If you have ever been lucky enough to be in the presence of Gary Meyer—which is likely a run-in with him at a film festival or industry event—you will know that he will enter into a conversation with curiosity, often asking about what you thought of a film or what you are going to see next. Inevitably, he will weave in an anecdote of how he “knew the filmmaker when” or “the time he projected this on film” and follow up with you on a later date with clips, photos or treasures from his personal archives, excitedly sharing moments of film history. Gary has been enchanted with films—finding any way possible to see them, project them, distribute them—since he was a kid. So it is no surprise, though beautifully poetic knowing his close relationship to the man that it is named after, that he is being honored at the 67th San Francisco International Film Festival with the Mel Novikoff Award. Given to an individual or institution whose work has enhanced the film-going public’s appreciation of world cinema, Gary has been deeply connected to film culture of the Bay Area while playing a pivotal role in the distribution and access to independent cinema nationally. Sure, he founded Landmark Cinema—which included programming the UC Theater in Berkeley and Nuart in LA—took over the Balboa Theatre in San Francisco, joined the Telluride Film Festival ultimately becoming the co-director, and much more. But these are just milestones in a life so fascinated by the moving image that at one point in his teens he showed home movies on low flying clouds (people were calling the police reporting aliens in the sky).
Amanda Salazar: Gary, there could be no better recipient of this award! I am so honored to get to speak with you and I would like to begin at your beginning—how did you come to love the moving image?
Gary Meyer: We'll take a step back to when I'm seven years old. I went to the movies with my parents at the Uptown Theater in Napa. My dad wanted me to go to the theater to see Strategic Air Command [1955] and The McConnell Story [1955], because my dad had been a co-pilot in World War II. It was my birthday so I'd been given my first thing of value—a LeMey watch that I had taken to the movies. I did not like the war film, it upset me.
AS: You knew that young?
GM: There was something I didn’t like. So at the intermission I went to the payphone and called home and said, “I'm ready to come home.” My dad said, “There's no way you could've seen two movies. What time is it? Look at your new watch.” And my watch was gone! He said, “Well, you find the watch and watch the second movie and then call me again.” I went in with an usher and a flashlight but we couldn't find the watch. Watched the second movie, it was over, lights came up but we never found the watch. I came home so devastated that I didn't know if I ever wanted to go to the movies again.
AS: Oh no!
GM: Luckily, a few months later we went to see Lady and the Tramp [1955]. My parents told me years later that what I said was, “I watched Saturday morning cartoons on TV. But this is different. And I want to know how they make cartoons!” Typical of my parents, they took me to the library and we found a book on animation. My dad's 8mm movie camera had a single frame stop frame ability. So I started doing stop motion on the front lawn with silly putty and dinosaurs and things like that. And I fell totally in love with movies.
AS: Did you always also have that curiosity of how movies were made while you were watching them?
GM: Absolutely. I think that I was letting movies take me away. But at the same time, I was kind of curious about something about the background of them. By the time I was 11 or 12, I was starting to make live action films with the 8mm camera and I'd see films that were probably not appropriate, ha! At 12 years old, my parents brought us to San Francisco once a month, at least. They would go shopping or go to a museum and I had a route that I was allowed to go on my own and it would start at Union Square. So this particular day, I wanted to see a movie at The Esquire—it was [Ingmar Bergman's] The Magician [1958]. I don't know what it is, but I'm a magician, I want to go see The Magician! Wild Strawberries [1957] is playing with it—let's go see that! Oh, my poor sisters. [The films] were visually really interesting but I had no idea what was going on. Of course, when I got home I went to the library, I found a magazine review of the films. I think that was my first foreign language film experience.
AS: I think that's what's so wonderful about our early viewing experiences—they aren’t often appropriate…
GM: They were pretty heavy. I didn't know they were heavy!
AS: This clearly shows your voracious appetite for the moving image and wanting to be in that space. I would love to hear where exhibition started for you, when you wanted to show films to people?
GM: I just wanted to show movies. I could rent little 8mm Castle Films from the local drugstore; in elementary school, on Fridays, I would often show movies; and then I started buying Blackhawk Films. So I would have Méliès, Laurel and Hardy, Chaplin, and Keaton shorts to show as well. A couple of times in the summer, I started to show them outdoors in our yard. It was through the monster magazine [Famous Monsters of Filmland] that I found out I could rent the great silent classics in 8mm from a place called Cooper's Films in Chicago. So I started doing that on a fairly regular basis.
AS: You’ve come to film through so many avenues—filmmaking, distribution, exhibition—and there's a through line about your joy of going to the movies. So would you mind picking up in your college years and what ultimately became your Landmark Theater days?
GM: I wanted to be a filmmaker. And I got accepted to UCLA and USC, but they both said you can't take any film classes until your junior year. I've been showing and making movies since I was a kid, I ran a theater [The Above-the-Ground Theatre]! My journalism teacher in high school would take some of us to San Francisco State to sit in film history classes, so I'd gotten to know a couple of professors and the head of the department. I called [the department head] and said, “I didn't apply to SF State because I felt confident I'd get into these other schools.” He said, "You can take a history class and a production class every semester from the beginning." So that's why I went to San Francisco State. It turned out that I was the only one in most of those early film classes who'd ever had their hands on a camera. It was that time in 1966, where everybody wanted to be a filmmaker.
