I received this letter this weekend. I don’t know the cinema, but it looks real nice. I don’t know the letter writer, but I sympathize with his plight. “Public Cinema” sounds like it was a great program and will be a shame to be lost. There are always many sides to any story, but this does sound like a tragic tale. Here’s Hope hoping for a happy ending.
Dear Mr. Hope,
I am sending this letter to you as the Founding Board Member of the Sixth Street Cinema, a very small art cinema and media arts center in the town of Mariposa, just outside Yosemite National Park. Our cinema has been a beacon for American independent film and world cinema for nearly sixteen years, and has acted as such in the most unlikely of places – a small, mostly low-income, rural community, often a three-hour drive from any similar programming. Since 1996, we have occupied the second floor of an historic Masonic Hall that we converted to screen films, and filled the very important role of being the town’s only cinema. Before 1996, there hadn’t been a cinema in Mariposa since the fifties.
Over the last sixteen years, we developed a wholly unique and replicable model for rural (small) cinema by initiating a presenting program whose mission is to impact every demographic within the community. In essence, we strive to bring the artistic, cultural and educational opportunities of urban centers to the rural community. As the community’s only cinema, and only indoor venue for media programs, we felt an obligation to act as a clearinghouse of sorts for the arts, and we used the theater for that purpose. We call it “Public Cinema.”
Public Cinema consists of a wide array of media programs, including world cinema, documentaries, independent and studio films, live performing arts from around the world, author events, idea festivals and humanities forums. It includes an educational component for overburdened local schools that film study, film as adjunct, and live peer-to-peer videoconferencing by local students with students from around the world. To reduce barriers that might prevent community members from attending, our cost of admission is low, and many of our programs are free of charge. There is also a standing policy that anyone who cannot afford admission to any event would not be turned away. This too was at the heart of Public Cinema.
But first and foremost, Public Cinema was about the art of film, and for sixteen years we brought in films from every corner of the globe, and introduced our community to the best our industry had to offer, from Ozu to Won Kar-wai, Tarkovsky to Tykwer, Bresson to Haneke, Dreyer to Von Trier, the films of Dogma 95, the Mexican and Korean new wave, the New Iranian Cinema, to the ever-changing landscape of American Independent film before and since Soderbergh’s arrival. We even played host to a three-day film festival of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Decalogue” series, which included a panel discussion of film and religion scholars, and drew many filmgoers from the Bay Area. And as often as we could, we would invite Bay Area filmmakers to present their films and talk about their craft to full houses at the cinema. We have played host to several Bay Area filmmakers such as Adrian Bellic, Henry Rosenthal, and Debra Garcia, as well as other filmmakers from around the country.
By 2006, we had grown from a full volunteer organization with no budget, to a yearly budget of $150,000, on the strength of funding from the California Arts Council, the James Irvine Foundation, and the NEA. In that same year, the building in which we had resided in since our inception was put up for sale. Rather than face an uncertain future, or no future at all under new ownership, we decided to purchase the building with the intent to lease out the first floor, which would cover our mortgage and provide long-term stability for our nonprofit. Decades of deferred maintenance had taken its toll on the building, and so a renovation was needed in order to lease out the downstairs. Since the organization was small, and thus lacked the resources for a long-term capital project, we set a goal to be in the construction phase for no longer than two years.
In July 2007, with $20,000 already donated for the project from the community, we approached our County Supervisors for a one-time grant of $25,000, so that we could show potential funders a sincere interest from the community for the project, and thus leverage these funds for a much larger grant. The Supervisors voted 3-2 to approve the creation of a contract with our nonprofit for the purpose of granting the organization $25,000. This contract would then require 4 votes for approval, which we had, one week prior to the vote.
And thus began what would come to be known as “the cursed renovation project from hell,” and not for typical reasons like under-budgeting, or over-building, bad planning, or because we were victims of a bad economy. This curse, or as we like to call it, lots of really, really bad and unethical behavior, brought the following events our way over the course of four years (from 2007 through 2011), as we attempted to renovate our building, lease the downstairs, and move on with the job of screening cinema:
In 2007
An illegal shutdown of our building, a cessation of screenings, and a work order requiring upgrades and repairs estimated at $200,000 by the County Building Department just days before the scheduled vote for $25,000, all under the premise that the building was not safe. The shutdown was triggered by a letter to the Building Department Director from the lone dissenting vote on the Board of Supervisors, questioning the safety of the building (though ignoring the fact that the building was inspected and cleared just weeks earlier by a licensed structural engineer, the Deputy State Fire Marshal, and a licensed and well respected local contractor). It is our opinion that this was done to dissuade the County from providing the $25,000 grant for the project. The decision to close the building was reversed two months later for lack of evidence, and the cinema was allowed to resume operation without any requirement to make any of the changes specified by the Building Department (we were protected by the State Historic Building Code), but only after a clear blow to the reputation of the nonprofit and the integrity of the project.
