WONDER WOMAN

Here's lookin' at you, Nancy Raney!

She never actually made a film, but Nancy Raney was the undisputed godmother of the Santa Cruz movie community. When she took her final bow last week, surrounded by her loved ones, it was truly the end of an era

As co-owner of The Nickelodeon with her husband, Bill Raney, who opened it in 1969, Nancy was the the theater's one-woman publicity department.

As soon as a movie was booked, Nancy was on the phone to get the word out, not only to us ink-stained wretches of the press, but to anyone else in town she could think of who might be remotely interested in the film, or its subject — schools, service groups, foreign language societies, politicians, surfers, artists, musicians, you name it.

She was also a tireless cheerleader for arts and culture in Santa Cruz. She attended, promoted, or otherwise supported such local institutions as Shakespeare Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz Symphony, Pacific Rim Film Festival, and Santa Cruz Public Libraries, among others. An avid reader, she loved to organize cross-promotions with Bookshop Santa Cruz, or Capitola Book Cafe, any time a movie came out with a literary pedigree.

Nancy and Bill: too much fun.

But perhaps Nancy's most indelible influence on our arts scene—besides her buoyant personality—were the advance press screenings she organized at the Nick, so local scribes could get our reviews in print the same week a movie opened. I was only a lowly stringer at Good Times in 1976, when Nancy first invited me to a screening.

She greeted us in the lobby and ushered us into the auditorium, exuding her usual warmth and good humor. She had my life story out of me in no time (granted, at age 22, my story was pretty short). It's not that she pried, exactly, but she was always so interested in other people, and we found her interest irresistible.

As I inherited the job of full-time film critic, Nick screenings became a weekly event in my life. At first, I remember being worried about a potential conflict of interest: heaven forbid I should let myself get too chummy with the proprietors of a local movie house. Hah! I found I couldn't maintain a sense of aloof, professional decorum for very long, with Nancy. She was way too much fun!

It was never held against me when I wrote a bad review—and I wrote plenty. Nobody laughed about the stinkers more uproariously than Nancy. When I once revealed to her that I kept a mini-bag of M&Ms in my purse to keep me awake if a movie dragged, she gave me a family-sized jar of M&Ms for Christmas.

We both loved British history, Charles Dickens, and period books and movies of every stripe. And Nancy was fascinated by nuns, as only a Midwestern girl with a good Nordic Protestant upbringing can be. (And the naughtier the nuns, the better!) She had migrated out west in the first place to attend Stanford, which she also loved, and she kept in touch with a close-knit sisterhood of fellow Stanfordians for the rest of her life.

Oscar party, 1988: Buz Bezore, Nancy, me, and Art Boy

 When I married Art Boy (yes, Nancy was one of the few people in town I knew even longer than I've known him), he and I started hanging out with Nancy and Bill regularly at the Raney's mountaintop retreat above Happy Valley, enjoying Nancy's great dinners, telling stories, and always laughing like crazy. Our friendship continued on after they sold the Nick to Jim Schwenterley.

When we started hosting Oscar Night parties for local film folk, Nancy and Bill were at the top of the A-list. (She, always in a fetching negligee, since our guests were given the option of dressing up or wearing jammies.) And pretty soon, Nancy and I were taking field trips together that had nothing to do with movies — the Stanford Shopping Center; the Barbie Musum in Palo Alto (she knew about my weird fetish for dressing up my vintage childhood Barbies as the Best Actress nominees for those Oscar parties).

A trip we once took to the city (the reason for which escapes me, now), turned into Nancy's Swanky Public Restroom Tour of San Francisco. Upscale department stores, uber-plush restaurants and hotels, she knew 'em all! Then there was the time that Nancy, the instigator, in cahoots with Stacey Vreeken, one of my favorite ex-Good Times editors, sprung a surprise 50th birthday party on me, featuring just about everybody I knew in town.

Birthday Girl + instigators: Nancy and Stacey Vreeken.

When I took my first halting steps into fiction-writing, Nancy was there to cheer me on. She read all my unpublished novels in manuscript form (talk about a trouper!), and when I finally got one into print, she made sure her book club read it.

