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.”

During the next year and half, while continuing to run his other theaters — the Elmwood in Berkeley and the Cerrito in El Cerrito — Boyd was determined to find a new home for the Rialto. In the meantime, he ran a few film series at the Sixth Street Playhouse in Santa Rosa and came very close to taking over the Coddingtown Cinemas. But he finally settled on the Sebastopol 9 Cinemas space, previously run by Cinema West owner David Corkill, who owns theaters in Petaluma, Sonoma and Cloverdale. This time, the new Rialto lease includes options to renew, something Boyd didn’t have in writing last time.

“If there’s a silver lining in any of this, it was the amazing outpouring of community support,” he says.

The “Save Rialto Cinemas Lakeside” Facebook page drew over 4,500 members. Hundred of letters poured into newspaper editors as devoted Rialto fans rallied around Boyd every step of the way.

It’s a lesson and a battle he’ll never forget — but not an entirely unfamiliar struggle for a kid from Montana who was picked on and bullied at an early age.

“High school was a horrible place,” he remembers. “I was what I call the obviously gay kid and I got picked on mercilessly and the school didn’t really do anything about it.”

When he went back to his 20th high school reunion in 2002, “people told me things I have no recollection of. It’s totally blocked out and I have no desire to remember any of it.”

The dark, four-walled sanctuary of the local movie theater became a safe haven, along with working tirelessly at his dad’s burger joint, where he started at the age of 14.

“I was a loner,” he says. “I didn’t want to go hang out with the other kids. I wanted to earn a paycheck.”

It was at Boyd’s Burgermaster that he learned the art of customer service. It’s on display at the Rialto today — the carefully drawn-up, one-sheet movie flyers in the lobby, communal tables for post-show movie discussions and an assortment of homespun popcorn toppings, from brewer’s yeast to cayenne pepper.

“Walking into one of Ky’s theater is like going over to your friend’s house to see a movie,” says Jewish Community Center executive director Beth Goodman, who has worked with Boyd in producing the Sonoma County Jewish Film Festival at the Rialto for the past decade. “And I love that the owner of this charming home theater is often going to be in the lobby talking to people about the latest films or pouring your Coke for you.”

In renovating the new Rialto in Sebastopol, Boyd moved the box office inside into the lobby, across a low countertop, because “when you put glass between people it creates the opportunity for rudeness on both sides of the transaction. Whereas at a counter you can have a conversation.”

Along the walls, many of the movie posters on display have sentimental value. He’s had the “Victor Victoria” poster since his college days, because it reminds him of “the first gay movie I ever saw.” Looking at the “Diva” poster on the wall, he says, “It’s the reason I’m an exhibitor today.” It was not just the film itself — a 1981 French film about voyeurism and intrigue in the worlds of opera and prostitution — that so affected him, but watching it at the age of 19 in a converted wedding chapel theater in Missoula, Mont., decked out with an altar and a screen lowered from the ceiling. It turned him on to the magic of movies in the most unlikeliest of venues.

His deep sense of hospitality and marketing evolved from a range of jobs, including working at Indiana Repertory Theater (his first job after graduating with an M.A. in arts management from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music) and managing in-patient food service at the Indiana University Medical Center. At Indiana Repertory, he met his long-time partner Michael O’Rand, who now works by his side as CFO of Rialto Cinemas. In 1993 they decided, almost on a whim, to move to San Francisco where Boyd eventually landed a job as a manager at Embarcadero Cinemas.

After compiling massive market research and amassing loans from family and friends, Boyd made the leap to Sonoma County in 2000 to establish the first-ever multi-screen theater entirely devoted to independent cinema.

“It was a huge leap of faith,” he says. “Because even my film buyer was skeptical, telling me I’m not 100 percent sure this is going to work.”

Doug Endicott, co-owner of Exhibitor Support Partnership, which books films for the Rialto and 500 screens around the country, remembers it well.

“Statistic are statistics,” he said. “But these kinds of films always need extra nurturing and Ky always reached out to the specific community the film addressed. So if it was a foreign language film, it would be language departments at schools. Or if it’s a gay and lesbian film or of Jewish interest or a dance movie, he made sure he got to that community. That’s how he made it work.”

Today, widely regarded as Sonoma County’s biggest champion of independent films, Boyd is still trying to find the right balance of alternative and mainstream films at the new Rialto.

When the self-described “workaholic” isn’t managing the movie business, Boyd and O’Rand meet friends for dinner at favorite spots like Hole in the Wall in Sebastopol, Rosso or Jack and Tony’s in Santa Rosa and Willow Wood in Graton. These days they split time between a house in Santa Rosa and a loft in Emeryville. But aside from his voracious appetite for talking movies and dissecting the movie business, what Boyd loves more than anything is the buzz in the lobby on a weekend night as fans trickle in at dusk.

“My favorite part of my job is to be in the theater on a Friday or Saturday night, helping sell tickets, helping make popcorn and make sodas,” he says. “And then sometimes just to hang out in the lobby and watch people connect and see who runs into who and who wasn’t expecting to run into who. It’s that whole sense of community. Because a movie theater really is a crossroads of the community.”

Bay Area freelancer John Beck writes about entertainment for The Press Democrat. You can reach him at 280-8014, john@sideshowvideo.com and follow on Twitter @becksay.

BIOBOX
Who: Ky Boyd
Age: 48.
Timeline:
1974 – Launches “Electric City Cinemas” in his parents’ basement.
1982 – Seeing “Diva” in a wedding chapel inspires him to one day run his own movie theater.
2000 – Opens Rialto Cinemas Lakeside on Summerfield Road in Santa Rosa.
2010 – Rialto loses lease when it’s not renewed after 10 years.
2012 – Opens the new Rialto in Sebastopol.

Top three all-time grossing films at the Rialto in Santa Rosa: “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” “Fahrenheit 911″ and “Sideways.”
One of the most memorable flops at the Rialto: Steven Soderbergh’s “Full Frontal.”
First film he ever saw: Disney’s “Aristocats” at the Liberty Theater in Great Falls, Mont. He was 5 years old.
Estimated cost of ongoing renovations at new Rialto in Sebastopol: $400,000.
On seeing a movie in a theater: “I love the immersive experience. You sit down in a room full of strangers and you share a common emotional experience. You can’t stop it, you can’t pause it, you have to go along for the ride. I think that’s the way movies were meant to be seen.”