A concurrent series of defamatory articles in the community’s only newspaper about the closing of our building that, in our opinion, was an effort by the publisher to support the supervisor, as it had a history of doing, and to impact local politics. This series culminated with the final article declaring that our organization had “made behind the scene deals” to gain an exception to established building codes and regulations. Op-eds in this same vein continued well into the following year, with comments echoing as much, stating that our organization was exempt from rules and regulations that others must follow. The publisher even attempted an expose´ on our organization and the project, demanding access to all of our project information and financial records, citing the Freedom of Information Act as his rationale´. Apparently, he did not know, or thought that we did not know, that the FIA did not include nonprofits. These articles and op-eds remained on the paper’s website, easily searchable by potential funders of our nonprofit for nearly two years.
A $1.6 million dollar grant awarded and then arbitrarily rescinded by the State Endowment funding it because of a defective application that was provided by the Endowment.
In 2008
After nearly nine months of futile effort on our part to get our state assemblyman and senator to help, we filed a lawsuit with the help of the San Francisco-based California Lawyers for the Arts, who found an incredibly gracious Bay Area attorney to represent us pro-bono.
As another round of funding from the State Endowment became available. We turned in the very same application from the previous round of funding in 2007 that scored in the 82nd percentile. This time it barely scored in the top 50th percentile.
The State’s attorney requested a settlement after the first day of depositions, in which our attorney deposed the Endowment’s Executive Director. Soon after, the Endowment’s Board Chair and its Executive Director stepped down, the latter amid accusations by staff of changing scores and shredding documents. A month later, our project was awarded $1.3 million instead of the original $1.6 million request and the newly revised $1.9 million budget. That $300,000 reduction from the original request would prove very problematic for the project. All discussions by the Endowment’s Board about our lawsuit have been kept from the public record. The State Department of Finance (DOF) performed an audit of the Endowment, and 40 of its grantees, including our organization. We passed the audit without incident, but the audit uncovered evidence that the Endowment approved projects with insufficient application scores, and one in which no evidence of scoring had occurred. The DOF had no knowledge of our 2008 lawsuit during their 2011 audit of the Endowment.
In 2009
An eight-month shutdown of the project due to a state budget freeze.
We submitted a $500,000 grant application to the same Endowment the following year. It was established that only the top twenty projects would be funded. The grant guidelines stated that unfinished projects started with Endowment funds, of which we were one of just a handful, would be of special interest to the board as they considered projects for funding . Even with that, we were scored 35th out of 39. This grant would have finished our project, including the first floor, making it ready to lease.
2010
A state grant of $400,000 was awarded to the organization’s project, only to be rescinded three months after we signed a contract, six months after it was awarded, and over a year after the grant application was turned in, because the agency “made a mistake” during the application process and thus realized they should not have awarded it to us in the first place. This grant would have finished half of the first floor and made it ready to lease.
The accumulative affect of these events, the resources required to chase them, and the delays that they caused, forced us to close our doors in March of this year. The renovation is approximately 70 percent complete, with over $1.4 million dollars spent so far, including a new foundation, a completely re-engineered structural system for both stories, re-engineered walls, new historically accurate redwood siding , new historically accurate windows, and re-purposed cotton insulation. The building’s exterior has been restored to its original 1917 condition, and includes some original features that were lost over the years. The first floor and proper egress to the first floor remain unfinished. The Cinema on the second floor is fully operational.
Due to the inability to finish the first floor, the building has fallen into foreclosure, and is due to be sold on the courthouse steps on Monday, June 17. The lender has allowed for a window of opportunity to repurchase the building for approximately $200,000 (nearly half of its purchase price before the $1.4 million in renovation) so that the cinema can reopen while the nonprofit continues to seek funding to finish the building. However, these are not funds that the nonprofit can raise in its current condition, and this window closes on June 12.
The purpose of this letter is a bit desperate in nature, as it comes to you in the eleventh hour. But the 6th Street Cinema was born on a whim, and so maybe it’s possible it can be saved on a whim. The cinema has long been an integral part of the community, and so many people have donated tens of thousands of hours over these last sixteen years to make it a truly unique bastion for the film arts, and so much more. It would be a shame to see all that effort fade to black.
And so my question is simple — are there any private resources in the Bay Area, within or outside the film industry, whom you know that might have an interest in helping us save the building, and thus, the cinema? If this is a discussion you are willing to have, please contact me by return email, or by the phone number below. Either way, thank you for at least taking the time to read this. We have admired the efforts of your organization over the years, and thus we have learned much from afar.
Sincerely,
Anthony Radanovich
Founding Board Member
Rural Media Arts and Education Project
Sixth Street Cinema
Note: This letter is reprinted with the permission of the author, Anthony Radanovich.
