The Roxie Cinema

3117 16th Street at Valencia

The director of The Exorcist was at the Roxie last weekend. William Friedkin flew in from LA to kick off a weeklong celebration of his work, speaking Friday and Saturday nights to a young Mission crowd, some decked out in death wear for the event. But I have never understood Goth fashion and may have mistaken one woman's ceiling for what would never leave my floor. Friedkin regaled the long-board-and-tempeh crowd with tales of filming The Exorcist, anecdotes surely repeated many times during the past 25 years, but no less hilarious for the director's irreverent sense of what it takes to make a good picture. And as for his famed brutality with the actors: He hit only one of them once, and the voice of the demon requested she be tied to a chair.

My meeting with Friedkin, though brief, was demonstrative of every meeting I have ever had with any person of any fame. We said hello and shook hands, at which time I promptly dropped my note cards. And not into a neat retrievable pile, but into a sort of fan. I stooped to collect them, and when I straightened again the director had moved on to the door. It is the presence of such masterful side-steppers of social bullshit who make the Roxie Cinema, at 16th and Valencia in the Mission, one of the last vestiges of anti-plastica. It is also one of the last independent theaters in San Francisco, the oldest operating of them all, and absolutely deserving of your patronage.

The Exorcist was a success, but as programmer Elliot Lavine will tell you, times are always "pretty lean" at the Roxie. Although he and most of the employees are filmmakers, film students or film buffs, attracting a like-minded clientele is a show-by-show gamble. Lavine describes the collegiate- to post-college-age crowd as "street-active" and receptive to the unusual, but some of his choices as a filmmaker have not been successful at pulling in a more universal range of viewers. Still Breathing with Brendan Fraser, for instance, bombed ("But it's a great film!" Lavine said). On the other hand, Don't Look Back, the 1967 documentary about Bob Dylan, and Kurt and Courtney, the film Courtney Love didn't want you to see, were huge hits. His customers are drawn from all sides of the city by a combination of new releases, cult classics and documentaries, and Lavine travels to festivals as far-ranging as Cannes and Sundance as well as the Castro's Berlin for the widest selection of what he and his co-workers consider good filmmaking.

Built in 1912, the Roxie beats the Clay by a year as the oldest operating theater in San Francisco. In turns a venue for foreign films, porn, even burlesque in the late 1940s, the Roxie has been known as what Lavine called "this version" since 1976. The owner at that time began squeezing out porn to bring a wider range of films to the neighborhood house. The Roxie's first big hit was in the late 1980s with Vincent; this biographical narrative of the life of Vincent Van Gogh brought in enough revenue to build up the 275-seat house. Now plans are underway to expand again. The Roxie office, two doors down from the vertical neon marquee on 16th Street with its front windows papered with movie posters, will become a second theater, seating 49 people.

The expansion comes none too soon. Lavine cited the new multi-screen AMC theater on Van Ness as well as Landmark Corporation, a national chain that owns a number of theaters in San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley, as fierce competition for customers. But Roxie offers a unique product and attracts its crowd with some old-school advertising - free full-color foldout schedules in coffeehouses and other small stores across the city. "I would like to think I'm on every refrigerator in town," he deadpanned. "I told my mother that when I left home. She said, 'Make me proud, son.'"

The need for community support is no joke, however. As Friedkin stressed in his discussion last weekend, independently owned theaters are a dying breed. Only the continued patronage of film lovers keeps such venues afloat among the deluge of Hollywood-style pictures and cinemas. The Roxie's longevity is a testament to the character of this perennially offbeat city. Where else can you go to witness a completely tanked man yell his own version of the script of Purple Rain at Prince from the back row in the same week that you can embarrass yourself in front of one of Hollywood's most celebrated directors of cult films? Pick up a schedule at any number of coffee houses, record stores, book stores and other independently owned establishments in the city to see what lies in store in the coming months.

Jenny Pritchett

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