Today we are taking another look at the legendary Orson Welles Cinema (1969-1986), located at 1001 Mass Ave. The theater opened with a festive candle parade on April 8, 1969, taking over the space previously occupied by the Esquire Cinema since 1964.
The cinema’s first films were Luis Bunuel’s Simon of the Desert, Orson Welles’ The Immortal Story, and a midnight movie, Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The original owner was folk musician Dean Gitter, programs were created by then-Harvard Law student Peter Jaszi, and according to MassLive, its first house manager was actor Tommy Lee Jones, then a Harvard student.
The theater featured a 400-seat main auditorium and eventually added two small additional screening rooms. Throughout the years, they specialized in first run films of all types – art, foreign, and independent; some revival series (including their screening of the 1972 Jamaican reggae classic “The Harder They Come”); popular series like a science film festival; children’s films; and a film school.
As the focal point of the local film community (and hands-down the place to be in Cambridge), the theater was not without controversy. In 1970, the theater was raided by the Mass State Police for showing the avant-garde theatrical revue “Oh! Calcutta!” on video. The owners and staff were arrested and spent the night in the Cambridge jail.
In April 1970 the cinema announced their Pornographic Film Festival, dubbed the “Sexploitation Film Festival” by protesters. According to a Harvard Crimson article, the theater’s owners encouraged feminist groups Bread and Roses and Women’s Lib to attend the films and help “create a discussion” with the audience. This never happened, according to Liane Brandon, a member of Bread and Roses and a burgeoning filmmaker at the time. Instead, the owners “got a protest and an earful.” As a result of these protests, Brandon and other women had their own films shown at the cinema around a year later (see poster below – Brandon’s film is “Anything You Want To Be”). Brandon would go on to found New Day Films and produce award-winning independent films. You can watch “Anything You Want To be” here.
In 1985 the cinema showed Jean-Luc Godard’s controversial film, “Hail, Mary,” which was met with protests from religious groups and a request from the Cambridge city government to not show the film, apparently due to concerns over crowd-size.
Less controversial – but still popular – programming included the Intercat ‘76 cat film festival, shown the week of April 22, 1976. This festival was founded by actress and experimental filmmaker Pola Chapelle in 1969 with INTERCAT ‘69: The First International Cat Film Festival, “a five-hour program of films about cats” that began screening in New York before coming to Cambridge and then internationally, in 1973, 1974, and 1976. Festival showings included experimental films by Roberto Rossellini, Maya Deren, Alexander Hamid, Francois Truffaut, and an instructional film titled Fluffy the Kitten. Bard College continued to host this festival, as of 2016.
Another popular festival at the theater included the 24-Hour Science Fiction Film Marathon, which began in February 1976 and continues to be held today at the Somerville Theatre.
On January 7, 1977, the theater succeeded in getting the actual Orson Welles to visit the theater for the premier of his docudrama “F for Fake” (1973). Welles and his cameraman used this occasion to shoot footage inside the auditorium for their documentary “Filming Othello” (1978).
In addition to films, other operations at the cinema included the aforementioned Orson Welles Film School; a photo shop; record store; bookstore; and the Restaurant at the Orson Welles. The theater also published their own newsletters, of which we have a few copies in our Cambridge Ephemera Collection. All of the newsletter images below are from 1973.
On May 25, 1986, a fire broke out at the theater, purportedly started by a popcorn maker, and the theater permanently closed. It is now a mixed retail space. A documentary film by Garen Daly on the Orson Welles Complex was in the works as of 2015.
About the building: Built in 1921 for Philip Silberstein as a one-story retail structure; changed to two stories in 1988.
Additional Reading:
A 2017 post on the cinema from our Instagram.