AS: That time is still happening, Gary
GM: I know, I know. But it was sort of the beginning! I found a job in the AV center, as a projectionist and I was running film societies on campus. We were college roommates and we’re still best friends. Mike [Thomas] worked at the Presidio Theater, which had been an arthouse that became a porno house and the owners [of that theater] took over the Times Theater in North Beach, which had been a Grindhouse. When they flopped as a pornhouse, Mike went to the owner and said, “Let me try doing something.” So Mike and I, for several years during college, and right after college, ran it as a daily film lovers' Grindhouse. That was fun.
AS: What are some of the things you learned from programming a movie theater?
GM: Well, you learned to negotiate for films. I tried midnight shows out and I learned what didn't work on midnight shows. You learn about things like where do you get your prints? What happens if the print doesn't show up? What happens if the print is in the wrong can? Wrong film? One of my favorite stories is when I worked for United Artists Theater Circuit, which is before we started Landmark, I would book kiddie matinees and midnight shows and at the El Rey Theatre in Chico. I booked Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear [1964] as a kiddie matinee.The projectionist checked it in the cans and it said Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear, and the reel band said Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear, and he put it on and it was Emmanuelle [1974] which was an X rated film! They were both from Columbia and some projectionist thought [it] would be really funny to mix them up.
AS: What? Too funny!
GM: It wasn’t too funny when the parents came streaming out with their kids in tow!
AS: Oh my goodness.
GM: Those things were essential for when we started Landmark, which was all repertory and making sure we got the films in on time and we knew where to get the replacements when the print was in bad condition or it was the wrong film. We used to have a film exchange where this LA company and one up here, would call and say, “Come over on Saturday with the van and $100 bill, we’re junking prints.” We were interested in those films that could become orphans. If the distributors had gone out of business - who knows what would happen to those with prints that could be gone completely. But I'm jumping ahead a little bit…
AS: It’s all connected, don't worry.
GM: I'm gonna pick up a thread from that 16 year-old kid. I started going to the Surf Theater [in San Francisco] and one time the Surf was showing Metropolis [1927] and I had some photographs from Metropolis that I had collected. I went to the manager and I said, “Does the owner ever come to the theater?” He said, “Yeah, he's sitting right there in the cafe.” Way ahead of his time, Mel [Novikoff] had a Cafe adjacent to the lobby. I introduced myself. Mel always acted like he was on too much coffee, he was always so excited about things, and willing to share. And so we sat and talked for who knows how long, and he gave me his phone number and his address. I became a really good friend of Mel’s, [he] was my first real mentor, the guy who was inspiring me to do what I wanted to do.
AS: So now it is after college…
GM: There were no jobs in film production in San Francisco in 1972. My dad said, “Why don't you get a job working for a theater chain and find out how you're going to get screwed when you become a filmmaker.” There were quite a few chains based in San Francisco and the first one I called was the United Artist Theater Circuit. I worked my way up very quickly to become the head field buyer for 125 screens. And the whole time, Mel and I were staying very close. If there was something that I was interested in playing at the Vogue, which was the only arthouse that [UATC] had in San Francisco, I would call Mel and if he wasn't interested, or he was overbooked, then I could go for it. Then every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon we would watch films, independent films, mostly genre films, or action films. And I learned about what's involved in making an independent film. It became clear to me that I did not have the patience and the perseverance to find a project, develop it, raise the money, put the team together, make the movie, edit the movie, and hope you get a distribution deal. But I am in this unique position to give screentime to the people who did get that far.
AS: So where does your own theater come into this?
GM: I go to lunch with Steve Gilula—this guy who just graduated from Stanford—and we hit it off immediately. He didn’t know anything about the film business, just that he wanted to be in it—and I offered him a job. Every day on the streetcar going to work, we start talking about our dreams and the dream was to have a theater to have a different double feature every day. That ultimately became Landmark. We opened [our first theater], the UC Theater, on April Fool's Day 1976.
AS: You had written this beautiful piece for Arthouse Theater Day, saying “in the 1970s, an arthouse movement grew, Mel Novikoff uncovered the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, restoring the movie palace in 1976. He redefined what arthouses could be.” What could it be at that time? And how do you feel that it is 50 years later?
GM: We just thought we were going to do this thing in Berkeley and Mel was in San Francisco. I was with Mel the day he went into the Castro Theatre. He had this thought: maybe this rundown, third-run movie theater, maybe there was something there. We go to the theater, turn on the janitor's lights and it shined on that dome; we saw the murals, which were all covered with dirt and tobacco stains. I can still see Mel going, “We can do this!” He just put showmanship and smart-booking and a beautiful calendar together and understood the community. With Mel and many other independent exhibitors around the country, we were trying things. Our program calendars were sort of like rock concerts, where you have only one or two chances to see it. Landmark was not intended to be a national chain. In fact, we were called Repertory Theaters, Inc. originally. When we started doing first-run we went to [the name] Landmark.
