Victoria Theatre in San Francisco Censors “The Crash Pad” Director
A press release from Blowfish going out today:
Everyone knows that the United States is full of people who do not support gay sexuality. But would you expect to find a place like this in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District?
And, yet, the Victoria Theatre, at 16th and Mission Streets, has refused to show a movie by award-winning Lesbian director Shine Louise Houston, and has refused even to say why.
The Victoria Theatre is a restored stage and movie house that hosts many independent movie festivals, including Frameline, the annual San Francisco Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender film festival. Shine Louise has completed her latest movie, “In Search of the Wild Kingdom,” a light-hearted and sexy look at the San Francisco Lesbian community. Shine Louise is the director of “The Crash Pad,” which was shown at Outfest (the Los Angeles GLBT Film Festival) and Cineffable (the Lesbian film festival in Paris) in 2006. It was an award-winner at the Toronto Feminist Film Festival.
You would think that the Victoria Theatre would be the perfect place to host the gala premiere of her new movie. Christophe Pettus of Blowfish Video, the distribution company, thought so.
Sadly, we were wrong.
On February 6th, Christophe visited Anita Correa, the owner of the Victoria, and described the movie and orally booked a premiere date for March. He was clear that the movie was sexually explicit. Given that the Victoria Theatre has shown movies of a huge range of explicitness (currently, it is showing “Spike and Mike’s Sick & Twisted Festival of Animation”), and, besides Frameline, has hosted the SF Indie Film Festival, we had no reason to believe that the content was an issue. And on February 6th, it wasn’t.
On February 16th, Ms Correa called to demand to know “what kind of film it was.” Christophe repeated the description, and made it clear that it was an NC-17 movie. Ms Correa said that she wasn’t sure she could show it because she had “complaints from the community,” but she offered to look at it before making a final decision. That was a new, significant demand. It was complicated by the fact that the movie is still in post-production, but Shine Louise worked to put together a rough cut.
Christophe called Ms Correa on February 20th to say that the preview DVD was ready, and he could drop it off that day. But, now, the story had changed. Ms Correa rejected the preview disk, without explanation. She repeated that she had received “complaints from the community,” but refused to say what movie the complaints were in response to, or what the nature of the complaints were. She stated that she didn’t want to show a movie that “could be offensive,” and refused to say whether or not the Victoria had a policy against showing movies that might offend someone. (Can you imagine what would happen to GLBT and indie film making if you couldn’t book a movie that might offend someone?)
She refused to state what the policy was, and repeatedly refused to accept the preview disk, all without explanation. She then terminated the conversation.
Of course, Blowfish will find another venue in San Francisco for the premiere of “In Search of the Wild Kingdom.” But finding this level of discrimination against a Lesbian director in San Francisco is, to put it mildly, surprising.
The San Francisco GLBT community has supported the Victoria Theatre through patronage and bookings. At this point, the community should consider if the Victoria Theatre deserves this support.
For more information, contact:
Christophe Pettus
Blowfish Video
(415) 252-4343
This entry was posted on Tuesday, 20 February 2007 at 11:56 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on Tuesday, 20 February 2007 at 12:00 pm Victoria Theatre Censors Lesbian Director | GentPorn wrote:
[…] The full press release of Blowfish’s latest fun in anti-sex discrimination is over at the Blowfish Blog. I’ll add, here, without comment, that Anita Correa is one of the people leading the charge against the Kink.com purchase of the San Francisco Armory, and thus may just be a bit sensitive to people pointing out that her theatre has shown lots and lots of porn. Filed under: censorshipGo on, click an icon. Everyone is doing it.These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]
on Wednesday, 21 February 2007 at 11:46 am Leiza wrote:
I don’t know anything about SF politics, so I rummaged around a little on the net….Maybe the following is not news to you or, on ther hand, maybe it’s way off base…but for what it’s worth…
Is the owner of the Victoria participating in an effort to discredit the Mission Anti-displacement Coalition (MAC)?
According to this article, the protests against kink are really an atempt to discredit MAC (as in, “MAC opposed gentrification, so now you’ve got a porn in your neighborhood!”).
This article protesting kink is by two members of the Mi ssion Merchant Association board of directors (including the Victoria’s owner), as well as a board member of the nonprofit Mission Housing Development Corporation.
This 2004 article in the progressive press describes previous upheaval within Mission Housing Development, and this business press article describes a split between Mission Housing Development and MAC.
on Wednesday, 21 February 2007 at 12:24 pm chriso wrote:
I can’t believe she is being SO shady about Shine’s film - it’s so disappointing and frustrating. I blogged an email I sent to the Victoria about it. I hope people raise a fuss over this so Anita Correa realizes what a mistake she is making kowtowing to this sudden explosion of anti-porn and anti-sex sentiment going on in the Mission.
on Thursday, 10 April 2008 at 11:11 pm guitargod1 wrote:
Yes, I do think your opinion is righteous. (So do lots of people). Luckily majority of people are intelligent :).