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to say. Ron Rice was a good example of a poor guy, dead poor. He used machine-gun-camera film that half the time wouldn't respond to the lab developer. I remember him coming through town in the early Canyon days with two beautiful young ladies. He found some back room in Berkeley with these two lovely ladies. We were curious about the relationships, naturally, but we never asked him. He was kind of a severe guy, I thought. He was on his way to Mexico, and as you know, he never returned. He was working on a film, had it hanging up with the women's underwear on strings across his borrowed room.
I find that when we [Baillie and Lorie, his Filipina wife] go to the Philippines, in some ways we find the spirit we had at Canyon Cinema in the sixties. The key was, and is,
simplicity
. At Canyon we recognized that one of the essential ingredients was necessity, and that to be heard you have to be needed. When we're in Lorie's village in Bobol, anything we can offer is needed. In a Philippine village, there's no such thing as Mom and Dad who live in a middle-class house, commute to work, and love their children, and when their child has a birthday, they have a little birthday party. In a village, everyone's a brother or a sister or a cousin, and all children are mine and my children are yours, and when they have a birthday, there's plenty of time because nobody's commuting, we're all unemployed. We had a dance last night for somebody who got married and today the daughter is having her fifth birthday and people cry and laugh and there's music and cake and all kinds of stuff is happening. Christmas takes two months! That was film art for ten years in America. We needed each other and enjoyed the process, regardless of its difficulties. It was hungry people making cookies all day!
MacDonald:
How did Canyon get started?
Baillie:
We started Canyon Cinema about 1960, in Canyon, California, over the hills from Oakland and Berkeley. Kikuko was paying the rent and giving me the chance to free up my time to make films. Immediately, I realized that making films and showing films must go hand in hand, so I got a job at Safeway, took out a loan, and bought a projector. We got an army surplus screen and hung it up real nice in the backyard of this house we were renting. Then we'd find whatever films we could, including our own little things that were in progress"we," there wasn't really any we, just myself for a whileand show them.
So I made a
thing
of it. I had no occupation. I couldn't get a job anywhere. So, I thought, I'll invent my own occupation. I set up a little part of the house as an office. I had to call it something: I put up a little sign, and it turned out to be "Canyon Cinema" with a light bulb next to it. Fairly soon, we had weekly showings. Kikuko made popcorn. The kids around the neighborhood gathered the community benches and chairs, and we'd sit under the trees in the summer with all the dogs and