Movie Theater Expert Gary Meyer on The Balboa SF Theater And It’s Innovative Programming
ONN – Movie Theater Expert Gary Meyer on The Balboa SF Theater And It’s Innovative Programming
Movie Theater Expert Gary Meyer on The Balboa SF Theater And It’s Innovative Programming
This is Gary Meyer, who co-director of The Telluride Film Festival but also the co-founder of the Balboa Theatre in San Francisco, when we met in Berkeley for this Zennie62Media interview. What follows is a sample of the conversation in the video-blog from April 13, 2010.
Gary sat down with me at the Jupiter Bar and Restaurant to talk. “Well,” Gary said, “we’ve got a couple of really interesting things but most particularly we recently did a series of sneak previews of a film called ‘Remembering Playland,’ a documentary about Playland at The Beach for those of you who are old enough to remember it. It was great amusement park down at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, which had roller coasters and scare rides and the most amazing fun house. Or the famous laughing South mechanical statute – it was laughing and scaring how many people, and making the other half people fall into hysterics. And you can go into that funhouse where I think 25 cents and spend the entire day in there doing stuff.
“Meyer continued “They had the giant slides. and a hall of mirrors and all kinds of traps and games and things. If you’ve ever seen “The Lady from Shanghai”, Orson Welles film, at the very end, Miss Hayworth is in the hole – appears that they go out into Playland. Anyway, this document has been made. We had a series of sneak previews. Every one of them sold out. The audience was going crazy. People were – I was there,” Gary said.
While Gary was running the Telluride Film Festival at the time, the focus of our talk in Berkeley was about The Balboa SF, the place he’s ran since 2001. In 2012, Meyer stepped down from that role, and worked with The San Francisco Neighborhood Theater Foundation to arrange for them to take over the Balboa Theater’s lease through 2024. The reason given, at the time, was the heavy cost of digital conversion – upwards of $200,000. But Gary’s innovative programming left a legacy that lasts today.
Stay tuned.
Note from Zennie62Media and Oakland News Now: this video-blog post demonstrates the full and live operation of the latest updated version of an experimental Zennie62Media , Inc. mobile media video-blogging system network that was launched June 2018. This is a major part of Zennie62Media , Inc.’s new and innovative approach to the production of news media. What we call “The Third Wave of Media”. The uploaded video is from a vlogger with the Zennie62 on YouTube Partner Channel, then uploaded to and formatted automatically at the Oakland News Now site and Zennie62-created and owned social media pages. The overall objective is smartphone-enabled, real-time, on the scene reporting of news, interviews, observations, and happenings anywhere in the World and within seconds and not hours. Now, news is reported with a smartphone: no heavy and expensive cameras or even a laptop are necessary. The secondary objective is faster, and very inexpensive media content news production and distribution. We have found there is a disconnect between post length and time to product and revenue generated. With this, the problem is far less, though by no means solved. Zennie62Media is constantly working to improve the system network coding and seeks interested content and media technology partners.