Fort Bragg on the Northern California Coast
For years Hollywood has been enamored with Fort Bragg and the northern reaches of the quintessentially craggy Mendocino Coast. It’s a great place to film. Parts of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975) with Jack Nicholson was filmed here, as was “Overboard” (1987) starring Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, and “The Majestic” (2001) with Jim Carrey. The 1966 hit “The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming,” which seemed a lot funnier back then, was also filmed at Fort Bragg, Noyo Harbor, and quaint and beautiful Mendocino a few miles down the road.
Relative isolation helped protect this beautiful stretch of real estate from California’s 40 million residents who would overrun this pristine old logging and fishing town three to four hours north of San Francisco if you gave them half a chance. It’s not distance alone that shields the restored Victorian homes, gorgeous harbor and phenomenal sand beaches from the outside world, but coastal mountains as well, and maddening corkscrew roads that twist and turn and bend sharply through steep forested terrain once dense with towering redwoods now toppled and long gone for the most part.
