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The scramble to get a piece of the movie pie is a weekly dogfight for local theaters. Here’s how Marin’s celluloid scene is spliced.

BY DAVID TEMPLETON

Mickey McGowan of San Rafael is a certified cinematic connoisseur. Renowned as an artist and cultural observer, the longtime Marin County resident—known to many as the founder and curator of the former Unknown Museum in Mill Valley—is one of those folks who likens going to the movies to attending religious services at church.

“Going to the movies is like going to church,” he says. “You sit in the dark in a silent, contemplative posture, you gather with others in similar need for some kind of inspiration and cinematic illumination, and like those who pray or meditate, you make yourself emotionally and mentally ready to be moved, to be inspired, be taken somewhere beyond the realm of normal, everyday life. There’s even Communion, if you can consider the shared ritual consumption of popcorn and beverages to be a kind of communion.”

McGowan enjoys a wide range of film experiences; as such, he has come to know his way around the many theaters and cineplexes of Marin County—which, contrary to popular opinion, are not all the same. To return to the connoisseur comparison, McGowan, like an experienced patron of an all-you-can-eat buffet, has learned which theaters in which corners of the county show which kinds of films. He can predict in advance which movies are likely to play at the six-screen Century Regency on Smith Ranch Road or the two-screen Sequoia in Mill Valley or the 15-screen Northgate Mall or the single-screen Cinema in Corte Madera. He knows which films are likely to be selected for the beloved first-run independent movie house, the three-screen Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center in downtown San Rafael, or at the second-run-and-classics-focused Lark in downtown Larkspur.

And he knows which films will never play in Marin at all.

“If it’s a King Kong or a Cars or a Star Wars movie, it will play at the Cinema, still one of my favorite screens in Marin,” says McGowan. “If it’s an artsy or Oscar-caliber film, maybe a Merchant Ivory kind of thing, it will show up at the Regency, unless someone doesn’t think it will appeal to that many people, in which case it will end up at the CinéArts theater in Sausalito. Teen comedies, horror movies, family movies and anything with Tim Allen in it will be at the Northgate Mall, along with whatever other wide-release films are new.” (The mall, by the way, is where McGowan chose to see Dawn of Dead, the zombies-in-a-mall remake a few years ago, deciding that the setting would lend atmosphere to the film.) Adds McGowan: “And of course, most of the decent documentaries, foreign films and independent movies will be at the Rafael.”

For anyone who’s ever wondered why particular exhibition choices are made around Marin, and who in the world makes them, the answer is easy: Movies are chosen according to what the programmers predict, from the slate of available films, will sell the most tickets to the most people. And in Marin County, the people who make those decisions are Richard Peterson, Bernice Baeza, David Corkill and Harry Whitson.

Of those four exalted human beings, only Peterson, director of programming for the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center, and Baeza, executive director of the Lark Theater, make decisions for independently owned non-chain movie houses. Whitson, longtime programmer for Century Theatres, and Corkill, owner of Northern California-based CinemaWest Theaters, make decisions for vast numbers of theaters every week. Expectedly, there is a degree of competition among theaters, each vying for the best offerings from the same pool of theatrical releases. Since Century and CinemaWest both declined to speak to the Pacific Sun for this article, we will be focusing on the Rafael and the Lark, the gutsy nonprofits boldly holding their own in a county where the chains appear to hold most of the cards. To use McGowan’s smorgasbord analogy, in the theatrical buffet of Marin County, the Rafael and the Lark are the talented pastry chefs selling homemade wares from table to table, hoping against hope that quality and craftsmanship are enough to stand out among rows and rows of mass-produced, manufactured food products.

• • • •

BUT FIRST, a little background.

Currently, there are 11 theaters operating in Marin County, with a total of 50 screens. Two of those theaters, the Lark and the Rafael, are nonprofits; the former owned by real estate investors Terrence Andrews and Michael Gottlieb, and the latter owned by the California Film Institute, which runs the Mill Valley Film Festival. Two other theaters, the Tiburon Playhouse and the Fairfax 5, are owned by the Petaluma-based CinemaWest chain, which operates a dozen theaters in Northern California. The seven other Marin County theaters are owned by the 64-year-old Century Theatres chain, though those theaters will soon be changing hands. The Corte Madera-headquartered Century—which operates 78 theaters with a total of 994 screens across 14 Western states—announced last week that it will be purchased by the Texas-based Cinemark USA, Inc. Not counting its new acquisitions, Cinemark owns 202 theaters with 2,469 screens covering 34 states in the U.S. (with another 112 theaters and 932 screens in 13 countries, primarily Mexico, and South and Central America).

