I saw life in raw on the streets of San Francisco. I met the cops and the whores and the reporters and the bartenders and the Chinese and the fishermen and shopkeepers. I knew them all, knew how they thought and how they loved and how they hated. When it came time for me to make motion pictures, I made movies that were real, because I knew how real people behaved. Wikipedia records that at age 12 LeRoy hawked newspapers at iconic locations, including Chinatown, the Barbary Coast red-light district, and Fisherman's Wharf, where he became educated as to the realities of life in the city. He would not have met my uncle, Sergeant John Leahy, SFPD, who worked the Chinatown Squad after LeRoy had left San Francisco. The main character in Pretty City Murder is fashioned after Uncle John. Mervyn LeRoy, b San Francisco 1900, d Beverly Hills 1987.
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