Public Comment

To:Tom Quinn, CEO, NEON

Dear Mr. Quinn,

I write out of anxiety for our movie theaters. The success of Netflix et al at making movies accessible privately during COVID was a comfort. But I’d hate to see this convenience be allowed to displace the shared experience of seeing films on the big screen. Without movie theaters and their large screens and sound systems, I worry that we will lose great films. They need the financial support that comes from large-scale presentation, and viewers need the scale provided by big screens in movie theaters to enjoy the richness of a film made as a work of art.

Great films such as Apocalypse Now, Blade Runner, Atanarjuat, Claire Denis’ mysterious The Intruder, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, and a particular favorite that I know you helped bring to us, Honeyland, cannot be appreciated on a small screen and in a private home. Film as an art form requires the big screen. Viewing movies in a communal setting creates the exhilaration of sharing a momentous event and the satisfaction of the senses that art produces.

As I wrote to Kevin Holloway, President of Landmark, I am deeply grateful for Landmark’s reopening of the Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley last year as the pandemic began to recede. It was a huge relief to be able to see some of the new films (I’d been keeping a list) under rigorously safe conditions, thanks to the Cinemas’ scheduling multiple screenings daily, including uncrowded afternoon showings.

Between the 1960s and 2010 or so, Berkeley was one of the best places in the world to see a wide range of films, popular blockbusters as well as foreign films, indie films, the low-budget quirky films I’ve always treasured. But we’ve steadily lost screens in recent years, mainly due to developers’ proposals for market-rate housing, which doesn’t serve Berkeley’s urgent need for median- and low-income housing. The heirs of Landmark’s great 1914 California Theatre recently rejected a very good offer to renew the lease in favor of a for-profit speculative development.

And now I am alarmed at the renewed threat to the Shattuck Cinemas resulting from the sale of that property to a Chicago developer, fronted by Bill Schrader of the Austin Group. A group of film lovers formed here to oppose the previous developer Joseph Penner’s intention in 2015 to demolish the Shattuck Cinemas. The property is part of the landmarked block that contains the 1910 Shattuck Hotel. The ten-screen theater represents the very successful repurposing of a former department store; it includes hand-painted murals in the Egyptian- and Moroccan-themed theaters. Due to different-sized screening rooms, it brings us a range of films. Before the pandemic, 275,000 to 300,000 movie viewers a year were coming to the Shattuck Cinemas in downtown Berkeley.

I spoke with my friend Rick MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s, another film lover, recently about the possibility of the sort of forum Harper’s occasionally organizes, to discuss the future of movie theaters. I write you to ask if you are aware of any organized effort to defend our movie theaters across the country against the home-screen ventures and demolition by developers, so we can continue to see films on their big screens, with other film lovers.