Boyd’s Back

Ky Boyd has found a new home for his Rialto Cinemas in Sebastopol after a two year absence following the loss of his Santa Rosa location. (photo by Christopher Chung)

Today if you want to see a movie screened by Ky Boyd, all you have to do is buy a ticket and settle in a seat at his recently acquired Rialto Cinemas in Sebastopol.

But 38 years ago, it was a much more ingenious endeavor. At 10 years of age, a pint-sized Boyd ran the “Electric City Cinemas” in the basement of his family home in Great Falls, Mont.

Every weekend, he would change the letters on a Coca-Cola marquee given to him by his father, who owned Boyd’s Burgermaster, a popular mom-and-pop fast-food joint. The concession stand was his mother’s ironing board. The popcorn he popped himself, before projecting 20-minute industry teasers of “Grease,” “Saturday Night Fever” and even the seldom-seen sci-fi spoof “Hardware Wars,” on a flickering 8-millimeter-film projector.

“Even at that age I was fascinated by movies and I wanted to be in the movie business,” he remembers.

Sitting at a table in the upstairs lobby of his new Rialto home, as Boyd moves on to talk about how cutthroat the movie business can be, he keeps taking off and putting on a beaded bracelet. It turns out it’s a free promotional trinket from the film “Eat, Pray, Love.”

“Someone called them my worry beads,” he says. “I break them periodically, so this is actually my fifth or sixth set of them.”

Over the past year and a half, Boyd has had plenty to worry about. In 2010, after a decade of establishing Rialto Cinemas Lakeside as the only art house devoted entirely to independent films in Sonoma County, Boyd lost his lease on the Summerfield Road building in Santa Rosa. It came as “a total surprise” when the lease was not renewed by property owner Lynn Duggan and instead was awarded to Dan Tocchini and his partners who run the Santa Rosa Entertainment Group, which operates the Airport and Roxy theaters and now Summerfield Cinemas, where the Rialto once stood. It was a classic, small-town Monopoly-game coup d’etat that involved longtime Sonoma County movie theater families the Coddings, the Tocchinis and the Duggans, who had been forming alliances and trying to outmaneuver each other for decades.

“I’m still a little heartbroken,” says Boyd, 48, looking back. “I was completely blindsided. I got burned and I got burned bad.”