Gary Meyer—The Man Who Knew Mel Novikoff

 
Gary Meyer, the recipient of the 2024 Mel Novikoff Award, given in appreciation of the Landmark Theatres co-founder’s role in enhancing film audience’s appreciation of world cinema, is the rare awardee who knew the legendary operator of the Surf theater chain for which the prize is named. Theirs was a friendship going back decades to long before Meyer himself achieved legend status, a figure well-known throughout the film community in the Bay Area and far beyond even the United States’ borders.

How did Gary and Mel meet?

“I was 16 and went to the Surf Theatre one night and a new schedule was out with Metropolis on it,” Meyer remembers in conversation at a San Francisco coffee shop.

Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent classic was a favorite of the teenager’s. He’d even screened it in the theater he ran in his family’s Napa hayloft. He even had film stills that he wanted to offer to the theater for its display cases. When a worker pointed out Novikoff sitting in the Surf’s café, Meyer approached him.

“I introduced myself and we spent the next two hours together,” Meyer says. “We became friends throughout the rest of my time in high school. Then when I went off to San Francisco State, I was allowed to go to the theater all the time.”

The friendship lasted a lifetime. In later years, the two men ran their respective companies, Landmark and Surf, from an office across the street from the Vogue Theatre.

“He brought all of his enthusiasm and knowledge to what he was doing with this film program. Every day, we’d spend time talking about ideas,” Meyer says, adding, “What I learned from him about showmanship and programming and how to make relationships, everything I could possibly learn. I hope [I] provided some ideas and things to him as well. So, I carry my thoughts about Mel and what he meant to me and the larger world with me every day.

“I’m thrilled [to get the award] because Mel meant so much to me and to not only the Bay Area film community but international filmmakers and programmers.”

What made Gary Meyer the movie man we know today?

Meyer’s road to the Novikoff prize began when he was a small child. He laughs now recounting how his love of movies was nearly strangled at birth. His father and grandparents were jewelers. When he turned seven, he received a watch for his birthday, a Swiss-made LaMay, named for his grandmother, and he was sent to the movies by himself for the first time. His dad was a co-pilot in the Army Air Forces during World War II and wanted his son to know a little bit of what that was like, so he sent Gary off to a war movie double bill.

By the end of the first film, Strategic Air Command, a 1955 drama starring James Stewart, the little boy knew he hated war movies. He called home asking to be picked up but his father said he couldn’t have sat through two movies and asked him what time it was. That’s when Meyer noticed the watch was gone. He never found it. And he hated the second feature as much as the first.

That experience soured him on movies, but as with so many children, Disney provided a gateway drug, luring him back. Meyer fell in love with Lady and the Tramp, knocked out not just by the story but by the animation. It wasn’t long before he started making his own animations, using clay and his father’s camera.

He also started haunting movie theaters, seeing usually two double bills each week. He remembers with a laugh being allowed to pick the evening’s entertainment during one of the Meyer family’s monthly trips to San Francisco. A boy magician as well as a budding filmmaker, he saw that a movie called The Magician was playing at the Esquire with something called Wild Strawberries. And, thus, young Gary dragged his family to an Ingmar Bergman double feature.

“I didn’t fully understand what was going on but, visually, the films made a huge impression on me and I wanted to learn more about the filmmaker,” Meyer says.

That curiosity about the people making the films and their methods coupled with the hayloft screenings that he started when he was 11 provided Meyer with an invaluable informal education. He haunted the library, making suggestions about what books should be added to the film collection, to learn more about auteurs like Bergman. Meanwhile, through his early work in exhibition, he taught himself how to match music with silent films and became familiar with film rentals through the 8mm and later 16mm catalogs from which he built his programs.

When Meyer enrolled at SF State, his aim was to become a filmmaker. But after college when the opportunity to work in production didn’t arise, he went back to where he started as a middle-schooler. He became a booker with United Artists, initially charged with scheduling second features at drive-ins and worked his way up to head booker at the chain. His stint there revealed his talent for innovation, as he instituted things like dust-to-dawn screenings at drive-ins and early experiments in midnight movies.

“That was a lot of fun to do,” Meyer says.

More on Gary Meyer’s professional life in and around the Bay Area

By 1975, he was ready to strike out on his own, co-founding Repertory Theatres, Inc., which would later become Landmark, so named because most of the chain’s theaters at the time were actual historical landmarks. Even as he managed the growing chain, Meyer continued to demonstrate his flair for programming, taking on Berkeley’s UC Theatre and the Nuart in Los Angeles. His work portfolio expanded at the same time as he spent years in various capacities at the Telluride Film Festival.

When Meyer’s run at Landmark was over, he took over the Balboa Theatre in San Francisco’s Outer Richmond, his love of programming sustaining the place from 2001–2012. By 2014, Meyer was onto a new adventure, founding the online magazine Eat Drink Films. More recently, the man who harbored ambitions of becoming a filmmaker has seen that come to fruition at long last as he came on board as a producer on a documentary, The Art of Eating: The Life of M.F.K. Fisher. Now, he’s joined another, Planet Ocean, a documentary still in its early stages about deep-sea mining.

As the Novikoff honoree, Meyer picked the film that will accompany the award ceremony and onstage conversation. When he was at Landmark, Meyer liked programming a short before a feature and he does that here with Jessica Yu’s Sour Death Balls. The comic documentary short film screened at the Festival in 1993. It also screened as a short before Landmark features as Meyer fell in love with it the first time he saw it.

For the feature, he chose Macario, a melodrama by Mexican director Roberto Gavaldón, in which a poor man gains mystical powers. Meyer was a kid when he first saw, perhaps even at the1960 Festival where the film’s star, Ignacio López Tarso, won the best actor Golden Gate Award. He recently revisited it when the Morelia International Film Festival screened a new restoration. It was on his mind when asked to choose his Novikoff feature, a decision that brought out the programmer in him.

“I wanted to show a film a lot of people hadn’t heard of, a great photographed film,” Meyer says, adding “It made an impression [on me] when I saw it. It was my introduction to magical realism.”

About the Author

Pam Grady is a freelance writer, whose work appears in the San Francisco Chronicle, 48 Hills, and other publications. She also has her own web site.

Stay In Touch With SFFILM

SFFILM is a nonprofit organization whose mission ensures independent voices in film are welcomed, heard, and given the resources to thrive. SFFILM works hard to bring the most exciting films and filmmakers to Bay Area movie lovers. To be the first to know what’s coming, sign up for our email alerts and watch your inbox.