Walk-in becomes the new drive-in
Sure, there are film nights in parks every summer in the city, but Proxy is making a go of it on weekends year-round on a reclaimed parking lot surrounded by housing, traffic and urbanity at the corner of Hayes and Octavia streets.
Run as a nonprofit by an architecture firm, the free outdoor screenings opened with a Fall Film Festival, curated by filmmaker Malcolm Pullinger.
“We’re inventing a new cultural institution that brings movies, dance and other art performances to this space,” said Proxy founder Douglas Burnham, while introducing “The Wolfpack” to a full lot on a clear, crisp night in November as the fall season closed.
Envelope designed a mixed-use hub, named Proxy, in a set of shipping containers that can be moved in a jiffy.
There is Biergarten, which runs a year-round Oktoberfest; Smitten, which freezes ice cream to order, by the cone; Ritual Coffee; Aether clothing; a bike tour rental; an outdoor gym; and a juice shop.
A fundamental aim of Envelope A+D is to bring free cultural programming to the strip, and it finally arrived last October when the Proxy Fall Film Festival opened with the recent release “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” to begin a series of films about filmmaking.
Treseder Gorham staked a claim for a dozen people and accented her spread with homemade hummus on sesame seed crisps, served under candlelight, though no candelabra.
Sunk into his camp chair as if it were a bean bag, he looked like the cartoonist R. Crumb, and at age 71, he hazarded the claim that he was both the oldest customer here and had come the farthest, from Elk, a three-hour drive north.
“This is a happening, and I wasn’t getting my urban quota, so it’s fun to be in this kind of effervescent urban stage,” said Minkus, who limited his intake to one draft beer, because of a case of gout in his big toe, though he would not say how big a vessel that beer came in.
“When you take public spaces that feel like they have either grandeur or freedom and safety, then people want it,” said Minkus, given to comparing Proxy to some of the grand plazas he has visited in Europe.
The projector was donated from someone’s outdated home theater, and the projectionist, Clark Sellman, works at Envelope A+D, like the rest of the volunteer theater staff.
Because there is housing and traffic everywhere, it never gets very dark or quiet at Proxy, but it gets quiet and dark enough that when Sellman kicked on the projector, you could hear it whirr and see dust in its beam of light, as 450 people went silent at once.
Proxy Walk-In Theater: “Heart of a Dog” runs Saturday, March 26, followed by Exploratorium Cinema Arts short films April 2 and The Black Panthers: