Please check back
The 95-year-old Sequoia Theatre in downtown Mill Valley reopened Monday, May 20, marking a rare reopening of a movie theater amid a wave of closures.
The cinema, built in 1929, has been in the dark since last October, when the lease entered into through the Cinemark cinema chain expired. Over the past six months, its owner and new operator, the California Film Institute, has improved the projectors and sound. apparatus and renovated the lobby.
Starting May 20, the theater, newly named Sequoia Cinema, will celebrate by screening 4 days of old movies like Vertigo, The Wizard of Oz and Back to the Future, for a $1 ticket.
The California Film Institute also operates the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, as well as the Mill Valley Film Festival.
An increasing number of movie theaters in the Bay Area have closed: the Century Cinema in Corte Madera, the Regency 6 in San Rafael, the Century Regency in San Rafael, the Albany Twin in Albany, the Century Cinema in San Francisco, and the Embarcadero. Cinema in San Francisco and at the West Portal Theatre in San Francisco. Meanwhile, the reopening of the Sequoia is a welcome exception.
“When we do really wonderful, exclusive programming, especially if there’s a local filmmaker or a local network association involved, the others do it,” said Dan Zastrow, general manager of Smith Rafael Film Cinput and Sequoia Cinema. building, someone stops me to ask when we will reopen. People are excited about the return of cinema.
Many of the movie theaters that closed in recent years, Zaltrow noted, were operated through primary chains such as Regency, AMC, Landmark, Century and Cinemark.
“And nothing that’s in the way of the big movie chains, which I love,” Zastrow said, adding that the Sequoia will inevitably screen some mainstream movies seen in the area’s megaplexes. “But it’s a different kind of show animal; it’s the next big movie comes out and it’s underperforming. What we do is more community-oriented and filmmaker-oriented.
Film reservations at the Sequoia will be handled through Jan Klingelhofer, who also books at the Smith Rafael Film Center. On May 31, the Edge of Everything theater premieres, through filmmakers Sophia Sabella and Pablo Feldman. The film was driven through the writer-director in his teenage years, who grew up in Mill Valley.
The Sequoia Theatre could undergo a basic renovation. In 2022, the California Film Institute commissioned the City of Mill Valley to excavate lower ground and build a second site, expanding the number of auditoriums from two to four.
Zastrow may simply comment on the precise main points of the plans, or their location. “We’ll see where we are in a few years,” he said.
“But while we’re raising money and making plans for a renovation, we couldn’t leave construction in the dark. We had to get it up and running, keep it open and shoot the movie,” he said. “It’s just this incredibly beloved networked cinema. “