SAN FRANCISCO- The veteran actor Martin Landau recently walked the streets of San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood wearing a rumpled brown trench coat, a carefully creased fedora, and a look of exasperation. If he were not so recognizable as Martin Landau, and if he were not surrounded by a film crew of about 50, with cameras and lights and police directing traffic, he might have looked like a neighborhood regular.

The cast and crew of the movie “Harrison Montgomery” were in the Tenderloin because they wanted a gritty urban environment for the film’s backdrop. They could have filmed in Eugene, Oregon, with far fewer bureaucratic hurdles but the story, “is specific to the Tenderloin, specific to the type of poverty and the type of crime that happens here,” said director Daniel Deavila.

“It’s a side of San Francisco that doesn’t get much attention,” said Catherine Deavila, a producer and Daniel’s younger sister

But the neighborhood does get attention, perhaps more than Deavila realized. And that attention, said some who live and work in the neighborhood, promotes a stereotype that the Tenderloin is a down-and-out place of drugs and prostitution, a den of iniquity in the heart of the city.

But many good things do happen in the community, according to residents. The neighborhood has many strong families and thousands of children. That positive side generally goes unmentioned in media portrayals, they say.

“If you go and look for dirt, you’re going to find it,” said Laura Choe, manager of the Tenderloin After School Program. The real story, she said, is “the beautiful things that happen here.”

“The Tenderloin is full of citizens who are politically engaged and active in improving the quality of their neighborhood’s life,” said Dwight Saunders, a community outreach specialist with the Central City SRO Collaborative, which helps single room occupancy tenants organize for better conditions.

For example, local residents recently pushed City Hall for legislation addressing the problem of bedbug infestation. While the thought of bedbugs is distressing, the story of how the community has been fighting to eradicate them is not.

“That’s a very positive story and it’s been reported in a very positive way,” said Saunders.

The problems that define much of the neighborhood’s reputation may simply be a result of its density, said Jerry Jai, a project manager with the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, which provides housing and services to low-income individuals and families.

Three out of the five most densely populated census tracts in San Francisco are in the Tenderloin, according to an analysis of 2000 federal census data by San Francisco Cityscape, an online urban design journal. Census tract 122, a piece of the Tenderloin bounded by Van Ness, Leavenworth, Post, and Ellis streets, has a population density equivalent to 99,085 people per square mile.

Since the population is clustered so close together, and there are few alternative spaces available, the streets are often used as public space, said Jai.

Otherwise, the Tenderloin has traits that urban planners often tout as the best qualities for a community, he added. These include being walkable and having an active street life, mixed-use properties, and residents of all ages. Jai said he has fallen in love with the neighborhood since he started working there.

Daniel Deavila, the director, tried to include some of the traits Jai described in his film, whose main characters include an older white man, a single mother, and her young daughter. Deavila described his film as “a fair portrayal of the social and personal dynamic in the Tenderloin.”

But he admitted to having a preconception about the neighborhood, a fascination inspired by how different it seemed in comparison to his own life. But a week on the streets of the Tenderloin changed that, he said, “What I’ve really appreciated is coming to feel really comfortable in that environment,” said Deavila. “To be able to walk through there and not really take notice of anything. Not that I’m suddenly closing my eyes. It’s just to come to understand that reality. It’s just another reality as opposed to a monster that’s going to eat you.”

Life in the Tenderloin is just another reality to Dwight Saunders and his fellow residents.

“These are people who struggle with the challenges of living in an urban center,” said Saunders, “but who get up every morning and meet those challenges.”