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Tuesday evening, courtesy of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, came more bad news from the film front: the Haight's Red Vic Movie House will be closing on July 25, its 31st birthday.
The independent rep house has been run by a collective, which will be disbanded at the close of the month, according to Claudia Lehan, who has been with the Red Vic for around 14 years. The news will not come as a total shock to movie buffs, as the Red Vic had made its financial troubles known this past year, but Lehan said that patrons have been reacting with a mixture of sadness and sometimes anger. "I think we just did some fundraising, some reaching out, got some support, but what we needed to make it all gel was an enormous amount," she said.
Like many other rep houses, as profiled last year by The Bay Citizen (on the occasion of the Red Vic's 30th birthday), more people seemed to profess to love the idea of an independent movie theater than left their couches to watch. "The bottom line was attendance," Lehan said. "It's a different world than 31 years ago."
As sad as the Red Vic's passing is, Lehan said that the mood of the staff was "acceptance." If there were a "silver lining," she said, it was that the building's owners were interested in having another community-minded group take over the space, although she had no details on that. And the witty programming that was the theater's trademark will close out over three decades of film. The last showing will be the first movie played, "Harold and Maude." "We're going out with Maude," Lehan said, referring to the movie's premise, "Not to be morbid."
© The Bay Citizen, 2012
