Guerrilla Cinema on the Run!

By RICHARD FREEDMAN
Times-Herald staff writer
 

It was late. Very, very late. And Marc Dolezal couldn’t sleep. Sure, he wanted to. But when you lived in North Beach during the 1970s, only the deaf eschewed ear plugs.

Music clubs, Chinese restaurants, strip joints and coffee houses clamored until 4 a.m. Salsa music blasted from a Latino bakery until the morning.   “All this noise made it impossible to sleep,” Dolezal remembered. So a baggy-eyed Keystone Korner jazz club manager glazed at the television, glued to film noir movies on so late “that only the dregs of society, who were hopeless cases anyway, would be exposed to such disturbing imagery.”  Dolezal became enamored with the wee-hour movies. “These films must have been cheap to air and the networks took advantage of that,” Dolezal said. Fast forward to 1977. Dolezal got his hands on a early proto-type RCA video recorder.  He taped all the late-night nuggets and began playing them for close friends and neighbors who were prone to normal sleep patterns. It continued until the early 1980s, fell dormant, and returned in 1996 when Dolezal started The Danger and Despair Knitting Circle.
 

“Using the recordings that we had individually collected since the end of the 1970s, we organized a Film Noir Tape Library and began trading with fans in the Bay Area and then all over the country.”  It caught on.
 

“Soon, requests from exotic locations starting coming in,” Dolezal said. “Interest in Film Noir exploded.”  Iceland. Pakistan. Croatia. They all sought a piece of the black and white action. “Everyone wanted to buy VHS copies of the rare stuff that they couldn’t find anywhere else,” Dolezal continued to show the classic black and white movies, now in a rare 16mm film format in San Francisco, typically in empty office spaces “thanks to a couple of hip and kind-hearted commercial landlords.”  “I think we are most at home in these kinds of temporarily abandoned, waiting for a purpose environs,” Dolezal said. “Much like the anti-heroes depicted in these plot-heavy classics, lonely and empty.”  Marc Dolezal has since branched out and taken his 16mm film noir road show to other towns, states and overseas offering the classics free of charge to the participants  “You’ll get an entertaining, yet erudite introduction to the film with some insider gossip on the real lives of the actors,” Dolezal said. “In this setting, you’ll concentrate on the movie rather than dealing with the distractions of home.”

Because Dolezal doesn’t charge, “we’re able to pass the savings down to the participants,” Any incidental cost has been covered by the Danger & Despair Knitting Circle Film Club.  The Film Noir series offers more than a typical theater or home-delivery can,  “We are trying to make this both educational and fun,”

The film noir’s popularity isn’t surprising, Dolezal said. “These stores were realistic and they could easily happen to you and me at any time,” he said. “A classic plot of film noir is the wrongly accused protagonist. We have all, most likely, been in a similar head space at some point in our lives.”

The film noir opened up the idea of “subjective existence on a modern level and made that awareness acceptable because it was seen as entertainment,” Dolezal said. “Following the Great Depression, the Stock Market Crash and Word War I, the average citizen was left feeling very insecure and powerless in a system that wasn’t the pillar of strength that it was made out to be.”

Besides, there’s something romantic about a 16mm projector, Dolezal noted. “Part of the attraction is how many folks love to hear the film projectors working away and watch the concentration of high intensity light radiate across the room, It’s a hip low-tech throwback to an era when many went to a small neighborhood theater and watched two or three black and white films on any given afternoon. When you watch these old prints with an occasional scratch line or little black flicks on the screen, you get the sense that you’re watching something very rare. And you are.”

The difference between the vintage motion pictures and contemporary movies is obvious, Dolezal said.  A good story and glamour vs. dialogue and special effects. “When the classic film noir was being made, studios and producers hired one and sometimes two writers to create the movie,”  “Most came from the hard-boiled school and borrowed elements from the great mystery and crime authors like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. They wrote adult stories for adults.”

Today’s studios hire writers and then present the work to a committee of non-writers and film executives “who then chop the story to fit the age group demographics that will render the most profit,” Dolezal said. “Since the age group that wins on box office receipts hands down is the 8 to 21 group, most commercial Hollywood films are created for kids and young people.”  Today’s movies also are devoid of glamour and fashion, Dolezal said, from Cary Grant in his monochrome suits to “those fabulous feathered ladies’ hats, glamour made everything seem larger than life.”  And today?  “We get Ben Affleck with his baseball hat turned around backwards,” Dolezal shrugged.