This Nob Hill institution first debuted as The Guild Art Theatre, filling its 153 original seats in February of 1966 with a grand opening screening of Red Lanterns, a sequel to Jules Dassin’s Never On Sunday. (That 1962 film about prostitutes in Greece got Don Pancho’s Arts Theater down the block declared “out of bounds” by the Catholic Church. But the archdiocese didn’t seem to care as much four years later.) Owners Tom Coleman and Don Dunham (who also opened Don Pancho’s) threw all their efforts behind this new venue, closing their short-lived Roxy Art Theatre (located where the Frontier restaurant sits today) two months later.
Guild started out playing foreign films but quickly switched to “nudie cutie” comedies (Wild Gals of the Naked West), sexploitation (Russ Meyer’s Mudhoney) and other, not-quite-X-rated European erotica (France’s Notte Erotique a.k.a. Night of Lust).
In 1971 Movie Inc bought the theater and started showing Hollywood revival and indie art films. It closed in ’77, reopened in ’79 and closed again in 1988. A series of owners took over from there, sticking with foreign and indie films. Movie man Joe Esposito ran it from 1988 to 1998 (along with the old Don Pancho’s, which shut down in 1998). Married owners Joe Alcorn and Sylvia Wittels were in charge from 1998 to 2003. Current owner-operator Keif Henley started working there as a part-time projectionist in 1997 and in 2004 purchased the business, eventually ushering it through a year-long pandemic shutdown and supervising a much-needed digital projection upgrade.