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people and watch French or Canadian Embassy films and National Film Board of Canada stuff, along with our own. I let it be known immediately that I had a place to show films, if any filmmakers were coming through town. I let Jonas [Mekas] know right away. At first we were in touch with only Larry Jordan, and later, Jordan Belson.
Stan Brakhage came to town after a while and tried to make a home in San Francisco with Jane. And other filmmakers were scattered here and there; we didn't really see each other very much. There weren't many films to show, but toward 1962 it began to build up rapidly. We'd send out postcards, and soon the mailing list was too long. Then Chickie Strand was in town, at Berkeley, and we got together and ran Canyon together. There were a few other people around: her husband, Paul Strand, took care of the screen and the Volkswagen bus, and later Emery Menefee joined us. Chickie was working at the university, and we would show in Berkeley at various places, whatever was available. By then we were showing our newsreel and everything else we could find: Brakhage's films, and Mekas's . . .
MacDonald:
There was a generation of Bay Area filmmakers in the late forties: Peterson and Broughton . . .
Baillie:
We would order those films from the Audio Film Center catalogue and show them. James Broughton was a kind of father figure. He didn't come around much, but we knew he was in the area. We'd show all his films. Marie Menken, Sidney Peterson, Maya Deren, Frank Stauffacherwe'd have a festival once in a while. Later, we showed in North Beach in San Francisco, in the late beatnik era. So we were pretty busy, putting up signs everywhere, keeping our equipment in shape, and renting films and trying to pay for them, shipping them, returning chairs to the mortuaries, sending announcements to the paper, which they'd
never
print. Nobody would ever write anything about us. But the Berkeley police would come constantly and run us out, right at the last minute, as a fire hazard or something.
MacDonald:
Why?
Baillie:
I don't know. This was in prerevolution times. Berkeley was quite conservative in the early sixties. They just didn't like the spirit of it. We'd have the Finnish Hall as a backup and a bunch of Volkswagen buses out front (Paul Strand in charge). The police would come and tell us to leave, and we'd say OK, and everybody would get on the bus, go to the next place, and we'd set up again. It was like von Richthofen's Flying Circus. We got really adept at setting up a nice theater anywhere. It was never sloppy. We taught all the people who would come to work for usvolunteersto set everything up precisely, the right way. We had a good projector and good programs, and we tried to pay attention to the timing of the interludes between films.