The Bay Area movie lovers keeping community cinema alive
Natalie Hanson
SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — Standing in line outside The Beat Museum in the North Beach neighborhood one evening in August, Lee Diamond had come all the way from Plantation, Florida, to visit friends in Alameda.
She took a ferry from the island to enjoy a day in the city, then found herself at a free “cinema crawl” organized by local film lovers.
“It’s very hard to find independent movies in Florida,” Diamond said. “If you do find them, you have to drive 45 minutes to an hour to the theater.”
“This is great, having it all at my fingertips,” she added. She said she’s interested in the beat literary movement, as well as “quirky little films that can be hard to find.”
Like Diamond, a growing number of film buffs in the Bay Area are finding new ways to come together and enjoy great movies as locally-owned movie theaters close en masse across the region.
San Francisco movie lovers have for years watched some of their favorite theaters close down, hurt by low ticket sales and rising costs.
Beloved theaters like The Roxy and Balboa are just hanging on. The Castro, the landmark playhouse in the city’s historic LGBTQ neighborhood, is under a major renovation in an effort to stay open. Nor is San Francisco alone in this trend: Oakland and Berkeley are also struggling to keep open locally-owned playhouses, with Berkeley recently losing all of its downtown theaters.
Faced with these challenges, local film fanatics are finding ways to keep the community together, including by encouraging people to meet up and enjoy local films. Among those leading the charge is “Those Guys,” a local group that’s helped organize free monthly “cinema hopping” events in the historic North Beach neighborhood.
Organizers say that over the years, local theaters have slowly been driven to closure without feasible ways to stay open — leading to a loss for both local movie lovers and filmmakers looking to show their work.
Just because theaters are closing, though, doesn’t mean credits have to roll on the local film community. Those Guys' “Films with Friends” cinema crawl “brings people out,” group co-founder Rob Schmitt said, encouraging locals to “roam around and see several different films.”
This year, the cinema crawl has brought people out every third Wednesday evening to join other film lovers for screenings, like the one at The Beat Museum that Diamond attended.
About 20 people including Diamond filed into the museum to fill folding chairs around a projector screen. They sat surrounded by books and art celebrating the history of the beat movement. The room soon darkened as a collection of beat artist Harry Smith’s collected experimental art films, mostly abstract animations using paintings on film, began to play.
Others looking for a different venue could cross the street and end up at Le Petit Paris 75, a cozy and well-known French bar, for Alice Gay’s collection of short silent French films. As the screening at The Beat Museum got underway, this establishment arranged its TV screens around the bar, so visitors could sit, sip and chat while enjoying a different kind of show.
A jazz trio had been booked for the bar that same night, but the accident worked out well. The jazz was fitting background music for the films showing off entertainment from the era, including physical comedy skits and a magic show where a woman seemed to disappear.
Organizing it all was a team of 10 Bay Area movie lovers known as “Those Guys.” Schmitt, the co-founder, said the group has been showing free films around the neighborhood for years, including in the landmark Kerouac Alley.
As demand for outdoor film events grew during the pandemic, Those Guys this summer created the free and outdoor “Films with Friends” movie crawls. The group persuaded local businesses to participate, with unique lists of films curated for each showing.
The events have grown to draw bigger and bigger crowds — and Schmitt said he’s been “taken aback” by the overwhelming turnout and positive response.
“We’re also looking to show films that are not exactly the normal Hollywood thing,” he added. ”We want to do short films or independents, things like that.”
Those Guys have so far shown few signs of slowing down. The team plans to keep the event free to the community by covering costs to outfit different spaces for showings and rent equipment, co-founder and filmmaker Nanci Gaglio said.
“It’s our first season, and we’re sort of working out the kinks,” Gaglio said. She noted that some bars are more difficult to outfit for screenings.
Dominic Angerame, an award-winning filmmaker and film studies instructor including at University of California Berkeley, serves as Those Guys’ film curator.
Angerame picks the films for each month’s program and helps the participating venues present them. As most local theaters often show the same big-box releases, he said it’s important to him to offer screenings of films that can rarely be found elsewhere.
When local theaters close down or don’t offer opportunities to show hyperlocal or experimental films, local artists have nowhere to go to show their work, Angerame said. “It’s extremely frustrating when you make movies and nobody gets a chance to see them.”
“My role is to bring some of the best cinema that we can to the citizens of North Beach, as well as in bringing in experimental avant garde films to the community as well,” he added. “We hope to present at least two avant garde filmmakers in person, showing their work and talking to the audience, in our next season.”