Why not the Stanford?

Palo Alto's Stanford Theatre seems like a natural for a WB retrospective, but instead the festival screens in Menlo Park

by Jim Harrington

The obvious home for a festival commemorating the 75th anniversary of Warner Bros. studios, at least locally, has got to be the beautiful Stanford Theatre--the Bay Area's number one venue for classic films.

Stanford Theatre owner David Packard, not surprisingly, agrees.

"Of all the places in the world, the Stanford Theatre should be doing a retrospective of Warner Bros.,'" he said.

A Warner Bros. retrospective and the Stanford Theatre are such a natural, in fact, that there's a chance that people intent on attending the festival might wind up at the ornate downtown Palo Alto movie palace by mistake. But the Stanford is showing "My Fair Lady" this month while the festival is taking place in Menlo Park at the Park Theatre.

What happened?

Well, as it turns out, the Stanford Theatre had a chance to hold the festival, had a big interest in doing so, but couldn't go along with the officially sanctioned, prepackaged movie spread that the Warner folks were shipping around to various theaters. The problem was that the prepackaged festival included films from the '70s, '80s and '90s--which is simply out of Stanford's targeted time zone.

"It would be against our charter as a nonprofit, and it would be just wrong," Packard said.

So Packard made a proposition to hold a complimentary Warner Bros. film festival, one that would take a more extensive look at the older films in the catalog and ignore such movies as "Driving Miss Daisy" and "Batman." Packard took his case to the upper echelon of Warner management and was still told "no."

"I couldn't believe that they wouldn't want us to do it," he said.

Packard was more than a bit ticked to hear that the official Warner Bros. retrospective was being held right up the road in Menlo Park, though he made it clear that he was not angry at the Park Theatre for booking the festival.

"I have nothing against the Park Theatre. ... They certainly have a right to do whatever they want," he said.

And so does Packard. But he's being justifiably careful when dealing with a giant.

Besides their own extensive back catalog, Warner Bros. also now owns the film archives of MGM and R.K.O., which makes the huge media conglomerate a very important player for anyone who wants to run a theater that focuses on classic films. Packard knows it's not in his best interest to raise the ire of WB, so he's not going to try and hold a film festival when they tell him he can't.

"Who knows? Maybe we'll do a Warner's program in the fall," Packard said.

Meanwhile, Packard went ahead with plans to show one of Warner's most popular classics--"My Fair Lady"--during the run of the regular festival at the Park. It seems that "My Fair Lady" is one that is no longer owned by Warner and therefore the WB giant could not tell the Stanford Theatre not to run it. So check the movie listings and, if you feel like it, include "My Fair Lady" and the Stanford Theatre in your own customized WB film festival.

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