Hell on Frisco Bay (2005-2008 archive)

"We're closed."

That was the exchange I witnessed Friday night on my way home from work as I decided to stop by the UA Galaxy Theatre, which had shown its last films the previous evening. Though most of the street-level glass panels on the building had been covered with butcher paper, one could spy theatre staff dismantling the concession stand and preparing for the inevitable lockdown now that the place is closed to the public. A man in a wool beanie signaled one of these workers, approached the box office as if to buy a ticket, and asked his question. With the ticket window's speaker decommissioned, I had to lip-read the response.

When the four-screen Galaxy was erected in 1984 Herb Caen called it a "glassbackward brickhouse" and others likened it to stacks of legos or telephone booths. Though it's true that the building, which looks like something Q-Bert might want to hop around on top of, represents just the kind of building this city's armchair architects love to hate, I always thought it maintained a certain oddball dignity. Upon opening it was billed as the most expensive movie theatre ever built in Frisco, and I guess it felt state-of-the-art at the time, though it was soon topped by the octoplex Kabuki Theatre less than a mile away. By the time I entered high school the Kabuki was the cool place for my peers to go see a movie and the Galaxy had begun its long but inevitable journey on the path toward its perceived obsolescence made official in 1998 when the AMC 1000 Van Ness unveiled a fourteen-screen addition to a former auto showroom just down the street.

I'm pretty sure the first time I went to the Galaxy it was with my parents and the film was a busy matinee of Stand and Deliver. Since then I've been about a dozen or so times, mostly to unremarkable films: Philadelphia, Star Trek: Generations, a Life Less Ordinary. During the past two or three years, when the theatre's fate seemed sealed but it still remained in operation, it began booking the occasional under-the-radar independent or foreign film that wasn't always graced with a review in the local papers. The place also briefly became a valve for films after they played a single week at the Castro, Lumiere or Opera Plaza. This is how stuff like 15 and Warriors of Heaven and Earth, and even revivals of Kurosawa's the Seven Samurai and Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast ended up at a theatre that also opened the Passion of the Christ as a first-run film. The Galaxy was the only theatre in town to play the 2003 re-release of DePalma's Scarface for a full week. They even tried out a midnight movie series with really strange choices like Hook (I tried to convince a few friends to go but was met with much resistance), and rented screens to film festivals like the American Indian Film Festival and IndieFest. But though I was tempted more often, to be honest I still didn't go much. Without an on-line presence or a marquee near my regular routes, I found I often learned about an intriguing selection only a day or two before its run was up, or even after it was over. A pair of exceptions were a bill of Academy-Award nominated short films (the highlight of which was the amazing Das Rad) and Jafar Panahi's Crimson Gold, each of which I saw with only a couple other patrons in the theatre. The last film I saw in the main house was a House of Flying Daggers matinee during its opening week which was nearly as empty. The last film I saw there, period, was a Frisco-shot film about graffiti writers called Quality of Life. The filmmakers actually four-walled one of the houses for a couple weeks, executed a guerilla marketing campaign, and delivered filmmaker Q&A sessions after evening shows. Though Quality of Life seemed a better fit for the Roxie near where most of it was filmed (and where it later played as well), in retrospect I'm glad my last Galaxy memory is of this flawed but heartfelt film with a knockout ending that seems to elevate all of what had gone before.

The best film I ever saw there was Terence Malick's the Thin Red Line in early 1999. It was actually my second viewing of the film, and I was already thinking of it as the year's, heck maybe the decade's best film. The house was close to capacity and I sat near the back of the theatre this time, probably trying to achieve some more objective distance from the film than I'd had sitting in the first few rows of the Coronet on my first go-round. It didn't work; I was still totally enveloped by the immersive audiovisual experience and found the film's themes at least as compelling as they had been on first pass. When the end credits began to roll, I got out of my seat and stood at the back of the room to watch the audience file out, as I used to like to do. One of the first people to walk by was an elderly gentleman who before exiting turned to me and said something I have no reason to disbelieve, "That's exactly the way it was in the Pacific. I was there."

What's next for this building? Who knows? The Coronet and Alexandria were also shut by Regal/UA many months ago and nothing but vandalism has happened to the buildings in the meantime. And of course I don't feel nearly as sentimental about the Galaxy as I do those theatres and half a dozen others that have shut in recent memory. But then again I'm a diehard movie theatre enthusiast who thinks the city's public bus lines shouldn't accept cinema-bashing advertising slogans ("Sneak in food. You own the theatre.") from Comcast on the fleet, and I'd be thrilled if any of the boarded-up theatres in town could somehow be made viable venues again. The Galaxy included.

I'll end this reflection with the words the beanie-capped man tried to shout through the glass to the worker, or perhaps it was to the glass and the theatre itself, before he dashed off into the night:

"Thank you for everything!"