SBIFF Gives Fiesta 5 a New Lease on Life

SBIFF Gives Fiesta 5
a New Lease on Life

State Street Movie Theater to Be
Transformed into Santa Barbara Film Center

By Nick Welsh | Photos by Ingrid Bostrom
October 10, 2024

It was a wet and rheumy white sky of a new morning. A Tuesday in late September. A solitary guitar note hovered over the paseo adjoining the Fiesta 5 movie theater in downtown Santa Barbara. Homeless people who claim this skinny stretch of paradise — drawn by the availability of public restrooms — were securing shopping bags to the handlebars of their bikes.

It was time to greet a new day. 

Two weeks before — on September 16 — the lights went out on their next-door neighbor, the Fiesta 5, which for the past 47 years had welcomed hundreds of thousands of moviegoers with the promise of popcorn dreams and darkened comforts. Since then, its five big screens and all its old seats have been removed. An industrial-sized dumpster under the theater’s marquee bulged with the strain of all that mess. Nothing was left behind but faded memories.  

Elvis had left the building.

But maybe not. 

Inside the lobby, the theater’s manager, Sal Garcia — a stocky man graced with a warm, easy laugh — was waiting to give a tour to the theater’s landlord. He appeared in the form of Ed France, an employee of Santa Barbara city’s parking division. After a perfunctory walk-through inspection of the theater, Garcia turned the keys over to France. It marked the end of Metropolitan Theatres’ lease of the building it had rented from the city for almost half a century.

The Mayor Says ‘Wow’

Metropolitan Theatres is a modestly sized L.A.-based movie theater chain, the oldest in L.A., owned by the Corwin family. In Santa Barbara, it’s basically been the only game in town for decades. In addition to the Fiesta 5, Metro owns the über-iconic Arlington — where the classic Frankenstein premiered — plus the Metro, the Hitchcock, the Paseo Nuevo, the Fairview theaters, and of course the Camino Real fourplex out in Goleta. To date, Metro — as the theater company is called — has been the only operator the Fiesta 5 has ever known.

But as of this Tuesday, all that’s changed.

Amid much celebratory hoopla and uncharacteristically giddy euphoria, the Santa Barbara City Council voted unanimously to hand the keys to the Fiesta 5 theater over to Roger Durling and his high-flying nonprofit, the Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF). Even Mayor Randy Rowse, reflexively on the lookout for things seemingly too good to be true, was inclined to throw caution to the wind. “Wow!” he exclaimed. “It’s morning in America.”

According to the new lease, Durling — who during his 23 years at the helm of the SBIFF has emerged as Santa Barbara’s cinematic equivalent of Willy Wonka and his chocolate factory — has promised to equip the Fiesta 5 with state-of-the-art seats, speakers, and projectors; repair or replace the building’s decrepit heating, venting, and air-conditioning system; and transform the lobby, now threadbare, into a movie-themed art gallery.

In other words, Durling will make the old Fiesta 5 into a bright, shiny object, an engine for artistic and economic growth.

Aside from six months of temporarily deferred rent, he’s not asking City Hall for a dime.

Making Movie Theaters Great Again

Durling said he’s already raised the first $5 million of the needed $15 million to complete the project; he also conceded that he might have to raise a little more to make his dream — which first started hatching 10 years ago — come true.

As part of that dream, Durling promises to program the hell out of what he intends to now rename the Santa Barbara Film Center. He also intends to feature first-run independent films in one of the five theaters; first-run foreign films out of another; documentaries in a third; family-friendly and kids films in a fourth; and retrospective series featuring the works of directors such as Federico Fellini, who happens to be one of Durling’s cinematic heroes, in the fifth. “There is a hunger,” Durling said in a recent interview. “The audience is there.”

Durling gets downright evangelical when it comes to movies. They’re his salvation. They’re who he is. They’re his reason for being. He remembers seeing his first movie with his mother as a kid growing up in Panama. It was The Sound of Music. After that, “I was just obsessed,” Durling recounted. “Obsessed.”

People are much more open to different kinds of movies, he insisted, than Hollywood’s mainstream fare might suggest. Audiences are willing — eager, even — to take chances. “Film is not elitist. Film is the most common denominator there is. Even if there are subtitles, the average person can still relate to it. You can’t pander to your audience. They’re way too sophisticated for that.”

