Snapp Shots: ‘Berkeley and the Movies’ historical exhibit kicks off Sunday

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive director will speak at the grand opening of the exhibit covering the city's theaters from the early 1900s to the present.

Did you know that three Academy Award-winning “best films” came from Berkeley? Or that the name of Alice Waters’ iconic Chez Panisse restaurant was inspired by a movie date? Or that Pauline Kael, the great film critic for the New Yorker, got her start at a tiny art film house at Haste and Telegraph?

The movie date occurred when Pacific Film Archive program director Tom Luddy took Waters, whom he was courting at the time, to see Maurice Pagnol’s classic 1930s film trilogy “Panisse,” “Fanny” and “Cesar.” She said she was so entranced that she named her first restaurant Chez Panisse, the second restaurant Café Fanny (she named her daughter Fanny, too) and the third restaurant Cesar.

And Kael’s first movie gig was projecting films at the Berkeley Cinema Guild at Haste and Telegraph (and she read her earliest reviews on Berkeley-based KPFA). All this and more is the subject of one of the Berkeley Historical Society’s most eagerly-anticipated exhibits in years, “Berkeley and The Movies.”

The historical society’s exhibit (bit.ly/3Jmd0MJ) will kick off with a grand opening from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. this Sunday in Berkeley’s Veterans Memorial Building at 1931 Center St., featuring a lecture by Susan Oxtoby, the director of film and senior film curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).

And what a history it’s been! In 1901, huge crowds crammed the Berkeley Opera House to see a silent film of President William McKinley giving his last speech shortly before he was assassinated. In 1905, the Berkeley Theater incorporated short movie clips into its programming for continuity between live acts. In 1907, the Alcatraz Theater combined moving pictures with illustrated songs as background for a live singer.

The first houses specializing in movies, the Varsity Theater and the IT Theater, opened in 1907, charging five cents for children (hence their name — nickelodeons). They soon gave way to much larger theaters as movies became longer with multi-reel productions.

They included downtown Berkeley’s 2,000-seat UC Theatre, the 1,500-seat South Berkeley’s Lorin Theater and West Berkeley’s 700-seat Varsity Theatre. By 1914, movie theaters were showing films from the major studios, including the Rex Theater, which was showing flicks from Vitagraph, Lubin, Selig and Biograph.

The talkies came to town on April 15, 1928, when the Campus Theater showed “The Jazz Singer.” By the 1930s, most of Berkeley’s movie houses were owned by the major studios. In 1932 United Artists — founded by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith — built the beautiful 1,800-seat art deco UA Theater on Shattuck Avenue. Fox owned three theaters — the California, the Campus and the UC.

The big theaters era came to an end, though. In the 1950s small “art houses,” specializing in experimental and foreign films, opened, including the Cinema Guild, the Fine Arts and the Telegraph Repertory Theater. Then came the biggest threat of all — television.

The studios responded by making movies bigger, if not better, while the theater owners went in the other direction by carving their huge movie palaces into smaller units and showing many different films simultaneously.

Alas, attendance kept falling as the decades went by until this century, when Netflix began renting DVDs you could watch at home, followed by a new menace — streaming video. The final blow was the COVID-19 pandemic, which made going to the movies a serious health hazard.

Since then the UA, Shattuck Cinemas and the California have closed, though a move has been afoot to save the outside of the UA Theater from demolition (visit savetheuaberkeley.org to find out more).

Other movie houses have been repurposed, like the Oaks Theater on Solano Avenue, which has been converted into a climbing gym. Today, the only places in town where you can see a movie are the Elmwood (rialtocinemas.com/elmwood) and BAMPFA (bampfa.org).

The exhibit will run through Sept. 28, featuring the rise and fall of Berkeley’s movie theaters; the emergence of repertory theaters; the history of BAMPFA, Saul Zaentz and his impact; independent filmmaking in Berkeley; and movies partially filmed in Berkeley, including the 1967 hit “The Graduate,” which famously depicted Dustin Hoffman driving on the upper deck of the Bay Bridge from San Francisco to Berkeley (the only problem being that the upper deck’s traffic goes the other way in real life).

See you at the grand opening. Popcorn will be served.

Martin Snapp can be reached at catman442@comcast.net.