Nancy was no mean hand at writing, herself. A veteran traveler, she and Bill favored remote destinations—Yellowknife, in Canada's Northwest Territories; Papua, New Guinea; African safaris—and she wrote some fine travel pieces for the alternate alt-weekly. (In a photo in the Raneys' hallway from one of her last trips, Nancy is beaming down from the back of a camel.)

To my undying admiration, she once journeyed along the Trans-Siberian Railway (by herself!) To St. Petersberg to visit the Hermitage. For years, I was helping her edit her memoir of this astonishing event, but her life was always so full, I don't know if she ever had time to finish it.

It's hard to imagine Santa Cruz without Nancy Raney. I loved her pretty much from the minute I met her in the lobby of the Nick, and that never changed. We were as close as family—closer than most—but, now, it helps to imagine her perched on that camel, off on her next adventure.

SCENES FROM A MOVIE(HOUSE)

Long before I ever became an official movie critic, I fell in love with the Nickelodeon.

Back in my student days up at UCSC, I saw most of my movies on campus, either at student-generated film series (Film Noir! Swashbucklers!), or at any one of the six individual college dining halls where double-or triple-bills seemed to be playing every night. But when my best friend Jan moved to town in 1974, and we rented our first little downtown apartment in Beach Flats, I had to find some other way to feed my insatiable movie habit.

That way was the Nick.

Original owners Bill Raney and JoAnne Walker Raney had operated an art house movie theatre in San Francisco before they migrated down to open the Nick in 1969. The University was just getting started, so UCSC and the Nick sort of came of age together. The United Artists theatre chain owned basically all the other movie houses in town, showing a steady diet of Hollywood fare, but Bill had other ideas.

The original theatre had only one screen (what's now known as Nick I). An old-fashioned nickelodeon machine sat roped off in a place of honor in the lobby. The snack counter was dominated by its vintage popcorn popper, and contained such marvels as a bag of Swedish mints (round chocolate mint balls coated in pastel candy), which quickly became my drug of choice. Price was, I believe, 45 cents.

As if the regular fare of new foreign-language films by Bergman, Wertmuller, Fellini, and Truffaut (always subtitled, never dubbed), and non-mainstream American independents were not blissful enough, there were afternoon programs like a ten-week series of classic French New Wave. Jan and I went to all of them. People ask me where I acquired my "background in film." I say: at the Nickelodeon.

In 1975, I started reviewing movies professionally (ie: in some place other than my journal) for Good Times. Okay, it was awhile before I actually got paid for it, but I knew I had arrived as a real critic the day that Nancy Raney, Bill's second wife, invited me to my first press screening at the Nick.

It was 1976, and the movie was Francois Truffaut's L'Histoire de Adele H (The Story of Adele H), starring the beauteous Isabelle Adjani. I took along my posse—Jan and my brother, Steve—and we got to watch an entire movie with only a couple more people in the audience. (I had no idea who they were at the time, and I was too shy to ask, but it was probably Dale Pollock from the Sentinel, and whoever was reviewing movies for City on the Hill that week.)

What an illicit thrill! A private screening in the middle of the day for a movie that wouldn't be open for the public for another week—it was surreal! Little did I know that would be my new reality for the next 38 years.

Nancy was the consummate hostess. When the Nick screened Almodovar's Women On the Verge (Of a Nervous Breakdown), where gazpacho figures prominently in the plot, Nancy served everybody cups of gazpacho in the lobby.

 When Bill and Nancy bought the three-year-old Sash Mill Cinema in 1978 from its owner, Rene Fuentes-Chao, Nancy was able to use the adjoining Sash Mill Cafe for "dos," as she called them, wine-and-munchies receptions for the press to meet visiting filmmakers. (For Les Blank's doc, Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers, she even served up garlic popcorn.)

But she really outdid herself in 1987, promoting the Danish film, Babette's Feast, in which a Frenchwoman prepares and extravagant meal for the dour inhabitants of a 19th Century Danish village. Yup—you guessed it! In cahoots with Casablanca Restaurant, Nancy had Babette's entire feast replicated for about a dozen members of the local film-reviewing press, whose ranks had swollen over the years. (And you can see why!)

The point of all this was to get people talking about the movies and the little-art-house-that-could, that kept bringing the best of world cinema to our little burgh. And, oh, how it worked! Bill and Nancy opened a second screen at the Nick in 1976, and added two more in 1981.

