Rialto Cinemas marks 20 years of shows

Ky Boyd, about to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Rialto Cinemas he founded, may be Sonoma County’s best-known movie house host.

“I didn’t quite plan that,” he admitted during a recent chat in his cluttered second-floor office at the theater, where a sample square of carpet serves as a drink coaster. “I was an introverted kid, but from the first night at the Rialto, I introduced all the movies. I am very visible at the theater.”

Boyd, who as a kid organized Super 8 screenings in his parents’ basement, opened his original Rialto moviehouse, the Rialto Cinemas Lakeside, on Summerfield Road in Santa Rosa on Jan. 14, 2000.

He moved to the current location in Sebastopol in 2012, and on Jan. 21, the Rialto will host a public party there to mark two decades of bringing films to Sonoma County.

Local fans

Over time, Boyd has developed a local cult following, in part because of the film events he orchestrates, the Jewish Film Festival and OUTWatch, to highlight films about Jewish life and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex community.

His fans went very vocally public on social media in 2010, when Boyd and his business and life partner, Michael O’Rand, lost the lease on the Summerfield Road site to Dan Tocchini, whose Santa Rosa Cinemas company owns 10 theaters, half of them in Sonoma County.

Some Rialto followers went so far is to vilify Tocchini as a corporate invader, which was ironic, given that Tocchini had lost the lease on the same property to Boyd a decade before and that Tocchini has deep roots in Sonoma County cinema - his father opened the first “talkie theater” in Santa Rosa in 1924.

The dust has long since settled on that controversy, and both theater operations - Boyd’s Rialto Cinemas and Tocchini’s Summerfield Cinemas - continue to thrive. But the incident helped cement Boyd’s local celebrity status, which he has nurtured with years of community work.

A farewell closing party for the Rialto’s Santa Rosa site drew a sold-out crowd of 800 fans. In the meantime, he had opened two other theaters: Rialto Cinemas Elmwood in Berkeley in June 2007 and Rialto Cinemas Cerrito in El Cerrito in July 2009.

In Sonoma County, Boyd continues to command attention.

“When people see me in public, they go, ‘You’re the Rialto guy!’” he said.

After a two-year hiatus Boyd dubbed “Rialto on the Road,” when he showed films at Santa Rosa’s 6th Street Playhouse, he settled on the former Sebastopol 9 Cinemas space on McKinley Street in Sebastopol and reopened the Rialto there in 2012.

Theater dreams

Born Mordecai James Boyd III, he is happy going by the nickname Ky, and somewhat relieved.

“My grandfather was called Mort, and my father was called Morty, so I got very good deal.”

When he was still a little boy, Boyd, now 55, knew exactly what he wanted to do when he grew up.

“The first movie I ever saw was Walt Disney’s ‘Aristocats.’ My mom took my brother and me to the Liberty Theater in Great Falls, Montana. And I was hooked on movies from that very first experience.”

He was little more than a toddler then, but it wasn’t just the movies themselves that enthralled him. He also grew to love the mechanics of showing them to other people.

“My parents had a big unfinished basement in their house, and I used to play movie theater. I would show Super 8 movies, both sound and silent, that I bought. I never wanted to be a filmmaker. I would use my mom’s ironing board as a concession stand and sell tickets to family and friends.”

State-of-the-art sound

Now, he has graduated to state-of-the-art sound and pictures, and his ironing board concession stand has been replaced by a lobby cafe, with most of the food made fresh in-house and served with local wine and beer.

While the Rialto is not the only Sonoma County theater that shows a mix of current blockbusters, smaller art films and documentaries, Boyd also has established his theater as the home for cinematic events with the Jewish Film Festival and the OUTwatch festival, featuring films by, for and about the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex community.

“It is always important to me as gay man to embrace the LGBTQI community,” Boyd said. “Representation is a powerful thing, and it’s important for them, and for the Jewish community as well. It’s important to see yourself and others like you on the screen and in the media. It’s validation.”

He also helped pioneer theatrical showings of live and encore live performances in the “National Theatre Live” and “The Metropolitan Opera Live” series.

Boyd visits the Toronto Film Festival every year to scout of films he might otherwise miss.

“I see 25 or 30 movies in 11 days,” he said. “I believe it’s a valid time investment to see the films before the critics review them.”

Boyd’s relationship with film distributors is as important to him as his rapport with local audiences, and he works equally hard at both.

“Some theaters just take the top 10 films in the country that are out right now,” he said. “I am a very active participant in the booking and managing of this theater.”

You can reach staff writer Dan Taylor at 707-521-5243 or dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter ?@danarts.