Since every theatrical exhibition company has its own practices, policies and preferences, the change of ownership will certainly have some effect on the moviegoers of Marin. What that change will be, one can only speculate. Currently, the folks who program Marin’s Century-owned theaters work and live right here in the county. When the sale becomes official late this year, those tasks will likely be conducted from Cinemark’s headquarters in Plano, Texas. Another guess is that the local Century-owned theaters, which currently have a no-commercials policy (except, of course, for those irritatingly high-energy ads for Fandango, the Internet ticketing service of which Century is a founding member), will eventually be serving up animated Xbox ads, vertigo-inducing Lexus spots and the Fanta girls along with their previews of coming events and reminders to buy snacks and to not leave popcorn containers on the floor.

• • • •

RICHARD PETERSON KNOWS what a great job he has. Not only does he get to watch some of the best movies being made today, he gets to screen them in one of Marin County’s most beautiful, state-of-the-art theaters. At the time of this interview (just previous to the announcement of the Century-Cinemark deal), the marquee above the Rafael Film Center boasted the presence of The OH in Ohio, Three Times, Russian Dolls, Look Both Ways and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, all well-regarded films unlikely to appear at a cineplex near you.

“The OH in Ohio opened last week and it’s doing very well,” says Peterson of the buzzed-about comedy featuring indie-fave Parker Posey as a woman setting out to experience her first-ever orgasm. “It’s a new company that just started, Cyan Pictures,” he says. “They’ve been a little bit under the radar. Nobody knew much about the film or what it was going to do, but I thought it was an amusing, entertaining movie. I also thought we needed a comedy for the schedule, to balance it out.”

With three auditoriums of varying sizes in which to place films, Peterson says he always attempts to have a mix of things. Ideally, Peterson would like to have something “esoteric” on one screen, a comedy or something relatively light on another screen, maybe a documentary or something sociopolitical on the last screen. To be avoided, he believes, is having the same kind of movie on all screens.

“You don’t do your Tarkovsky series at the same time that you’re running your Bergman series,” he laughs. “Our mission is to show films that demonstrate an appreciation for the totality of cinema, which is a fancy way of saying we like all kinds of films, and we love older films as much as we love new films. We have seen that our audience likes a balance of things to choose from, too, so it’s not like we could just take the three newest films and expect them to have that balance of drama, comedy and education.”

Asked whether he approaches programming as an art or a science, Peterson laughs.

“Programming is not a science,” he says. “Nor is it an art, unless making informed guesses is an art. In a way, programming is really all about preparing to be lucky, because luck has a whole lot to do with it.”

To say the least.

When you are dealing with brand new films, luck ultimately plays a major part in choosing which ones to take up space in your theater. Distributors tend to move the dates around all the time, which also makes for a challenge, and compounds the luck factor.

“Some of our most successful films, we only found out we were playing them two weeks before they opened,” says Peterson. “That would include The Buena Vista Social Club and Winged Migration. March of the Penguins also did very well for us, but you just can’t plan for that. Who’d have guessed those films would do so well when others that are just as good or better don’t find an audience? All you can do is choose the best films that become available and hope. And since you can’t control the release dates of a movie, you can only do the best you can once a distributor announces the release dates of its next film.”

In another sense, programming a theater is all about preparing to be surprised. One of Peterson’s biggest surprises as a programmer has to be 2001’s Rivers and Tides, the cult-hit documentary about artist Andy Goldsworthy.

“That one did incredibly well,” Peterson says. “I think it’s the third or fourth biggest grossing film here since we opened. Who could have guessed that? Its success here was partly a function of the film being good and quickly becoming very popular with our audience, and partly because we did hold onto it for a long time, and the audience kept coming back, many of them more than once.”

Though Peterson declines to discuss matters of competition in the county, he does concede that there are films he’d have liked to have shown at the Rafael, movies he believes would have performed very well there, but he was not able to get. Standing in his way, of course, was Century, which, with all the clout one would expect from a national chain, tends to get first pick of the crop of new releases, with exclusivity clauses designed so that other local theaters cannot play the same movies at the same time. This leaves theaters like the Rafael and the Lark to do the best they can with the big chain’s leftovers. Sometimes, it works to the Rafael’s advantage, as when March of the Penguins (passed over by the majority of the country’s major chains when it was released last summer) went on to become one of the biggest grossing documentaries of all time, and one of the Rafael’s top three best-performing films.

“I don’t see the situation with other theaters as being competitive in a negative way,” Peterson muses. “I really don’t. It’s a challenge, sometimes, trying to program the best films available when another player is there trying to do the same thing. At the same time, there are some great films that are perfect for our audience here that the big chains wouldn’t be at all interested in. In the end, the way to succeed at this, and the only way I can think about doing what I do, is to work at growing an audience, at this theater, that trusts us to present interesting, unusual, entertaining films that they can’t find, and maybe wouldn’t want to watch, any other place.”

• • • •

THE 70-YEAR-OLD LARK Theater, located prominently in downtown Larkspur, is now on the national Registry of Historic Places, an example of the type of old-time American movie theater that was once the Art Deco norm across the country. Located at the north end of the town, the Lark, ever since being brought back from a six-year stretch where it sat unused and unhopeful of ever being a real theater again, has arguably become the economic anchor of the downtown area, which had also begun to decline in the years when the theater was closed.

