Shedding the stress with a flurry of cats
“You think you are alone as a crazy cat lover.” Live video festival lures certain kind of fan into Roxie
Only one thing could motivate Evelyn Borges to leave her bossy cats, Kismet and Kasim, at home during a pandemic — the chance to watch videos of bossy cats at home during a pandemic. So Borges tricked her pets by offering up treats as a distraction that let her slip out the door.
“I will be punished. They are cats,” said Borges, in a cat face mask outside the Roxie Theater on Sunday afternoon as she waited for the doors to open for the oneday screening of CatVideoFest 2021 at the landmark Mission District movie house on 16th Street. Borges felt guilty for her trickery, but was soothed by her friend Parley Gagne, who volunteers as a “cat matchmaker” at the SPCA.
“You think you are alone as a crazy cat lover, so you come here to find that you aren’t alone,” she explained. “You are with other crazy cat lovers.” They were all out in the harsh daylight of a sunny Sunday, waiting to transfer some cat hair from their clothes to the upholstery inside. Many had not been inside a theater since the COVID19 lockdown of March 2020. Last year’s CatVideoFest was virtual, which is not much different than watching cat videos on Instagram or YouTube.
Ten percent of ticket sales went to Give Me Shelter, a San Francisco rescue organization, and it had the feel of a charity ball. “If not today, when will I ever wear this?” said Cathy Ye, clad in a catprint shirt and cat earrings. But none could outdo Bernadette Robson, who wore a cat pattern sweatshirt with a cat pattern backpack and carried two library books she’d just checked out — “A Street Cat Named Bob” and “Strays.”
“This is the first movie theater
I’ve been in since lockdown,” she said, settling into her seat, “and I’m only here because it is about cats.”
It’s whatever it takes to lure customers back to the Roxie, which operates as more of a clubhouse than a commercial movie theater. More than 600 members pay annual dues of $45 to $325. At the highest price level, movies and popcorn are included, though members still must pay for their $2 cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon. General admission is held below the going rate. It is $13, $9 for members, and unlike many city restaurants, the Roxie did not take advantage of the pandemic to raise prices for its reopening, though it had good reason to.
“We lost 90% of our earned revenue,” said executive director Lex Sloan. “We were closed for 434 days, but who is counting? ... We all were counting.” During the long months of darkness, the theater was upgraded thanks to a grant from San Francisco Grants for the Arts, awarded before the lockdown. It paid for a disability-accessible bathroom and air conditioning for both the theater and the projection booth, which has been known to reach 100 degrees.
Some walls had to be opened up, and a ticket stub was found in a plaster wall from the Poppy, the theater’s original name, dated 1913. This answered a question that could not be verified: When did the theater open? It may be older than that stub, but it now has proof that it is at least one year younger than the Vogue on Sacramento Street, which opened in 1912.
Another change that the catmovie viewers experienced is the Roxie’s new advance reservations system that is helping ease the theater back into operation. It reopened on May 21 with two screenings of “Cinema Paradiso,” both an easy sellout at pandemictimes’ 25% capacity in the 234seat house. Seating has since ramped up to 75%. Friday night’s screening of David Lynch’s psychological conundrum “Mulholland Drive” also sold out two shows. The 49seat Little Roxie next door will reopen Friday.
“We are calling it ‘our experiment summer,’ ” said Sloan, who plans to mix in live musical performance. CatVideoFest is not in the experimental category. Created by the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis in 2012, it has been a hit since it first came to the Roxie in 2018.
“It is always spectacular,” said Borges, a regular at every screening. “The last time I came, my cat had died a week before. It brought me out of my grieving.”
The show was 72 minutes and spliced together about 125 individual cat performances, selected from 10,000 videos that curator Will Braden watches in a year. They are a mix of submissions and finds from all “kitty corners of the internet,” Braden said, hazarding a quip at risk of disapproval from his own cat Nin, who was eavesdropping on his explanation.
Because of the lockdown and cat quarantine, “there was more material and footage than ever,” Braden said. Categories include action adventure, drama, comedy, and a new category this year: “stuck at home with your cat.”
Shana Packin, an English as a second language teacher and an outlier in that she was not wearing any cat paraphernalia, did not have a cat at home waiting to punish her for leaving without permission.
“I will watch cat videos all day long even without owning one,” she said, attributing the attraction to the species’ “element of curiosity and their aloofness toward humans. I definitely find that appealing.”
Gagne said the appeal of cat videos is that they are not dog videos. Dogs are pleasers and can be coached.
“What’s great about them is that cats are not out to please anybody,” she said. “Dogs can be manipulated. Cats can’t. We try, but it never works.”