The Roxie Theater in San Francisco's Mission District, whose screenings regularly appear in the weekly Screen Slate SF Bay newsletter. (Courtesy of Screen Slate San Francisco Bay)
It’s easy, sometimes, in the face of losses or changes within the cultural landscape, to fall into doom and gloom. Everything’s less; everything’s worse; the philistines don’t care. For film buffs, today is one of those days — the renovation of the Castro begins, and the impending removal of its original theatrical seating constitutes a crushing loss of San Francisco’s last pure movie palace.
But instead of bemoaning the total loss of Bay Area film culture, how about we rally around what we do have — and what’s to come? After all, what we already have is a lot: enough independent, revival, experimental and artist-made films playing every night of the week that one can’t possibly see them all.
“I had, for years, a Google calendar that was everything playing in the Bay Area that I was interested in,” says Stephen Fisk, a 38-year-old film lover. “I had shared it with a bunch of friends, to the point that one of them was like, ‘I had to turn it off, it’s too stressful to see something every day of the week.’”
To capture and organize that abundance more publicly, Fisk and his friend Omar Rodriguez launched the website SF Bay Film in 2021, just as theaters were starting to reopen. The site was democratic and streamlined, compiling repertory screenings at microcinemas like Oakland’s Shapeshifters alongside far better-known venues like BAMPFA.
When they were building the site, Fisk and Rodriguez purposely modeled it after Screen Slate, a New York-based nonprofit founded in 2011 that publishes listings, criticism, interviews, zines and a podcast on moving image culture. And in late 2023, Screen Slate announced an official expansion into the Bay Area, bringing Fisk and Rodriguez on as editors to continue the work they had already been doing, but with editorial support and a larger audience.
Omar Rodriguez and Stephen Fisk of Screen Slate SF Bay introducing a screening of ‘Anguish’ at the Roxie on Oct. 26, 2023. (Courtesy of Screen Slate)
Now, every Monday, an email arrives in over 750 inboxes in which Fisk rounds up the film offerings for the week ahead. As Brett Kashmere, executive director of Canyon Cinema, pointed out by email, “There is a lot of great stuff happening across the Bay these days.” YBCA’s theater is back in action thanks to programming from Gina Basso (formerly of SFMOMA). Shapeshifters runs an “amazing cascade of workshops and screenings.” SF Cinematheque will host a program of Luther Price’s slide work in March. And, Kashmere adds, “The whole BAMPFA film calendar is on fire this season.”
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“We’ve lost a lot in the Bay Area film community in the past five years or so,” Fisk says. “But there’s still so much — I can’t list everything.”
“To me, it’s one of the most significant developments for the Bay Area film community in the past several years,” says Kashmere. “People love putting on and going to screenings here. But information about what is happening, when, and where has tended to be very scattered.”
On top of centralized listings, Kashmere says, Screen Slate San Francisco Bay has made visible the strong community and infrastructure that’s already here. “The scene is rich with stories and connections, a small-town feeling in a big city,” programmer Amanda Salazar wrote in the inaugural Screen Slate San Francisco Bay interview, a conversation with SF Silent Film Festival’s artistic director Anita Monga.
Fisk points to Salazar’s own pop-up cinematheque, Camera Obscura, as the type of programming he loves to highlight. “They have a Facebook page that they post on once a year,” Fisk explains of the Petaluma film series. “But if you are not keeping an eye out for that one post that comes in October … then you’re just going to completely miss it.”
Nellie Killian, a film programmer who’s deep in the permitting process of building out The Portal, a 49-seat microcinema at Mission and 29th Streets, agrees that Screen Slate’s arrival is a gamechanger. “It really helps,” she says, “just in terms of making you realize you actually are missing stuff if you’re being pessimistic.”
The Screen Slate SF Bay logo, designed by Braulio Amado. (Courtesy of Screen Slate)
While Killian’s hit more bureaucratic slowdowns than she expected, she’s confident The Portal will open in 2024. “There’s a lot of room for more theaters of different sizes,” she says, especially in the wake of the Castro’s closure. “If someone else wants to open a theater and wants to talk to me about it, I feel like I can save them some steps!”
The Bay Area side of Screen Slate is miniscule in comparison to its New York offerings (I stopped counting a single day’s worth of New York screenings at 40), but for Fisk and Rodriguez, along with Screen Slate’s founder and editor-in-chief Jon Dieringer, this is just the beginning.
Screen Slate “has somehow evolved organically over time, without a master plan,” Dieringer says. Rodriguez currently does the bulk of data entry for listings. (If more theaters are interested in coming on board, Fisk says, “Feel free to reach out!”) Essays and interviews are pitched by writers rather than assigned from the top down.
While there are honorariums for writers and editors, Screen Slate — on both coasts — is ultimately a labor of love. “I hate to be cheesy,” Dieringer says, “but it is more than just a calendar. It’s about creating that sense of community and enthusiasm.”