Getting to the Big Picture

In the devastating wake of online streaming, many theater chains — such as Metropolitan — have struggled to survive. COVID had functioned like an atom bomb. And the recent writers’ strike denied theater operators much-needed new product.

All that qualifies as the one-two-three punch that drove Metropolitan’s executive David Corwin to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection this past March. Not all theaters in the Metro chain find themselves in the same sinking boat. But screens in Santa Barbara — typically older and smaller — are drawing about half as much business as their counterparts in Goleta.

As part of his bankruptcy strategy, Corwin declined to renew his Fiesta 5 lease with City Hall. He wanted to stay, he told city officials, but he also needed to renegotiate the terms of his lease and pay less in rent. But City Hall officials noted that Metro had gotten significantly behind on rent; accounts vary as to how much is owed.

Durling had begun expressing interest in securing a downtown screen as early as 10 years ago, part of his grand plan to put the film festival on solid year-round footing. Back then, no screens were available. But when Metro filed for Chapter 11, Durling saw an opportunity. 

So, too, did City Hall.

City administrators issued what’s known as a Request for Proposals, or RFP. Corwin and Durling each submitted one.

Durling offered to raise $15 million and invest it in the theater; he would offer free programing to underserved kids and families, classes, and community access. And he was almost ecstatically bullish on the viability of art-house multiplexes, a relatively new hybrid sprouting up in metropolitan areas throughout the country. They are not merely surviving, Durling said — they’re thriving. “It’s not rocket science,” he added. “People are looking for different stories. It can be done.”

By contrast, councilmembers have said, Corwin was looking chiefly for a rent reduction. And it wasn’t clear if the city would ever get paid the back rent Metro owed. It was a choice between treading water and taking off.

Bringing People Back

Losing the Fiesta after 47 years had to sting for the Corwins and Metro. David and his father, Bruce, were not just any out-of-town businesspeople; they were true pillars of the Santa Barbara community — with deep emotional, political, philanthropic, and business ties to the city and county. Reasonable, respectable, accessible, and philanthropic.

Bruce Corwin — who died several years ago — was a big hug of a man. He was active in Jewish circles throughout Southern California, and the word mensch was often used to describe him.

Politically, Corwin knew his way around the block. In his youth, he had been arrested marching with Martin Luther King Jr. in a civil rights action, and in the 1970s, he offered support to Santa Barbara’s early liberal and environmental groups, including some of the more progressive members of the city council, such as Hal Conklin.

Around the same time, La Cumbre Plaza shopping center had opened on upper State Street, where it had all been cows and pastures. City Hall was suddenly seized by an urgency to protect its downtown retail core. As part of this strategy, someone in the bureaucracy had the creativity to suggest building a movie theater and retail shops and a parking lot, sometimes known the Lobero Lot. Back then, movies qualified as real events. They drew people downtown.

[Click to enlarge]: The 900 block of State Street, once vibrant with shops and restaurants, is now full of vacant storefronts.

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But when the Fiesta 5 was just getting off the drawing boards, it turned out City Hall was negotiating with another movie theater chain for the lease. This threatened the exclusivity Metropolitan Theaters then enjoyed throughout the South Coast. According to former City Attorney Fred Clough, who was involved in these negotiations, Bruce Corwin, when he heard about the competition, took his case directly to the City Council. Negotiations with the other chain abruptly stopped. Metro got the lease that it has held until this September.

Fiesta 5 first opened in 1977 when son David Corwin was still attending elementary school. But over time, he became a major player in the family business, eventually becoming its chief executive.

Where his father was expansive and gregarious, David was more analytical and reserved. After the city sent out the RFP, Corwin said, his efforts to engage officials at City Hall in discussions went nowhere. Corwin noted in a written statement: “Santa Barbara was always a place where we could meet, be transparent, and come to an agreement. This time was different, so we planned to move out.”

Longtime commercial real estate broker Steve Leider put it more bluntly. “After 47 years, they [City Hall] should have sat down and talked with him. After all that time, do you just throw someone overboard?” he asked.

Assistant City Attorney John Doimas, who spearheaded the bidding process, took issue with Corwin’s account. “The City Council appointed a negotiating team out of the City Attorney’s office [that met] with Mr. Corwin and his attorney several times, appreciating his position as a long term tenant,” Doimas wrote. After that, Doimas said, the RFPs went out.

