Public Comment

Dear Mr. Coppola,

Reading about Megalopolis moves me to write you, out of deep anxiety for the future of our movie theaters and the ability to see movies communally on a big screen.

Berkeley apparently will lose the great ten-screen Shattuck Cinemas after the city showed no interest in saving the other Landmark-leased California Theatre earlier this year when the heirs of the owner rejected Landmark’s lease renewal offer. As you may know, the Shattuck Cinemas’ ten screens allowed for screenings of independent films and foreign films along with big budget films. From 2015 to 2020, a group of us who love film succeeded in delaying the previous developer who proposed to demolish them. The new developer proposes 8 instead of 18 stories but he too plans the demolition of the theater, as he told me himself. He dismissed movie theaters as now obsolete. But the city could require him to preserve the theater.

The capacity of Netflix et al to make 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 such significant foreign films as 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 was 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. The speculative development projects do not serve Berkeley’s urgent need for median- and low-income housing and are erasing our once-rich cultural diversity.  

The renewed threat to the Shattuck Cinemas results from the sale of that property to a Chicago developer, fronted by Bill Schrader of the Austin Group. The property is part of the landmarked block that contains the 1910 Shattuck Hotel. The ten-screen theater represents the successful repurposing of a former department store; it includes hand-painted murals in the Egyptian- and Moroccan-themed theaters. With different-sized screening rooms, it has brought us a wide 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 John MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s, another film lover, about the possibility of the sort of forum Harper’s occasionally organizes, to discuss the future of movie theaters. Ultimately, the best solution might be that they re-emerge from the pandemic as non-profit businesses. 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?