Group 8 Blog 2

Authors: Yunfei Qiang,  Christina Wang, Kristen Vitolo, and Abby Oxley

Analysis of San Francisco Theaters

Great Star Theater

    Great Star Theater was built in 1925 with 500 seats, and has been a community center to host Chinese opera, Chinese movies, local artists and other variety of performing arts. It is also the only remaining theater in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The original Great Star Theater was torn down but it has been restored by a married couple working as software engineers for salesforce. They have founded a nonprofit to donate and fundraise for their project to reopen the Great Star Theater. Therefore, I think a great primary source would be a brief interview with the married couple to learn more about the history of Great Star Theater, why they resonated with it and what significance they saw in restoring it. In addition, now Great Star is showing a live ballet during the night. We are curious to understand how Great Star would merge tradition as a Chinatown theater and modern or western shows. What will be the future of Great Star Theater placing in today’s contemporary time and facing a variety of ethnic diverse audiences?      

 

 

Grandview Theater

    Upon searching for primary and secondary sources via the resources provided to us, I came across a memoir by Frank Dunnigan called “Growing Up in San Francisco’s Chinatown: More Boomer Memories from Playland to Candlestick Park” where he recalls his experiences growing up nearby Chinatown and the positive impact that the theaters on Jackson Street–Great Star, Grandview, and Sun Sing–had on his life. He recounts memories such as Grandview not having a snack bar compared to the other theaters and spending countless hours in the Grandview lobby alone as he lived just a block away. We are going to use this primary source to help us understand what it was like to watch films in each of the theaters back in the day from a first hand perspective since Great Star is the only theater still running. In terms of a secondary source, there is a Blogspot blog that includes images of the theater over the years and a brief history of the film archives, which will allow us to further compare the exterior of Grandview to that of the other theaters in Chinatown and hypothesize reasons for its closing. 

Sun Sing Theater

    In addition to Grandview and Great Star Theater, another Chinese theater located on Jackson St. in San Francisco is the Sun Sing Theater. This theater was originally a Chinese opera house, but as films began to gain popularity, the theater transitioned to showing films during the day and continued with live performances at night. Eventually, the theater switched over to showing films at night too. By the time this theater shut down in 1986, it held film screenings only and no live shows. Today, the theater’s building still stands, but the interior of the building has been converted into a store that sells Chinese goods and trinkets. While some of the original lobby details were eliminated during the retail conversion in the 1970s, the exterior facade of the building has been preserved as required by law for protecting historic buildings.

 

Future Direction/Questions

After this last round of chatting and research, we decided that we wanted to narrow down the research with a few guiding questions? 

• Why are the theaters that are open, still open? 
• How was the Great Star Theater Preserved? 
• What happened to the theaters that closed? 
• Is it commercial property now/unused/something else? 
• What did the competition with large theaters look like? 
• Were there insecurities about reopening places? 

    To keep track of our thought process and how we saw our research headed, we decided to try out the transcript feature in our regularly scheduled zoom. In this discussion we decided that a comparative analysis might be an interesting approach to these questions. This means we may be comparing two theaters, but are aware that we don't want to make our scope too large. The Great Star Theater came up as one of the main theaters we have been looking at comparing, as it is the only open one. That is why we thought to do a comparative look with one of the closed venues. This will allow us to do a deep dive on marketing strategies, the history of closure, and the process reopening (or the lack thereof). 

    We know some other groups are looking into the Great Star as well and we want to be cognizant of research overlap and the time of our mutual network, if we do go further into any fieldwork and research on The Great Star Theater. That said, Roger and Alice the new, loving owners of the lease at The Great Star have graciously stated that they can be contacted for further questions. On the class trip to The Great Star Roger briefly talked a bit about how pulling from other communities and art forms is what is keeping things in business compared to film screenings that The Great Star was known for before. This is evident in their current line-up of shows, but they hope to have a screening program coming back to the regal venue. This will be important for us to consider as it is part of their marketing and distinctly different from what other theaters with a similar history have done. 

    Considering these questions and concerns, our next bit of research will be focused on clarifying the relevance of the historical context in which these theaters were built, closed and rebuilt. With that, we have also found that seismic challenges from the 1906 earthquake are a really big part of many of the theaters being gone today. Therefore, our research is grounded in that understanding as well. 

Sources:

https://www.greatstartheater.org/who

http://sanfranciscotheatres.blogspot.com/2019/08/great-star-theatre.html

https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/heatherknight/article/Reopening-Chinatown-s-Great-Star-Theater-is-a-16234349.php

http://sanfranciscotheatres.blogspot.com/2017/09/sun-sing-theatre.html