Meet the 2018 Essential SF Honorees

Each fall, the SFFILM team gathers to talk about the individuals and institutions that we think help make the Bay Area film community what it is: inspiring, unique, brilliant, passionate, sophisticated, aware, and active. One of the results of those conversations is a list of additions to the Essential SF list — the organization’s ongoing compendium of the Bay Area film scene’s most vital figures.

Essential SF is a way for SFFILM to celebrate the diverse talent of the Bay Area, and to shine a light on just a few of the people and places that make this one of the best places in the world for those who love film. This year’s inductees — cinephile extraordinaire Netta Fedor, Oakland movie palace the Grand Lake Theatre, Pixar producer Nicole Paradis Grindle, prolific film journalist Dennis Harvey, patron of the arts Jeff Lee (posthumously), and filmmaker Dawn Porter — will be celebrated at a special ceremony in December, with friends and colleagues sharing stories and discussing their inspiring contributions to local film culture. Let’s meet the 2018 Essential SF honorees:

Netta Fedor’s favorite two weeks of the year are during the SFFILM Festival, but she also supports and attends many other San Francisco film festivals. She is often seen about town, as she views over 400 movies a year in theaters, while still working full-time. It is no wonder that Fedor loved movies from a young age, as she grew up in Hong Kong, which had the highest rate of per capita cinema attendance. This fascination with movies increased when her father took her, as a teenager, to a double feature of La Dolce Vita and 8½ at the now-defunct Circle Theatre in Washington, DC. She was totally hooked by then. In her 20s, she frequently attended courses and screenings at the American Film Institute when it was located in the then-new Kennedy Center, a few short blocks from where she lived. Moving to San Francisco in the 1980s had a profound impact on her cinematic life. She became enamored of the San Francisco International Film Festival and became an avid fan, while exploring the other film festivals in this city. From 1988 to 1989, she was the volunteer coordinator for the San Francisco International Film Festival.

The Grand Lake Theatre was built in 1926 by two Bay Area theater developers, Abraham C. Karski and Louis Kaliski. When finished, it was the largest theater West of the Mississippi. In 1928 it became part of the Fox West Coast theater chain. The 95-year ground lease was acquired by Allen Michaan’s company, Renaissance Rialto Theaters, in December 1979. Since that time the theater has been restored and expanded into four screens with the transformation of the original balcony into a 450-seat upstairs auditorium in 1981 and the construction of two adjacent movie palace auditoriums in 1985 in what had been the retail storefront wing of the structure. The theater is in full-time use and has full 35mm and 70mm film projection systems in three auditoriums as well as two-projector 3D presentation which resolves all the issues that come with the traditional one-projector systems. Allen Michaan has been operating theaters in the Bay Area since 1974 when he built the Rialto Cinemas in Berkeley at age 19, entirely from recycled materials from area theaters being demolished. The real estate of the Grand Lake was purchased by Renaissance Rialto this past August, thereby insuring its future preservation.

Nicole Paradis Grindle has been a key member of the Bay Area animation community for over 30 years. Most recently, she served as producer on the Disney•Pixar feature film Incredibles 2, that has grossed over $1.2 billion in global box office. Grindle joined Pixar Animation Studios in 1995, and has played a variety of producer and production management roles on seven of Pixar’s 20 feature films, including A Bug’s Life, Monster’s Inc., Monsters University, and Academy Award®-winning films The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and Toy Story 3. Grindle also partnered with Pixar colleague Mary Coleman to create a mentoring program, for potential women directors, which has already born fruit with the premiere of director Domee Shi’s short film Bao. Grindle began her feature film career at Industrial Light and Magic on Who Framed Roger Rabbit in 1987, and then moved to (Colossal) Pictures from 1988 to 1995 where she produced numerous projects including MTV’s ground-breaking Liquid Television. Born and raised in Washington, DC, Grindle holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania and a Master of Arts degree in Documentary Film from Stanford University.

Dennis Harvey began freelancing as a film reviewer in the late 1970s while a West Michigan high school student. He’s been the San Francisco Bay Area correspondent for trade publication Variety since 1991, primarily reviewing independent, documentary, foreign, and festival-premiere features. He’s also done long-term coverage of film, theater and other arts for 48 Hills, Fandor, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, SF Weekly, Focus Magazine, and SF360. Additional publications he’s contributed to include the Los Angeles Times, Oakland Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle Sunday Datebook, Details Magazine, Film Comment, EatDrinkFilm, Callboard, the Advocate, Boston Rock, Digital City, and SF Sidewalk.

Jeff Lee was General Partner, with Chris Wight, of Cypress Property Group, the visionary real estate developers that first dreamt of SFFILM’s presence at 644 Broadway and FilmHouse. Lee had a successful 25-year career in commercial real estate but his true passion was the arts. After the relationships made with SFFILM, Lee became inspired to translate his incredible talents of connecting people with ideas and investment from real estate to film. Lee attended many film industry events, from the Sundance Film Festival to SFFILM’s “Script to Screen” workshops. He loved the free spirt and creative artists in the film industry and invested in many of their films, often personally fronting the expense of the movie premiere after party. He would often say, “I’ll invest in the people and let them make the movies.” Lee was so proud that he was able to create a home at 644 Broadway for the many film professionals he met along the way. He went on to become an investor in a number of film projects and production companies. Sadly, before Lee’s new career path could be more fully realized, our film community lost him to a brief but heroic battle with cancer on September 2, 2018.

Dawn Porter is a documentary filmmaker whose first feature, Gideon’s Army, won the Sundance Film Festival Editing Award in 2013 and later broadcast on HBO. The film was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and an Emmy, and received numerous awards including the Nation Institute’s Ridenhour prize for best documentary film. Porter’s other films have appeared on PBS, OWN, Fusion, The New York Times, Amazon, and the Discovery Channel. In 2015, Porter interviewed President Barack Obama for Rise: The Promise of My Brother’s Keeper which was later simulcast on Discovery and the Oprah Winfrey Network. Her feature documentary Trapped explores the impact of laws regulating abortion clinics in the South. Trapped premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Award for Social Impact Filmmaking. In 2016, Porter was named to Variety’s “10 Documakers to Watch” and received the Robert and Anne Drew Award for Documentary Excellence at DOC NYC’s Visionaries Tribute. Her work has been commissioned by Time, the Center for Investigative Reporting and the Ford Foundation. She recently completed a four-part series on the life and political evolution of Robert F. Kennedy, which was released on Netflix in the spring of 2018.

Essential SF was inaugurated in 2010 to shine a light on the region’s exciting and diverse contributions to the filmmaking world. Those honored previously at Essential SF include: Craig Baldwin, Richard Beggs, Les Blank, Peter Bratt, California Newsreel, Canyon Cinema, the Center for Asian American Media, Joan Chen, Ninfa Dawson, Nathaniel Dorsky, Cheryl Dunye, Cheryl Eddy, Zoë Elton, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, Michael Fox, Pamela Gentile, Susan Gerhard, Joshua Grannell, Hilary Hart, David Hegarty, Marcus Hu, ITVS, Liz Keim, Kontent Films, Karen Larsen, James LeBrecht, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Allie Light and Irving Saraf, Carrie Lozano, Anne McGuire, H.P. Mendoza, Anita Monga, Eddie Muller, Jenni Olson, Jennifer Phang, Rick Prelinger, B. Ruby Rich, Marlon Riggs (posthumously), ro•co films, George Rush, Joel Shepard, Gail Silva, Kent Sparling, Judy Stone, Wholphin, and Terry Zwigoff.

As always, for more info about SFFILM, visit sffilm.org.