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

control, because it wasn’t fair. I mean, it was a dollar. Come on! People couldn’t spend a dollar to come
to this thing, if you had to have a ticket?
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: Yeah. Oh, this was the year that the, the second year of the Goldwyn
Awards, and the last. And this was because the jury chose Midnight Cowboy to get the award, and the
Goldwyn organization rejected it.
CLAUDE JARMAN: I don’t remember that much about it. All I know is we didn’t pay a whole lot of
attention to it.
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: Was the Palace ready in time for the 1970 Festival?
CLAUDE JARMAN: For the most part. It had a few kinks. And there was no Exploratorium down
there. So we decided to take advantage of the fact that we have all this space; we’ll have the Opening
Night party there also. The Opening Night film was The Great White Hope. It was also a rainy night.
Anyway, we had a flood; the toilets overflowed, and I’m out there mopping things up 30 minutes before
the opening.
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: You yourself?
CLAUDE JARMAN: Absolutely. Because we had to clean the place up. And it worked. The transition, I
think, worked out pretty well. It took a year to finally figure out a little bit more about how to make it
better.
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: There was something about the walls weren’t built or something, and
there were just curtains. Is that—?
CLAUDE JARMAN: It was a makeshift deal. But everything else has a growing period, so I thought to
move that in a year and to make it happen was, by and large, pretty successful.
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