A Bittersweet Truce

Given the long, essential partnership between the SBIFF and the Metropolitan Theatres, it was not unreasonable to worry that this new project might result in bad blood. The SBIFF has long rented Metropolitan’s Arlington, Metro, and Fiesta 5 theaters during its 10-day festival.

Although Durling did not respond for comment about this change, in previous interviews he had been quick to praise Metro and the Corwin family as great partners. Corwin himself sought to allay such concerns, albeit ambivalently. “We have always been a big supporter of the Film Festival and continue to be so, providing the Arlington as a venue once again next year, even as they were making a deal with the city to take over the Fiesta 5,” he said. “As film and theater supporters, we wish the Festival well.”

Corwin added that Metro will be upgrading its other theaters and “looking to possibly add screens in Santa Barbara.”

The Frustrating Years

For Councilmember Mike Jordan, the bottom line was always about people. Which of the two competing offers would bring more people downtown? What excites him most is the 5,000-volt shot in the arm he is convinced Durling’s enterprise will give State Street.

The 900 block of State Street — once a thriving hub of small restaurants and cozy shops — now is home to an alarming number of vacant storefronts. Even some of the occupied ones are businesses in name only. The former bank across State Street is now a pop-up Halloween store. A sign on the windows of what once was Room & Gardens announced the shop has flown to Montecito. The obvious star anchor of the block is the Apple computer store. But according to Mayor Rowse, Apple might also soon move.

For three long, frustrating years, Durling and councilmembers Jordan and Kristen Sneddon served on a star-studded committee charged with figuring out the future of downtown. But all the committee members fell to feuding over such divisive issues as bikes, cars, or pedestrians on State Street.

This summer, Durling dramatically left a meeting and the committee. He was deeply disappointment with the group’s utter lack of big-picture thinking. He was so upset, Durling later said, that he went outside and threw up. And he never went back. 

For members of the City Council, the commission’s long-term plans — the much heralded “flat-flexible and fun street scapes,” for example — remain many years and millions of dollars beyond reach. Short-term plans are cluttered with ephemeral slogans such as “street activation” and “programming.” Into this void, Durling’s grand plans to reimagine and reprogram Fiesta 5 sounds like the real deal.

Given Durling’s 23 years at the helm of the Film Festival — a highly successful three-ring circus over which he is the undisputed ring master — coupled with his impressive takeover and makeover of the once-moribund Riviera Theatre — councilmembers feel a high degree of confidence Durling can deliver the goods.

Because he has in the past.

A Tipping Point Has Come

What makes Durling’s plans for the Fiesta 5 so exciting — “necessary” might be a better word — to councilmembers today is exactly what made it so urgently needed back in 1977, when the theater was imbedded into a new city parking lot.

Both would bring people downtown.

That it’s happening at the same time the Farmers’ Market just relocated to its new Saturday morning space at the intersection of State and Carrillo adds a jolt of synergistic mojo to the equation. Likewise, the 78 units of residential housing about to open their doors to new residents by State and Gutierrez streets. And who-knows-how-many hundreds of new housing units that may — or may not — sprout up where the Paseo Nuevo shopping mall now stands.

Maybe Santa Barbara’s infamous logjam of inertia is breaking.

And it’s important to remember: Were it not for the Corwin family and Metropolitan Theatres, the Santa Barbara International Film Festival would likely not exist.

When Phyllis de Piciotto was first seized by the inspiration to start the film festival back in the early 1980s, she contacted Bruce Corwin, whom she knew from their days together at a Hebrew school in Los Angeles. They worked together in the 1970s, hosting a film series at the Riviera Theatre, which Corwin then owned, that combined movies with expert speakers.

From there, the idea evolved into what later became the film festival. “When she first called Corwin about the festival idea, he didn’t say, ‘Let me call you back,’” de Piciotto’s husband, Stan Roden, recounted. “He said, ‘Of course.’” When she asked for money, he said “Of course” and immediately wrote a $10,000 check. When she asked for theater space, he immediately made his theaters available.

Then Came Roger

By any reckoning, Durling makes an odd figurehead for the juggernaut the SBIFF has undeniably become. He readily admits he’s every bit as awkward and uncomfortable as he seems. If he shies away from shaking hands and pressing the flesh, it’s because he has the clammiest hands in Santa Barbara.

