Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

By John Cassavetes
Ben Gazzara brilliantly portrays gentlemen’s club owner Cosmo Vitelli, a man dedicated to composure and self-possession. When he runs afoul of a group of gangsters, Cosmo is forced to commit a horrible crime in a last-ditch effort to save his beloved club and his way of life. Suspenseful and idiosyncratic, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is a riveting examination of desperation and masculine identity. (1976, 135 min, 35mm)

By Michael Thomas
Director in person
One of the highlights of our summer “Smut Capital of America” series returns, this time with the director in person presenting his own uncut, pristine Kodachrome print. It’s a gritty tale of a bisexual hustler who’ll go to bed with any man or woman who offers him enough money and sexual kicks. Using both sexploitation and art-film aesthetics, Meat Rack is an essential and compelling artifact of pre-hardcore adult cinema. Director Thomas is a major figure in San Francisco film history. He owned and operated the legendary Strand Theater on Market Street, and co-founded indie film distributor Strand Releasing. (1968, 70 min, 16mm)

Presented by Albert Steg
Before VHS players and then the internet rendered hardcore pornography ubiquitous and banal, American stag films, often produced and exhibited illegally and viewed almost exclusively by men, held considerable power to shock, entertain, arouse and educate. Tonight's program, a series of short subjects from the 1920s through the 1960s, will show that they still retain this power. At times drolly amusing, at others appallingly misogynistic, the films are always 100% American and can be usefully viewed as transgressive cinematic monologues suppressed by the moral standards of their day.

A film collector from Cambridge, Mass., Albert Steg left a career teaching English literature in order to pursue work in film preservation and archiving. He is a member of the Board of Directors of The Center for Home Movies. Steg runs “Zampano’s Playhouse,” a traveling film series drawn from his growing 16mm and 8mm collection of educational, industrial, ephemeral and “blue” movies.