Unique among American cities, San Francisco still has many of the movie theatres that were built between 1910 and 1950, including the Castro, Balboa, Bridge, Roxie, Clay, and Harding, to name just a few. Monuments to the city’s cultural heritage, these theatres embody some of San Francisco’s most gorgeous architecture and house a rich cinematic history. Left in the Dark: Portraits of San Francisco Movie Theatres captures this fading heritage in the nick of time, before the theatres themselves have vanished and their histories slipped away.

Left in the Dark will be comprised of lush full-color fine art photographs by R.A. McBride, and essays written by Bay Area cultural leaders including Jerry Mander, Rebecca Solnit, Eddie Muller, Anita Monga, Joshua Grannell (aka Peaches Christ), Gary Meyer, Liz Keim, and Melinda Stone, among others.

R.A. McBride’s photographs capture the emotion often felt in revered public spaces and trace clues that illuminate the role of the movie theatre as social nexus. The photos portray the cinemas, both active and decaying, in lush color prints taken with 35mm and medium format film cameras. The theatres are pictured empty, allowing the grandeur of the architecture to take center stage. Unlike other photographic books about historic theatres, McBride’s shots of vacant chairs, ticket booths, and restroom signs do more than document; they reveal the evidence of life happening there, and the metamorphosis of polished grandeur to raw peeling paint and worn armrests. Looking at her images, one feels both the loud vitality and quiet decline of the theatres.

Neighborhoods, film movements, and ethnic communities flourished around the neon razor signs at the center of almost every San Francisco main street. Much is being lost as society retreats from public life into the anonymity of multiplexes and home entertainment systems. Through personal and historical essays, Left in the Dark dives through the worlds of 1920s impresarios to present day theatre owners; from the control of San Francisco’s “Great White Way” by the “Big Five” in the 1940s to current exhibition economics; from the Fillmore’s vibrant 1940s jazz community to the devastation of “urban renewal”; from the Cockettes’s performances in the 1960s to Midnight Mass; from the eroticization of experimental film in the 1970s to the contemporary series at the Exploratorium. By drawing a continuum from past to present, Left in the Dark reveals the multifaceted value of San Francisco’s movie theatres.

R.A. McBride, photographer, plays with journalistic and fine art techniques, capturing simultaneously raw and polished moments. She has exhibited in Durham, NC, Chicago, IL, Phoenix, AZ, New York, NY, and San Francisco, CA. Her work has been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Sun, Bitch Magazine, Girlfriends, and Release Print. She received a B.A. in Fine Art Photography from Columbia College in Chicago, Illinois, and since 1998 she has been a member of Point Blank, a photography group that exhibits slide shows and print in various outdoor spaces and galleries in San Francisco.

Julie Lindow, editor, earned an M.A. in English Literature from San Francisco State University with an emphasis in cultural and feminist theory. Recently she contributed to “Shadowplay: Exploring San Francisco’s Abandoned Movie Theaters,” in Instant City, published an article, “Exposure to the Dark,” in Artist Television Access Webzine, and coordinated, formatted, and proofread a 1,000 page medical textbook for the University of California, San Francisco. In addition to her editing skills, Lindow brings to the project ten years of experience working in environmental and cultural preservation at the Foundation for Deep Ecology, International Forum on Globalization, and Headlands Center for the Arts. Most importantly, she spent her youth slinging popcorn and candy at the Castro Theatre, where her relationship with San Francisco’s vibrant film exhibition community began.

CONTRIBUTORS

JOSHUA GRANNELL is the general manager of Landmark’s Bridge Theatre and the producer of the San Francisco Underground Short Film Festival. He is currently developing his first feature-length film to be shot in the Bay Area. Joshua’s alter ego, Peaches Christ, is an underground drag phenomenon, emcee, actor and award-winning short filmmaker with over ten years of professional experience. Ms. Christ’s Backlash Production Company and Midnight Mass movie series are based in SF.

ELISABETH HOUSEMAN has worked at the Bridge Theatre for nine years and is currently compiling an archive and history for the theatre. Her other interests include the history of the natural world and medicine and she is researching a book on 19th century poisoning cases. She has a B.A. in history and is currently working toward an M.A. at San Francisco State University. She has appeared in three of Joshua Grannell’s films.

LIZ KEIM is the Director of the Media Arts Program and Film Curator at the Exploratorium. She initiated the Exploratorium’s film program and collection in 1982. The media arts program has expanded to include screenings, residencies, workshops, exhibit projects, installations, and special events such as A Trip Down Market Street Centennial Celebration 1905/2005, an outdoor screening held at the foot of Market Street in September 2005, co-produced with filmmaker Melinda Stone.

JERRY MANDER is the founder and co-director of the International Forum on Globalization, the program director for the Foundation for Deep Ecology, and is a senior fellow at Public Media Center. Back in the 1960s Mander was president of a major San Francisco advertising company before turning his talents to environmental campaigns. His books include Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1977), In the Absence of the Sacred (1991), The Case Against the Global Economy And For a Turn Toward the Local, co-edited with Edward Goldsmith (1996), and most recently, Paradigm Wars: Indigenous Peoples' Resistance to Globalization, with Victoria Tauli-Corpuz.

GARY MEYER co-founded Landmark Theatres in 1975 with Berkeley’s U.C. Theatre. Landmark developed innovative ways to show and promote independent, classic and foreign films, while helping launch the careers of dozens of directors whose films have shaped contemporary cinema. Currently Meyer operates San Francisco’s Balboa Theatre, is the co-director of the Telluride Film Festival and provides a range of consulting services in the movie world through his company IDEAS. Projects have included feasibility studies and business plans for restoring old theatres.

ANITA MONGA has been involved in film exhibition in the San Francisco Bay Area for the last 25 years. As Director of Programming at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre she established an internationally recognized film arts program. A founding member of the Film Noir Foundation, Monga curates the Noir City Festival and consults on other festivals and theater programs. Most recently she directed the Film Arts Festival of Independent Cinema, and programmed the Palm Springs International Film Festival.

EDDIE MULLER is the San Francisco Literary Laureate of 2007. He has achieved much acclaim for his three books on film noir and for founding the Noir City Film Festival and Film Noir Foundation, earning the nickname the “Czar of Noir." Muller has also written two critically acclaimed novels, The Distance (2002) and Shadow Boxer (2003). Most recently he contributed to the San Francisco Noir Anthology and co-authored the biography, Tab Hunter Confidential.

REBECCA SOLNIT is a San Francisco-based cultural critic and writer. She is the author of many acclaimed works of non-fiction, including the bestselling Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. She contributed to After the Ruins 1906 and 2006 Rephotographing the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire.

MELINDA STONE earned a PhD in Communications from San Diego State University and is an Assistant Professor and Director of Film Studies at the University of San Francisco. Her historical research projects focus on amateur film clubs and modes of film exhibition, particularly in California. She also spends her time making films and directing site-specific film screenings such as the “California Tour” that feature her as an impresario engaging her audiences in games of chance, prize give-aways, and sing-alongs.

TO BE ANNOUNCED

contributors on architecture, the Fillmore, Mission, and Chinatown