Yet it’s been under Durling’s direction that SBIFF seized on the strategic market opportunity that’s allowed it to land marquee actors, directors, and writers on the red carpet year after year.

Durling grew up in Panama, a precocious film geek, the son of a lawyer who had yet to ascend to the middle class. Movies were everything. As a kid, Durling said, he discovered he had a genuine knack for predicting Oscar winners. “I was Rain Man when it came to the Oscars,” he said.

He also studied the lives of great impresarios, circus masters such as Barnum and Bailey and Joseph Papp, the theater promoter much lionized for New York City’s Shakespeare in the Park festivals. Both of these fixations would serve him well, he said, when he arrived in Santa Barbara from Los Angeles in the early turn of this century, a failed playwright on the brink of suicide.

Durling moved to Santa Barbara because of romance. He had a boyfriend here with whom he opened the French Bulldog coffeeshop in Summerland. That quickly became a hangout spot for Montecito actors who’d either retired or were between jobs.

Durling said he was aware of the film festival but hated it. “It was awful,” he said. “It was so rinky-dink. It had no reason to be.” Durling was not shy about sharing such feelings. By then, de Piciotto had stepped down and had been replaced by a succession of new directors. In early 2000s, the festival was in the hole to the tune of $150,000, and the director was either fired or had quit midstream. Durling stepped up and reportedly offered to do the job for free. He got the gig.

He quickly changed the festival’s schedule to coincide with the brief period — “Phase II” as it’s known — during which Oscar nominees are allowed to actively campaign, and the studios are allowed to spend money on such efforts.

Santa Barbara — so close to Los Angeles, so far from God — was and remains home to a sizable contingent of voting Academy members. Durling says more than 200 voting members are registered here. A lot more, he said, are registered elsewhere — like Oprah, who is registered in Chicago — but live here nonetheless.

By making the SBIFF a vehicle by which Oscar nominees and their backers can campaign, Durling gained astonishing ease of access to Hollywood A-listers. Though, Durling recalled banging his head against the wall that first year to snag the likes of director Peter Jackson and actor Charlize Theron. After that, he never had to bang again.

At the same time, Durling deliberately set out to reinvent himself as an impresario. “The festival needed a bigger-than-life person,” he said. “I totally intended to become that person. That’s when ‘Roger’ was built.” Some would say Durling always had been that person, but that’s when he changed from dyeing his hair purple to black, wearing cranberry-tinted glasses with thick black rims, and dressing in more black outfits than Johnny Cash. Then there’s his fingernails — one day bubblegum pink, another day Brat green — in honor of Kamala Harris.

Great Movies All Year Long

Durling was always planning. He realized the festival needed a year-round presence to be economically and artistically sustainable. Seven years ago, the Riviera Theatre was a musty art movie house managed by Metropolitan but owned by now-deceased banker, developer, and philanthropist Michael Towbes. Durling and Towbes both loved theater; they would catch plays in New York City and trade notes. When Towbes was dying of cancer, Durling said, he reached out to the film festival to take over the theater.

Durling said he balked initially. The $5 million needed to retrofit the theater was a heavy lift. But Towbes persisted. The rest, as they say, is history. In the six years since, Durling has screened first-run independent films, first-run documentaries, first-run foreign films, a host of kids’ and family films, and late-night cheapo-cheapo cult movies.

About four years ago, the Hutton Parker Foundation relocated the SBIFF into permanent new digs on the 1300 block of State Street. There, the festival offers free screening for movies made by Santa Barbara filmmakers and a host of educational programs.

All this, Durling said, gave SBIFF the experience necessary to successfully program the Fiesta 5. “You don’t just put out a film anymore and expect the audience to magically show up,” he said. “At the Riviera, we send out a couple of newsletters. We educate people. And we’re more than breaking even.”

If all goes according to plan, Durling will reopen the Fiesta 5 on November 15, using rented seats, speakers, and projectors. “We’ll bring our own popcorn maker.” After this year’s film festival — the 40th — the theater will go dark for about five to six months so the renovations can take place.

“Do I lay awake nights worrying about this?” he asked. “Hell yes. But I worry about how I will raise the money. I don’t worry at all about whether the audience exists.” After a pause, he reflected, “Besides, what’s the worst that can happen?” Then — as if to answer his own question — he added, “To steal a line from the movies: ‘If you build it, they will come.’”