North Bay’s indispensable movie guide steps down
For 2 decades, Bert Towle ran websites to help area’s filmgoers
Ever since Disney’s animated “The Lion King,” Quentin Tarantino’s breakthrough film “Pulp Fiction” and Jim Carrey’s blockbuster “Dumb and Dumber” were on their original box-office runs in 1994, thousands of Bay Area moviegoers have relied on one person to help plan their trips to the cinema.
First with SonomaMovies.com and then with NorthBayMovies.com, software engineer and tech consultant Bert Towle has meticulously listed every movie and showtime playing north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Until now.
After more than 28 years, Towle is retiring the free sites, which at their peak had a combined 100,000 page views a week and never lost their spartan charm: The simple, nearly graphics-free design was a throwback to the early days of the World Wide Web.
“Everybody was getting pretty lousy Internet service back then. So much of it was dial-up,” Towle said with a laugh during a chat with The Chronicle days before the end of his tenure.
He never accepted advertising. As he says on the sites, “I’ve tried to keep it simple and productive.” And that he did.
Towle’s last day was Thursday,
Jan. 26. To mark the occasion, Towle, a Chicago native who lives in Petaluma with his wife, Fran, agreed to a good-natured exit interview.
“I’m not a guy who has ever been particularly interested in publicity,” Towle said. “So it’s kind of striking, at the end of the website, that someone wants to talk about it with me.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: We feel a responsibility because, in a way, The Chronicle was a reason for you launching the websites in the first place, right?
A: No kidding! We moved up to Petaluma in ’93, and I discovered when I got here
that I couldn’t turn to The Chronicle and find Sonoma County movie times. So I decided to do something about it.
I only did Sonoma County at first, then within six months I started getting requests from people who lived in Marin County. (Eventually the site would cover Napa, Lake and Mendocino counties as well.) That’s how it turned into NorthBayMovies.com.
Q: You’re obviously a movie fan. How often do you go to the movies? Has that habit changed since the pandemic?
A: I used to go to movies a lot. They just came out with the Academy Award nominations,
and I haven’t seen any of them. Not one. I only went to the movies, I think, three times last year. I do more streaming, like so many other people are.
Q: What are some your movie memories growing up as a kid near Chicago?
A: I lived in a town that didn’t have a movie theater, so it was always a trip to go see a movie somewhere. Then when I got old enough to drive all of my friends and all of our dates and everybody else, we all liked to go to downtown Chicago so that we could be in the big theaters, on the scale of the Paramount in Oakland.
I like movie history. When I got married and we were on our honeymoon, I made a point of going to the parts of Switzerland where the James Bond car chase had been (filmed) in “Goldfinger.” So, yeah, I have pictures of the place where James Bond (Sean Connery) stood when he got shot at by (actress Tania Mallet).
Q: Do you have a favorite movie?
A: I tend to like more obscure stuff. Like “Blow-Up” (1966, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni). It was really interesting because it was all the pop culture stuff of the time, the London of the time, but it was a mystery and a puzzle and you didn’t really know what was happening. At the end you weren’t quite sure that it really did happen.
I also like action films from that era. I fell in love with San Francisco when I saw “Bullitt” in Chicago. In fact, when we first moved out here, we had so many visitors who came from the Midwest and other places who wanted to see San Francisco. I used to take them on a not-high-speed “Bullitt” tour of the city.
Q: What are you going to miss the most about about running your site?
A: I think the “thank you” notes have always been delightful to me. I didn’t do it for any reason other than to put the thing together as a service. So I’ll miss people who appreciate that more than anything else.
But, really, Google and all of the major search engines now have movie times available, and you can run through it pretty quickly by zip code. And most of the theaters have better quality websites than they used to.
Q: What was your web traffic like?
A: I was just looking at the stats this past week and it appears that my peak was about 2017 and I was doing about 100,000 page views a week. In 2019 it was down to about three-quarters of what the peak had been. And then, of course, in 2020 (the first year of the pandemic) it fell to less than 25% of what it had been, and it still hasn’t recovered. It’s now at about 40% of 2017 (about 40,000 page views a week).
That reflects the same issues that the theaters are having with attendance. Theaters are back to about 40-45% of what they had been. So I feel bad for the people who are struggling with that, especially the little guys (independent theaters). I did my website so the little guys could get some publicity.