Filmed in Berkeley and Oakland, ‘Freaky Tales’ is a love letter to East Bay’s punk scene in the ’80s

It’s been over two years since chatter on social media began circulating about sightings of Pedro Pascal and Tom Hanks on Telegraph Avenue and film crews working outside of the shuttered Loard’s Ice Cream in Dimond and the Grand Lake Theatre. This Friday moviegoers finally get to see what the buzz was about when Freaky Tales, an anthology movie by Berkeley-born and Oakland-raised Ryan Fleck and co-writer Anna Boden, opens nationwide. 

It’s a love letter “to the places I remember going to as a kid. And so if we’re going to shoot there, we better shoot in those places that I remember, and hopefully, other people remember them too,” Fleck said.

Fleck knew he wanted the film to include the era when Sleepy Floyd played for the Warriors and the legendary night when punks at Gilman fought off against neo-Nazis. “That’s how the chapters started coming to life,” he said. 

The film takes its name from a track on Too $hort’s classic 1987 album, Born to Mack. The stories are set in Oakland in the 1980s and loosely draw inspiration from Fleck’s Bay Area upbringing. 

“I was probably too young to listen to a song like that. It kind of blew my mind. And, knowing Too Short is from Oakland, the same place where I lived. I learned more about his music and was always a fan growing up,” Fleck said. “I became a filmmaker at some point, and I was like, Anna [Boden], we should make a movie called Freaky Tales one day. I would picture versions of it over the years, and they were, to be fair, too conventional. We would go off and we’d make another movie, and then I’d be like, ‘Oh, but what about this?'” 

The film is an anthology of four intertwined stories: a fantastical retelling of the real-life street brawl between punks at Gilman (Ji-young Yoo and Jack Champion) and skinhead Nazis; a Black female rap duo (Normani and Dominique Thorne) who battled Too $hort, and, in real life landed a feature in his album Life Is… Too Short; an aging enforcer (Pedro Pascal) who grapples with the nature of vengeance; and a heist gone wrong that leads Warriors player Sleepy Floyd (Jay Ellis) to become a superhero. At the center of it all is a villain you love to hate, portrayed by Ben Mendelsohn. 

The script that ultimately made it into production began taking shape in 2020.

Fleck and Boden knew that to keep the film authentic to Oakland and the Bay Area, the movie needed to involve Oakland actors like Tom Hanks and the late Angus Cloud, Bay landmarks, music from local artists, and it also needed to be filmed on location. 

Film crew outside of the Grand Lake Theater. Credit: Courtesy of LionsgateGilman in Berkeley plays a pivotal role in “Freaky Tales.” Credit: Courtesy of LionsgatePedro Pascal as Clint in “Freaky Tales.” Credit: Courtesy of Lionsgate

Local filmmakers have complained about the roadblocks of filming on location since the city doesn’t offer tax incentives like states like Louisiana or New Mexico. The co-directors applied for the California Tax Credit but didn’t get it the first time. The duo patiently waited until other approved projects dropped from the list and finally got funding to start working on Freaky Tales.

“We definitely understand how hard it is to make independent films in California and in the Bay Area,” Boden said. “We understand the struggle and the work being done to try and make it easier for films, particularly independent films, to get more incentives to make films up there.”

In recent years, local filmmakers have banded together to push for tax incentives in Oakland. Last summer, the Oakland City Council passed an ordinance allocating $500,000 from the city’s budget for tax incentives for projects filmed in Oakland. The ordinance was short-lived after being shelved when the city’s contingency budget was triggered to close the $130 million shortfall for the fiscal year ending in June.

The duo first reached out to Too $hort and his team to talk about the idea for the film. The Oakland rapper narrates the film and makes a cameo as a cop. But it wasn’t just about narrating the movie; it was about who would play the role of younger Too $hort, and could replicate the cadence of his voice and his mannerisms. The role ultimately went to Bay Area rapper Symba. 

“We started trying to cast the role the traditional way with actors who were not musicians, and they didn’t have the stage presence. Then, as soon as we got Symba, we were able to relax,” Boden said. “Symba was excited because he’s a Too $hort fan, and they are close. Too $hort was comfortable having Symba play a young version of him, the stars aligned.”

The stars also aligned when, while directing an episode of Apple TV’s Masters of the Air, the duo got connected to Tom Hanks, who is a producer of the series. 

“We’d already written in all the little references to him where he’s not named, but the characters are always talking about him, and we always imagined that he would show up as a cameo at some point in the movie, but that scene hadn’t been written yet, and so we asked him if he wanted to read it,” Boden said. “So, we wrote him that little scene, and we showed it to him, and we told him that he could be in the musical [at the end of the film] or do the scene. That’s how that came to be.”

Hanks plays the owner of a video store, who also serves as a gatekeeper to the seedy underworld in which Pascal’s character operates. 

While Hanks’s cameo is brief, it is Fleck’s favorite character.

“Not just because it’s Tom Hanks playing Hank but because it’s in a video store, and he’s actually playing kind of a version of me when I worked at a video store in the 90s,” he said. 

Entice is played by Normani and Barbie is played by Dominique Thorne as the rap duo Danger Zone in “Freaky Tales.”Sleepy Floyd played by Jay Ellis at the1/4 Pound Giant Burgers in “Freaky Tales.” Credit: courtesy of Lionsgate

In keeping with the film being a love letter to Oakland, the duo cast The Town’s own Angus Cloud, in his last role before his untimely passing in 2023. 

“We were so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with him. He was somebody who we knew we wanted to have in the film because he is so Oakland and because he is such a talented actor, and we wanted to pepper the movie throughout with our Oakland legends,” Boden said. “We asked him to be part of this, and he really wanted to, and we put him in this role that was like written for this pretty straight down the center right-hand man for Ben Mendelsohn’s character, and when Angus Cloud got to set and started playing this role, he just filled him with so much of himself. It was like the character took on this completely other dimension.” 

This action-packed film delivers a Tarantino-esque style of violence with a backdrop of Oakland and Berkeley landmarks and a musical score by Raphael Saadiq of Tony! Toni! Toné! The music of all various genres, from punk to metal to hyphy, pulses as punches are thrown, bullets fly, and samurai swords swing. 

“It’s a cinematic mixtape. That’s how we thought about it. And it does pull from so many movies that we love,” Boden said.

But the film is more than an orgy of gore. While there’s plenty of that, it is also a tale of overcoming fears, stepping up for those you love, and exploring the age-old proverb, “If you have nothing to die for, then you have nothing to live for.”