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What’s true, what’s fiction at the Rialto?
Published: Monday, March 22, 2010 at 7:29 p.m.
Last Modified: Monday, March 22, 2010 at 7:29 p.m.
The truth may be tough to get at in the involuntary change of proprietorship of Rialto Cinemas Lakeside and perhaps it doesn’t matter, really, who did what to whom.
Regardless, on Sept. 1 current operator Ky Boyd will lose the lease on the theater building on Summerfield Road and second-generation Sonoma County moviehouse owner Dan Tocchini Jr. will take it over.
For the record, Tocchini said in essence on Monday that he’s simply reclaiming a theater that “was really taken away from me.”
Back in 1989, Tocchini sub-leased the former ice rink, church and two-screen theater from master leasor David Codding and remade it into a five-screen multiplex.
Tocchini declared that after he’d operated the “Plaza at the Lakeside” theaters for a decade, Codding abruptly put him out.
“I got a three-day notice on my desk that I was evicted,” Tocchini said. He said Codding awarded a lease to Boyd shortly before he, Tocchini, began construction on his family business’s 14-screen Roxy Theater downtown in 2000.
Codding and Boyd said Monday that Tocchini’s claim of having been tossed out is not true. “Dan just wasn’t interested in having a small theater anymore,” Codding said.
He said Tocchini did not want to renew a lease in 1999 and instead asked to rent the theater month-by-month. Codding said he agreed to rent it to Tocchini until he found a new tenant — Boyd.
Boyd said Monday that when he met with Tocchini a decade ago to negotiate the sale of the projectors and other moviehouse gear, Tocchini never complained that he felt he was being forced out.
What’s beyond dispute is that Tocchini is poised to take back the theater a little over five months from now. He said that though he’s promising he won’t change the way Boyd’s popular independent and art-film moviehouse operates, “Nobody believes me.”
The truth of that matter will one day be revealed.
ALL THOSE KIDS who’ll walk to the Rialto from Slater Middle School this morning are hoping the theater will never drop its free-movie day for good readers.
Three times a year, Boyd opens up the Rialto early on a school day and welcomes in about 250 Slater students who have met or exceeded their semester reading goals.
Today’s movie is “Duma.” As always, said English teacher Ellen Friedman, the students who’ll be guests of the Rialto are jazzed.
WEST SIDE RISES: The arrival of spring provided a perfect backdrop to a celebration at greater Healdsburg’s West Side School, which is starting anew thanks to the community outpouring that followed a disastrous fire in fall of 2007.
West Side kids sang for their heroes and thanked them with framed pieces of student art.
Principal-Superintendent Rhonda Bellmer announced a new name for the building that emerged from the ashes of the school’s Felta Hall.
You guessed it: Phoenix Hall.
IT BEGAN HERE in 1978 when Sonoma County’s Commission on the Status of Women created the nation’s first “Women’s History Week” to encourage schools to dedicate classroom time to the contributions of women.
Two years later, President Jimmy Carter proclaimed the advent of National Women’s History Week and a group in Santa Rosa founded the National Women’s History Project.
This week, project Director Molly Murphy MacGregor and eight other local women are flying to D.C. to take part in 30th-year celebrations of the women’s history initiatives that started here and went global.
The week’s big event: A Thursday fete hosted by Nancy Pelosi and honoring Hillary Clinton.
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