The Production

288 Days is a feature documentary about the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, made in San Francisco, on the ground it stood on. This page is for anyone weighing a part in it: what exists, what is still to come, and who is behind it.

The filmmaker

Keith Adler writes, directs and produces 288 Days, and the temporary narration on the rough cut is a synthesized track in his voice. The final narrator is not yet cast. He is based in San Francisco and spent nearly a decade at a major entertainment company on the business and technology side before founding Hollow House Films, an independent studio whose slate of five films is listed with dates on its press page.

288 Days is the studio's documentary. The other four are dramatic features: The Aura Principle (December 25, 2026), Thirty-One Mirrors (February 14, 2027), The Saga for Donna (July 2, 2027) and Young Cop (November 25, 2027).

What exists today

• The film, in a rough cut of 138 minutes in 20 parts, free to watch on this site, with no code and no account. The narration is complete as a temporary track; the pictures and the reels are the fair's own, in order, against the record.
• This site: 15 chapters of history, a gazetteer of 125 places, 414 photographs, 46 period films, a timeline of 89 dated events, the walk through today's Marina, and a navigable 3D reconstruction of the grounds. Every claim traces to a source in the bibliography.
• The restoration: the archive's photographs have been enlarged and cleaned, plate by plate, for the screen: 628 film plates and 194 site photographs. See below.

By the numbers

The restoration

Most of what survives of the fair is a halftone plate in a book or a postcard: small, screened, and faded. Each picture in the film has been enlarged and cleaned so that it holds a cinema screen. Drag the handle across any of these. Left of it is the picture as it comes from the archive, right of it is the restored one, and both are the same size at full resolution: the archive side is the original enlarged with a plain resize, which is what you get without the restoration, rather than the small original or a deliberately ugly blow-up. Arrow keys work too. Nothing is invented or painted into a period photograph.

ArchiveRestored

ArchiveRestored

ArchiveRestored

ArchiveRestored

The road to release

Dates after September 2026 are the plan, and will be updated here as they are fixed.

The neighborhood

The fair stood on what is now the Marina, between the Presidio and Fort Mason. If you live here, the film is about your blocks: the walk goes stop by stop from Crissy Field to Fort Mason, the map lays the 1915 grounds over today's streets, and every place in the gazetteer says where it stood.

What is being filmed

The present-day shots the film calls for, by where they are, each with the code it carries in the film and on the walk. I am filming these myself.

Palace of Fine Arts

• S01 Palace of Fine Arts across the lagoon · photographed
• S02 Walking the colonnade
• S03 Under the rotunda dome
• S04 Color plates · Guérin's palette on the palace · photographed
• S05 The palace lit at night
• S29 Chestnut at Lyon, where the fair began
• S30 Lyon Street at the Presidio wall

Chestnut Street, then and now

• S06 Chestnut at Divisadero, the fairground's southwest corner
• S07 Walking Chestnut from Divisadero to Fillmore · photographed
• S08 Chestnut at Scott, the gate corner
• S09 Chestnut at Fillmore, the Zone's gate
• S10 The Marina Safeway
• S11 The Marina's 1920s houses on the fairground blocks · photographed

The Scott Street axis

• S12 Where the Tower of Jewels stood · photographed
• S13 The main gate at Scott and Chestnut
• S14 The Court of the Universe
• S15 The Column of Progress at Marina and Cervantes · photographed
• S48 Bay Street at Divisadero, at the edge of the Court of the Universe

The vanished palaces

• S16 Court of the Four Seasons · Beach and Divisadero
• S17 Palace of Horticulture · Divisadero and Chestnut
• S18 Festival Hall, east end of the South Gardens
• S19 Palace of Machinery · Fillmore and Bay, Marina Middle School

The shore

• S20 Marina Green, the North Gardens · photographed
• S21 The Yacht Harbor
• S22 The Scintillator's mole
• S23 The Golden Gate, open water in 1915

Crissy Field

• S24 The Avenue of Nations · Yacht Rd and Old Mason St
• S25 The racetrack oval, the Crissy Field airfield lawn
• S26 The tidal marsh at Crissy Field · photographed
• S27 The airfield lawn looking east to the Marina
• S28 The 1921 hangars on Mason Street

The Zone

• S31 Chestnut at Fillmore, the Fillmore gate and the start of the Zone
• S32 Lobos Square · Moscone Recreation Center
• S33 The Zone's plaza · Gough and Francisco
• S34 The Van Ness gate and Fort Mason
• S35 The Fort Mason railway tunnel
• S36 Fort Mason, looking west over the whole fairground
• S37 Fort Mason piers · photographed

Voices (present day)

• S49 Somebody who lives on the fairground
• S50 Somebody who uses the Palace of Fine Arts
• S51 Somebody who was in the Marina in 1989

Overlooks

• S52 Top of the Lyon Street Steps
• S54 Alta Plaza, the view down Scott to the Bay

Elsewhere in the city

• S53 The Hale Brothers store, Market at Sixth
• S55 Bill Graham Civic Auditorium
• S56 Brangwyn's murals · Herbst Theatre
• S57 California Palace of the Legion of Honor · photographed
• S58 The Pioneer Mother, Golden Gate Park
• S59 Calder's Star Maiden · One Sansome
• S60 The Old Mint, where the Exposition coins were struck
• S61 The Ferry Building

S38 to S46 are aerials, flown under permit.

How the names are said

More than two hours of narration runs through a lot of French architects, Italian sculptors and San Francisco street names, and getting one wrong is the kind of mistake a listener never stops hearing. So the film keeps a dictionary. It exists because the voice needs it, but it answers a question readers ask too, which is how to say Guérin.

Capitals mark the stressed syllable. These are the ones currently in use; another 180 names were checked, found to be read correctly without help, and retired from the list.

Contact

To be told the day the film is released, and nothing else: write "release date" to hello@288days.com.

For screenings, partnerships, press and anything else about the production: hello@288days.com. For photographs, films and memories of the fair, see Add to the story.