AS: Were you always thinking just regionally, that it would just have been in the Bay Area?
GM: When we started out we were in the Bay Area and Southern California. We went out of state because Kim, the third partner, was from Milwaukee. He went back for the holidays in Milwaukee [and] said, “We need to take over the Oriental theater.” He would not stop bugging us. Well, if you've ever seen pictures of the Oriental theater, it's amazing. It's just stunning and sort of irresistible. We went back to make a deal, but they said there's one stipulation that we have to put in the contract: that this particular rock group cannot ever play in the theater. So we sign the contract and we go walking back to the car and Kim starts laughing hysterically. “What are you laughing about?” He said, “I’m that rock group.”
AS: That is incredible.
GM: So we have this theater in Milwaukee and I said, “We need other theaters in the Midwest,” so we looked at Madison and found a theater there, and then Chicago and Minneapolis. Eventually Cincinnati, Cleveland and a bunch of places. Though not every theater was successful. We had some that [closed] relatively quickly before we had too many losses but mostly we did really well with them.
AS: This opening and closing of theaters all feels very cyclical and it is giving me a lot of hope. You're such an advocate for the moviegoing experience on every level, so how do you feel about arthouses today?
GM: Our theory was that we wanted people to say, “What's playing at Landmark?” before they looked to see what was playing anywhere else. So COVID comes along and it's at a time when young people are going to see films in a theater, just specific films that they have a strong interest in, not like, “Let's go to the movies or this movie theater.” But what we are seeing in New York, Los Angeles…here in San Francisco and increasingly around the country—there's hope because independent exhibitors are being very creative.
AS: I'm curious about your connection to the audience during this time when you were exhibiting
GM: I used to spend a lot of time in the theaters and probably way too much time talking to the managers around the country. I’d call on opening night to find out what the reaction of the audience was, who was coming, what the age breakdown was, why they were coming, what they were talking about in the lobby afterwards. We'd see a film at a film festival and go up to the filmmakers afterward, and say we loved the movie and want to play it. This might help them get a distributor.
I’ll always remember the first time that sex, lies & videotape [1989] showed at Sundance. Afterwards, Soderbergh said the producers of the film wanted to change the name. They didn't want the word “video” in there because they thought that was limiting, that people would think it was a video-movie, not a theatrical movie. I raised my hand and said, “I love the movie. And if the title stays the same, Landmark makes a commitment right now to play it in our entire circuit.” It kept the name.
AS: You are incredibly important to not only Bay Area film history, but how films were distributed and how audiences had access to them.
GM: I obviously felt like I was an important part of this, but it's all the people who worked with us. It's all those programmers, the marketing people, the theater managers, art department. Everybody was passionately in love with movies and they were all contributing ideas.
AS: What is so special about Bay Area audiences and the Bay Area film scene that has kept you inspired?
GM: There's something that draws [filmmakers] to as far west as you can go, and still be on this continent. There's a history of creativity in San Francisco.
AS: What does it mean for you to receive the Mel Novikoff Award?
GM: It's wonderful to be recognized for what I did in the guidance of people like Mel and so many other distributors, exhibitors, writers, press and audiences. Audiences are a huge part of the success. So in a way, I'm receiving this on behalf of all these different constituencies.
AS: I love how humble you are about this. Could you talk about your choice of films that will screen as a part of the program at SFFILM?
GM: Macario [1960] has been very hard to see. I think the Pacific Film Archive showed it five or six years ago as a part of a Mexican film series. So when I went to Morelia in October, they showed a restoration of Macario and It was everything that I could have hoped that it would be and more. The film had its American premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 1960. So there's a nice little tie in there. And then, I really liked playing shorts…
AS: That’s the programmer in you, Gary…
GM: Jessica Yu premiered her first film, Sour Death Balls [1993], at the San Francisco International Film Festival, where I saw it. And I went up to her afterwards and said, “We would like to blow this up to 35mm and make prints and pay you to show it in our theaters.” And it's just the most delightful five minutes you can imagine. We will actually have a 50-second surprise as well…
AS: There's so much history here! You have countless stories, I don’t know how we can stop talking
GM: Well, I’ve got one more anecdote for you… In the early days of the UC Theater, we were showing Singin’ in the Rain [1952]. It was the first time it rained since we had taken over the theater and there were leaks in the roof. Audience members were fighting to open their umbrellas and watch the movie under the rain. In the rain! One of those great moments where you're thinking this is a disaster and the audience turns it into a triumph.
Macario screens alongside "Sour Death Balls" tomorrow afternoon, Saturday, April 27, at the Premier Theater as part of the San Francisco Film Festival’s Mel Novikoff Award Presentation. Gary Meyer will be in attendance for a post-screening conversation with IndieWire Editor-at-Large Anne Thompson.
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