Last week, we began a conversation about a bit of Phoenix cultural arcana that gets forgotten: The Sombrero Playhouse, the city’s vibrant 1970s-era art house, one of the few places in town film fans could see foreign fare, art films, cult classics and rock movies.

Gary Gohring, who was the theater’s manager as well as the New Times' film critic at the time, now lives in San Diego; he agreed to participate in the following email chat about the theater and cinematic life in the Valley of the time generally, including the late, magnificent Cine-Capri, seen above.

The photo is by George Aurelius, and comes courtesy of CineCapriTheater.com.

Part 1 is here.

Part 2 is here

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PHXated: Specifically, The Rocky Horror Picture Show was a big deal for my high-school friends; in such a culturally conservative and homogeneous city, as a bunch of misfits in a high school drama club, I felt it was a place where we could meet similar quote-unquote creative kids our age.  What was your impression of RHPS at the time? Was it fun or a nightmare to oversee?

Gary Gohring: I am not really the person to ask about The Rocky Horror Picture Show as I was neither a fan of it or all the attendant fan involvement with it, but I certainly recognize that for many, many people in their teens and 20s in the mid-to late ‘70s it was the cult film and an important social bonding experience.  

Additionally, its financial success helped the Sombrero prosper and ultimately stay in business as long as it did.  It certainly allowed me to indulge my aforementioned tastes and book films such as [Bresson’s] Diary of a Country Priest and [Ozu’s] Tokyo Story, which hardly drew the same crowd, enthusiasm, or grosses.  

The assistant managers usually ran the theater on Friday and Saturday evenings; I only worked those RHPS showings they missed.  The theater was a nightmare to clean up on the mornings after, and we lost more than one cleaning crew in large part because of it.

PHXated: I remember the Valley Art, of course—particularly the afternoon showing of The Graduate where they accidentally showed an X-rated preview of Screw on Screen before it. (Sheer chaos resulted.) As I drive around town, I also think of the (literally) underground screens at Los Altos mall, the big Bethany theater, the Kachina in Scottsdale, the Cine Capri …

I’m not nostalgic that much about it (there are so many more movies available these days through so many sources), but there was something larger than life about seeing Star Wars, or Alien, at the Cine Capri, or Annie Hall at the Bethany. Any theaters you remember fondly from the time?   G.G.: What I remember most about moviegoing in Phoenix during the ‘70s was not so much the theaters themselves but the evolution of the moviegoing experience itself, disintegrating from the big movie houses such as Cine Capri, the Kachina, etc. into the multiplexes.  And in some cases, this was done extremely poorly, with a single cinema being butchered into an awkward five or six screen theater.  Mann’s Christown, I am looking at you.

The ‘70s also became the decade that ushered in the financial mega-blockbusters, where success has become measured more in terms of stratospheric box-office receipts on the opening weekend rather than solid financial gain and/or quality.  

I enjoyed (still do) going to foreign movies and off-beat films, so I generally most liked going to NEEB Hall at ASU, the Valley Art, and Dan Harkins' Camelview Cinemas, and as I lived in Tempe at the time, I did not mind driving to the other side of town to the Bethany Cinemas to see the likes of [Peckinpah’s] Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia or to the UA 6 Cinemas to see [Monte Hellman’s] The Cockfighter in their exclusive Valley runs.

Tomorrow: The end of the Sombrero.