“A downtown that doesn’t have a movie theater, or something like a theater to revolve around and to bring people into it, will sooner or later die,” says Bernice Baeza, who used to drive past the darkened Lark dreaming of the day the lights would be turned on again. “Economically,” she says, “the vitality of a downtown area depends on the existence of thriving, active theater of some kind.”

It was almost two years ago that Baeza and a group of Larkspur residents formed a nonprofit to run the venerable theater, after owners Terrence Andrews and Michael Gottlieb let it be known they’d prefer the Lark continue its life as an active theater. With Baeza as executive director, the nonprofit adopted a mission statement stressing its commitment to “independent film, international film, mainstream preview screenings, film festivals and multicultural events.”

“You know we’re a nonprofit,” Baeza wryly points out, “because we’re a single screen theater. The days when a single screen theater can make a profit are things of the past.”

As the primary programmer for the Lark, Baeza has been forced every week to cobble together a strange hybrid of a theater schedule, with a mix of second-run films, documentaries, family films, Hollywood musicals, classics, first-time independents and films by emerging directors. And sometimes she’s lucky enough to get a mainstream, first-run film—on that rare occasion Century doesn’t snap it up first. The challenge of keeping the screen filled with product that people will make the trip downtown to see is akin to walking a tightrope in a swaying breeze.

“This is a business. Movies are big business. And so it’s no real surprise that they play a pretty nasty game, sometimes,” she says of Century (which she refers to as “the Big Theaters”) and its programming practices. “It’s obvious that they block us from getting the films we want by putting them into certain theaters where they have clearance. When the Big Theaters want Superman, we can’t have Superman, and if they want An Inconvenient Truth, we can’t have An Inconvenient Truth. And if they choose, for one of their theaters that normally caters to an adult crowd, to put in a family film, you gotta know they’re not doing it to make money, because they’ve already proven they can’t make money with a family film in that location—that’s why they decided to cater to adults in the first place. They are doing what they do to make sure that the Lark doesn’t get the family film, because family films are one of our strengths.

“It’s part of the game,” she continues. “If we want it, they don’t want us to have it, so we have to think outside the box. It makes us a better, more creative theater.”

Her programming practices, Baeza says, are a mix of trusting her own tastes and trusting the customers who make known what they want to see. For her part, Baeza likes the old-time classic musicals, and for their part, the local audience likes those family-oriented films.

“That really works for us—family films, like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” she says. “We did The Wizard of Oz and it did very well. The original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. That did wonderfully. Families do go to the movies. They may not go Monday through Thursday, but they definitely do go to the movies.”

They also like movies about football and people who run fast.

“For some reason,” says Baeza, “films about sports also do well at the Lark, so I’m always on the lookout for the next Chariots of Fire or Remember the Titans. We’ve got Once in a Lifetime coming up.”

Add to those films a sprinkling of socially conscious documentaries and independents, and you’ve got a happening, somewhat eccentric theater that keeps the doors open even if it is never all that far away from having to call it quits. Fund-raising is a constant in Baeza’s life; that’s just the way the system works. On August 29, she’s organized a triumphant gala to celebrate the two-year anniversary of the Lark Theater, with food, champagne and a special screening of the independent comedy Keeping Mum.

As for the struggle to get the hottest film on screen along with all those musicals and sports flicks, Baeza has learned one important maxim: If you can’t get Superman, there’s always My Super Ex-Girlfriend, one new film she was able to snap up fairly quickly.

“My Super Ex-Girlfriend was not my first choice,” Baeza admits, “but that’s what we could get.”

One way Baeza has dealt with the challenge of being surrounded by theaters that get first pick of the new movies is to do things the Big Theaters would never dream of.

“In a lot of our programming now, what we are trying to do and what we are looking at doing more of are series—a series of musicals, for instance. We’re also forming alliances with unlikely partners.”

One example of that is a recent alliance formed with the Marin Theatre Company in Mill Valley, the renowned live theater troupe known for Bay Area premieres of first-rate plays. Next month, MTC will present the Bay Area premiere of a play called Orson’s Shadow, by Austin Pendleton. The play is a comedy about collaboration between Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh.

“So of course we will be doing some films featuring Orson Welles and Vivien Leigh,” Baeza says, “and that should be a lot of fun.”

Ultimately, Baeza says the secret of programming strategy is to choose films that collectively create an environment in which people feel comfortable and enjoy hanging out.

“The thing is, we bring people together,” concludes Baeza. “Folks who are sitting at home, alienated, watching a DVD, they really need to get out and get together with other people, to be stimulated intellectually, to be entertained, to share ideas and talk to people. My job is to give people the movies they will want to go out and talk about.”

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