While the Nick spread the gospel of indie and art films to the public at large, the Nick screenings pretty much begat local movie culture. I met so many folks (and made so many friends) in the Nick lobby at screenings, I probably can't remember them all. Morton Marcus came to Nick screenings regularly; he was so famous, I was afraid to talk to him for years!

I'd known Buz Bezore up at UCSC, but it was at Nick screenings that I got to know the other alt-journalists—Christina Waters, Michael S. Gant, Tom Maderos, Geoffrey Dunn —who would be staffing Buz's string of alternative weeklies for years to come.

Vintage me, vintage Nick lobby, ca 2004. My home away from home.

Bruce Bratton was writing his column for Good Times when I started at the paper, and was one of the most loyal screening attendees. UCSC film prof Vivian Sobchak was a regular, and, occasionally, her colleague Eli Hollander. I got to know all the various Sentinel film critics over the years—Dale Pollock, Rick Chatenever, Catherine Graham. And while I can't recall the movie being screened, I vividly remember the day I met the "new kid" at the Sentinel in the Sash Mill Cafe, at one of Nancy's dos—Wallace Baine. He was there with his wife, Tina, and he had their infant daughter in a baby carrier over one arm.

Early in my tenure at GT, I went to a screening of one of Bill Raney's favorite movies, the obscure, utterly impenetrable 1965 Polish epic, The Sargossa Manuscript. (He was bringing it back as a classic revival.) This time, there was only one other person in the theatre, and as he and I staggered back out at last into the light of day, laughing and utterly flummoxed, we bonded over the fact that neither one of us had a clue what the movie was about. This was the first time I met Jim Schwenterley, who was then writing for the Cabrillo Log.

Soon, Jim was working for Rene Fuentes-Chao, programming the eclectic repertory double-bills at the Sash Mill. When Bill bought the Sash Mill in 1978, Jim became part of the Nickelodeon family. When Bill and Nancy were ready to retire in 1992, they sold the business to Jim. Who else loved movies as much as the Raneys, or was better suited to maintaining the Nickelodeon legacy?

Jim and his then-partner, Chuck Vowiler, were responsible for bringing the dilapidated Del Mar under the Nickelodeon umbrella, and restoring it to its Art Deco glory. Next came stewardship of Aptos Cinema—to the delight of Aptonians starved for Nickelodeon-style film content down in South County. More recently, Jim and partner Paul Gotlober undertook the massive project of switching the theatres over from film to digital.

Now, after 23 years of savvy, challenging, and entertaining film programming, Jim and Paul are ready to step down. The Nick has been sold to Landmark Theaters; yes, it's a theatre chain out of Los Angeles, but its theatres specialize in art-house and independent films.

The current plucky staff of Nick, Del Mar and Aptos employees are being retained to do what they do best: continue bringing the best movies out there to our community. The theaters will be dark on December 17 and 18, then rise, Phoenix-like on Friday, December 18, in time for the holiday movie season.

Here's looking at you, Nick. Let's hope the fabled Nickelodeon legacy continues!

DARK MAGIC

Baby critic in the making: media was always the message

40 years on the movie beat in Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz in 1975 was heaven for a fledgling film buff. The movies were great: Dog Day Afternoon, The Godfather Part II, Nashville. Admission was around $2.50 for a double-bill.

Those were the days! Much has changed in the world since then—especially the movie scene, and the moviegoing experience, here in Santa Cruz.

My affair with both began in the summer of 1974. As a freshly-minted UCSC grad, I packed up my BA, and went to work nights selling tickets and popcorn at the U. A. Cinemas (now the Riverfront). It was the streamlined "flagship" of the United Artist chain of theaters in town (which at that time included the Del Mar, the Rio, 41st Avenue Playhouse, and Aptos), before the corporation lost interest in Santa Cruz and let its theaters crumble into ruin.

Fledgling critic ca. 1976

The flip side of this corporate mentality were independently owned mom-and-pop movie houses. The Nickelodeon, operated by Bill and Nancy Raney (one screen, with a vintage nickelodeon movie machine roped off in the lobby), was a popular venue for foreign films, maverick indies, and festival programming. (Like a brilliant French New Wave retrospective that my roommate, Jan, and I drank in like fine wine every Saturday afternoon for weeks.)

