The Bridge is a 2006 British-American documentary film by Eric Steel spanning one year of filming at the Golden Gate Bridge which crosses the Golden Gate entrance to San Francisco Bay, connecting the city of San Francisco, California to the Marin Headlands of Marin County, in 2004. The film shows a number of suicides, and features interviews with family and friends of some of the identified people who had thrown themselves from the bridge that year and one person who had jumped previously and survived. The film was inspired by a 2003 article titled "Jumpers", written by Tad Friend for The New Yorker magazine. The film crew shot almost 10,000 hours of footage, recording 23 of the known 24 suicides off the bridge in 2004. Background The Golden Gate Bridge, which first opened in May 1937, was the most popular suicide site in the world during the documentary's filming, with approximately 1,200 deaths by 2003. Its death toll has since been surpassed only by the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge in China. The four-second fall from the Golden Gate Bridge sends a person plunging at to hit the waters of the San Francisco Bay "with the force of a speeding truck meeting a concrete building." Jumping off the bridge holds a 98 percent fatality rate; some die instantly from internal injuries, while others drown or die of hypothermia. In his article for The New Yorker, Tad Friend wrote, "Survivors often regret their decision in midair, if not before", supported by survivor Ken Baldwin explaining, "I instantly realized that everything in my life that I'd thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped." In the 1970s, the city's newspapers sparked "countdowns" as the death toll closed in on 500 recorded fatalities. Television crews covered the scene as bridge officials managed to stop 14 prospective jumpers, among them a man with a sign reading "500" pinned to his T-shirt. The media frenzy was even more intense in 1995 as the total drew close to 1,000. The body of the 1,000th victim, a 25-year-old who was seen jumping, remains unrecovered. Steel said he was shocked that, despite the Golden Gate Bridge's notoriety and history, nothing had been done to prevent people from attempting suicide there. "Most bridges where, or high places, if it's high enough that it would be a fatal fall, have put up suicide barriers precisely for this reason." Production