My thoughts and exploits in and of San Francisco’s late, lamented Strand Theatre have been documented here and here, so no need to repeat myself…other than to reiterate the fact that that those who ‘came of age’ with home video could never fully appreciate what it and others of its kind provided for those of us with voracious movie appetites before the VCR, when network broadcasts of cut pan-and-scan prints were riddled with commercials. (Think: AMC after the late 1980s.) For this week’s Double Bill-a-Thon hosted by Gautam at Broken Projector, I submit the following scans of vintage Strand schedules, jam-packed with double (and triple and quadruple) bills. Unemployed and deranged (like so many in the audience), I saw most of these, perched in the balcony’s front row. I’ve arranged the 8 1/2" x 14" sheets as tops and bottoms, fronts and backs, which can be clicked to enlarge. Oct. 14 — Dec. 22, 1978
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Dec. 23, 1978 — Mar. 1, 1979
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Mar. 2 — May 3, 1979
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May 4 — July 5, 1979
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July 6 — Sept. 6, 1979
A recent photo of The Strand, boarded up but guarded by a sentry. (Oh! Those crazy Californians!)
Previous double-bill galleries on Flickhead:
Art of the double bill, part 1
Art of the double bill, part 2
Art of the double bill, part 3
Art of the double bill, part 4
Labels: San Francisco, Strand Theater, Une affaire de Flickhead
6 Comments:
Ray- this is incredible! Look at all those beautiful pictures. Do you actually have a hard copy of them all? It's worth a fortune to a cinephile! Thanks for the contribution.
Thanks! Yes, those are scans of the originals!
Wonderful! I envy you now. Actually I'm pleased you would take such valuable pieces of art and actually put them under a scanner for my blogathon.
You know a couple of decades ago cinema tickets in India were only affordable to the upper class and the less privileged used to just go into a small cottage-like structure which had a display of various film posters. The people use to pay a few coins to go inside and spend a specified amount to time just staring at the many posters on display. That for them was equivalent to going to the cinemas. People used to actually claim they watched a film when they actually went to the poster-cottage.
This was something my father told me (I wasn't born until 1985). Just thought I'd share that with you. Fascinating, eh?
I wish I'd been enough of a movie lover to have known to take advantage of the Strand during the tail end of its repertory heyday. San Francisco cinephiles still talk of it like a lost eden.
A local filmmaker is making a film about the venue, and I'm excited to see how it turns out.
A friend of mine who died this year used to frequent the Strand. I wonder how many of these films he saw.
Thanx for the blast from the past.
Thank you so much for these!!! After growing up outside San Francisco and reading all the movie info in the Chronicle each day one of the great joys of my life once I had a car and pocket money was hitting all the repertory theaters in SF to catch all the films I hadn't been able to see. The Strand looms large in my memory, along with the St Francis, the York, the Parkside, and several others whose names have faded. Seeing these schedules again is amazing.
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