settled on a building at Pier 1 along the Embarcadero, which came with just the type of lived-in charm that they needed.
“It was completely trashed … When we talked to the city, they were going to clean it up, but we had to make an emergency call to say, ‘Don’t touch anything! Leave it all,’” said Harrison, who added that it had just the type of industrial grit they needed. The warehouse also afforded enough space for offices and wardrobes, but in a freak natural disaster, an earthquake on the second day of production ended up shattering the second-floor glass windows.
That came after a Day 1 dilemma in which the most well-known actor in the film came into shooting with a toxic attitude that could’ve compromised the vibe of the production. “I saw the six years of me trying to make this movie slip through my hands,” Harrison said. They ended up dismissing the actor and promoting a member of the supporting cast, which the crew took as a reminder to make decisions with their gut.
Once a rough cut of the film was completed, they sent a version to Sundance on VHS and were accepted into the 2000 edition of the festival, leading to an acquisition by Sony for $1.5 million and a limited theatrical release in June of that year. It came on the heels of two other rave-related films released in the year prior: “Go” and “Human Traffic.”
The film has aged surprisingly well over the years, and it genuinely still feels like the document of a burgeoning scene as captured by participants rather than outsiders, created with the same ethos that fueled the parties.
“There was a certain idealism and naivety that was also represented in the rave scene that was required to make independent film,” Harrison said.
On its release, there was some backlash from ravers averse to bringing their culture mainstream, but as for DJ Forest Green, she just had one complaint.
“I only have one pet peeve with the film, and that was when they were ending the night, they didn’t leave the room spotlessly clean, because we always did. We always left things better than we found them.”
