I was the only patron at a 1 PM Thursday screening of Sundown at the Aquarius in Palo Alto, a solo screening experience that I usually relish, since it had only happened twice in the thirty years before 2021. Given the fragile state of Bay Area cinemas, it’s now problematic. This was my third solo screening in the past four months; (the others were screenings of The Souvenir Part II at San Francisco’s Landmark Embarcadero and Benedetta at Berkeley’s Landmark Shattuck).
I guessing that this current trend is, at least mainly, a COVID-influenced hesitancy to gather indoors. Indeed, vax’d and boosted as I am, I’m not ready to sit in a crowded weekend screening of a popcorn movie. But an art house screening at 10% capacity in the Bay Area, where cinephiles, from the oldest and most well-educated cohorts, are almost 100% vax’d, should be pretty low-risk.
No one can say for sure if the cinemas that present independent, international and documentary films will recover from the pandemic. At all. Ever. It’s especially worrisome that Landmark’s Embarcadero has now closed permanently, right on the heels of the Castro’s purchase by live entertainment promoters.
In particular, the high quality cinemas have been completely devastated in Silicon Valley. CIneArts’ Palo Alto Square has closed, following Downtown San Jose’s Camera 12. Campbell’s Camera 7 has transitioned into the Pruneyard Dine-in, which still offers some good fare, but the new business model has squeezed out the art films. Camera 3 has been turned into 3Below, whose flaky and buffoonish operators have essentially gutted it as a serious venue for cinema. Landmark’s Guild in Menlo Park closed for the pandemic and hasn’t reopened. Fortunately, the AMC and CInemark/Century theaters are still devoting a few screens to the very best major studio films (Belfast, Nightmare Alley, Don’t Look Up, etc.). The bottom line, though: there was no place in Silicon Valley to see the year’s best film, Drive My Car, when it was released (although it has just popped up at two AMC theaters since it was Oscar-nominated).
Indeed, Landmark’s Shattuck and the Alamo Drafthouse New Mission remain alive, along with the smattering of 1-2 screen venues like the Roxie, Balboa, Vogue and 4-Star in San Francisco, the Rafael in San Rafael, the Aquarius in Palo Alto and the New Parkway in Oakland. But, over the past decade, the Bay Area has lost about half of our art house screens, and Silicon Valley art house cinema has been essentially wiped out.
There’s a been a harsh domino effect on Bay Area film culture itself. The film festivals that I cover – Cinequest, SFFILM, Mill Valley, Frameline, Noir City and the SF Jewish Film Festival – had to go virtual during the pandemic, a real body blow. As they re-emerge to in-person festivals, their recovery is uncertain.
The Castro will still host SFFILM and Frameline in 2022, perhaps for the last time. But the first post-pandemic Noir City had to be relocated to another vintage movie palace much smaller than the Castro. When COVID hit us, Cinequest was still adapting to the loss of Camera 12.
It’s all sobering, but there it is.