Oakland’s Grand Lake Theatre is a 1926 Art Deco show palace that first hosted vaudeville shows and silent movie screenings accompanied by the bass-note oscillations of a Wurlitzer Hope Jones Unit-Orchestra Pipe Organ. The classic venue is symbolic of its city, which made it the ideal spot for the Bay Area premiere of a the debut feature by another Oakland icon: activist, musician and now writer-director Boots Riley, who came of age as a moviegoer at the venue. “I saw Star Wars here,” he told an audience that packed the house during the recent San Francisco International Film Festival, where the […]

There’s a sequence early in A Thousand Thoughts, Sam Green and Joe Bini’s “live documentary” about the Bay Area musicians, the Kronos Quartet, that may seem familiar to anyone who has watched a music biopic. Scored to the ticking of a metronome, it’s a “rise to fame” montage of newspaper headlines, all taken from the years in which Kronos were becoming new music superstars. On top of each article, the bold-faced type indulges in the same wordplay, a riff on the Greek meaning of the group’s moniker: Kronos’s “time is now,” one headline reads; the group has hit “the big […]

Kirsten Johnson was among the most in-demand documentary DPs even before her much-celebrated 2016 film Cameraperson. Johnson has shot more than 50 films for such directors as Laura Poitras, Alex Gibney and Kirby Dick. Her latest film, A Thousand Thoughts, is a doc on the Kronos Quartet from directors Sam Green and Joe Bini. The film will be presented at Sundance as a “live documentary” with Green narrating live and the Quartet conducting the score in person. Before its premiere, Johnson spoke with Filmmaker about finding innovative ways to film a concert and how a shot from Cameraperson wound up in A […]