San Francisco Film Society Oral History Project Interview with ...

MARGARITA LANDAZURI: And what did that do to your schedule?
CLAUDE JARMAN: Well, we didn’t have anything else going on, but—people would say, “When is
this going to end?” This was when they were free and people were lining up. They would be coming in
and people were leaving because they were tired of it. It just got to be very difficult to manage. But
Bette Davis was still at the Masonic.
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: Yes, the last year there.
CLAUDE JARMAN: I guess we were still OK up at the Masonic. It was when we got to the Palace,
where we only had 1000 seats, we were cut down to half our seating capacity. But with New Directors,
we had Susan Sontag, Haskell Wexler, Gordon Parks—all these people at four in the afternoon.
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: This year in an interview, you said you wanted to expand the concept of
retrospectives and do more on the craft of film and more emphasis on contemporary filmmakers. Did
you and Albert Johnson agree on this?
CLAUDE JARMAN: Well, we agreed because we were running out of the old guard. We needed to
expand it,
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: So you had more contemporary filmmakers at this point.
CLAUDE JARMAN: That’s right.
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: So, admission was still free at this point to the retrospectives, right?
CLAUDE JARMAN: Yes, because we wanted the audience. We were still building an audience. But we
really didn’t get into customers paying until we got to the Palace. People would show up and they
couldn’t get in, and they said, “Well, we’ll pay to come in.” And then once we sold the tickets, that was
it. If you didn’t have a ticket, you didn’t get in. It wasn’t about the money as much as it was crowd
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