Great article yesterday in the San Francisco Chronicle Pink Section honoring Pinball Donut Girl’s Ned Kopp:

Ned Kopp on the set of Pinball Donut Girl
– photo by Audrey Daniel

A longtime Bay Area production supervisor, Kopp was who the Bond production team, headed by Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli, turned to when James Bond came to San Francisco to make “A View to a Kill,” which was partially filmed here in 1984. The film, Roger Moore‘s seventh and final appearance as Bond, was released in 1985.

The Bond team liked Kopp’s work so much that they called the next time it shot in the United States – four years later for “License to Kill,” with Timothy Dalton as Bond, in Key West, Fla.

In the early 1970s, Kopp served as an assistant cameraman on George Lucas‘ “THX 1138” and was Lucas’ assistant director on “American Graffiti.” (You can see Kopp in any Mel’s diner. In a photograph with actor Ron Howard in the foreground and Lucas hunched beneath a lunch counter, Kopp is the bearded, balding man standing above the counter.) He also worked on films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, Phil Kaufman and Alan Parker, among others.

But a Bond set is something else.