The family-owned Capitola Theater, and Cinema Soquel, showed less-than-brand-new double features. (Although, in a couple of years, Cinema Soquel switched to X-rated films in a desperate, but doomed attempt to stay solvent.) The Skyview Drive-In was still showing movies, but Gary Culver had not yet opened Scotts Valley Cinema, and the Cinema 9 was not yet even a gleam in the developer's eye.

In January, 1975, Rene Fuentes-Chao opened the Sash Mill Cinema, with 25-cent popcorn and double bills like A Streetcar Named Desire with Last Tango In Paris, Sunday Bloody Sunday with Persona, or Chinatown with Touch Of Evil.

It had poor insulation, no ventilation, and a corrugated metal roof that guaranteed patrons would freeze in the winter and roast in the summer; raindrops sounded like Taiko drumming. We loved it. Its program of vintage and recent films changed three times a week, and they published a poster-sized schedule every quarter, which everyone I knew had taped to their refrigerator.
  

Early GT promo (ca 1977) for its new full-time critic

The Sash Mill and the Nick catered to Santa Cruz's new identity as a university town. Programming was inspired and offbeat, prices were relatively low, and the sense of community was enormous—especially among students (and recent students) discovering David Lynch, or RKO musicals, or Japanese samurai movies together.

Jan and I went out to the movies with my brother, Steve, almost every night. And I wrote obsessively about everything I saw in my journal, long before anybody ever paid me to do it.

Enter Good Times, a 12-page entertainment weekly started in April, 1975, by Jay Shore. By then, I was working at Bookshop Santa Cruz, in the textbook room managed by Steve, and my nights were free. When GT film reviewer Christian Kallen advertised for an assistant, I hauled out my old (manual) college typewriter, hammered out a one-page review of some dreadful B-movie we'd recently seen at the drive-in, and mailed it in. Two weeks later, Christian called me up to tell me seven people had responded to his column, but I was the only one who'd actually written something. It must have worked; I became Christian's official stringer

I love to write, and I love movies, but the rest was strictly on-the-job training. When Christian left town, about a year later, I inherited the job.

In the lobby of the "old" Nick, ca 2004

One of the greatest perks of that job was the fabled Nickelodeon press screening. In big cities, films are screened early for the press, so writers can meet their deadlines and get a review out on opening day. The Raneys embraced this idea for a small, movie-loving town like ours. Their eclectic films needed attention right away; if a movie didn't get reviewed that first week and draw a house, it probably wouldn't last a second week.

For years, Thursday afternoon press screenings at the Nick became the place for the SC film elite to meet. It was like a private club for local scribes, where we all got to hang out together, whatever rivalries might have been going on between our papers.

I had known Buz Bezore slightly at UCSC, but the Nick lobby is where I first met Christina Waters, Tom Maderos, and Michael Gant, all of whom wrote about film sometime or other in the various incarnations of the Santa Cruz Express/Independent/Taste/Metro/Weekly. Bruce Bratton was a regular, as were Rick Chatenever and, later, Wallace Baine, from the Sentinel. I'm pretty sure I met Morton Marcus for the first time at the Nick, and probably Geoff Dunn, when he was making his first local history documentaries. UC professor and film historian Vivian Sobchak attended the screenings for years, and, more recently, Dennis Morton and David Anthony from the KUSP Film Gang.

My first GT review! Monty Python & the Holy Grail. October 23, 1975

In one sense, we knew we were all on the same team—the collective treasure hunt to discover great movies and spread the word. We saw the sublime, the ridiculous, and everything in between at those Nick screenings. And since we rarely agreed on which was which, debates were spirited as we filed back out into the (always unexpected) daylight.

Sadly, those press screenings are no more, much like film itself.     Movies are projected digitally. Vintage film reels are preserved as objets d'art suspended from the ceiling in the lobby of the Nick, relics as quant as that old nickelodeon machine once was. Today, movies assault you in 3D, seats rock or recline, theaters call themselves "cafe lounges." But it was never about all that stuff. All that really matters is the transformative magic of the movies.