Marty Rubin - San Francisco Internal Film Festival History Site - San ...

MARGARITA LANDAZURI: Exactly. So that’s remarkable. I didn’t know all of this. So you,
just as a film buff, and someone who knew a lot about classic films—
MARTY RUBIN: Yeah, and also had worked professionally presenting films. This would have
been the equivalent of—I’m trying to think—in San Francisco—
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: Pacific Film Archive?
MARTY RUBIN: Not that big. Whatever’s a notch below that. Pacific Film Archive would have
been like the Museum of Modern Art in New York. We were No. 2 at the time, in that field.
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: Does that still exist?
MARTY RUBIN: It exists, but not as the same entity—it was taken over. It was a notorious
institution that had been started by Huntington Hartford, the grocery store magnate. He called it
the Gallery of Modern Art and he built it. It’s a really weird building that sits in the middle of
Columbus Circle, slightly Moorish. Edward Durrell Stone was the architect. Very impractical
building on a very strange site. A very small site. After Hartford got tired of it, or it became too
insolvent, it was taken over by Fairleigh Dickinson University and redubbed the New York
Cultural Center. It ran for several years until the university pulled out their funding. At that
point, the museum closed and I lost my job. It was taken over by the city to use as a visitor
center. As far as I know, it’s still standing and there have been rumors of tearing it down, but
people have been fighting that because the building is considered to be of some architectural
significance.
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: Edward Durrell Stone, I would say, yeah.
MARTY RUBIN: Frankly, it might look nice from the outside, but, as a practical place in which
to work and in which to run an art gallery, it was widely despised by the people who worked
there, who thought it was a lemon.
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: So you had that job while you were doing the Festival as well?
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