Former Rialto theater moving to Sebastopol

Almost two years after Ky Boyd surrendered the lease to his Rialto Cinemas Lakeside independent-film theater in Santa Rosa and vowed to find another venue, he is purchasing the Sebastopol Cinemas.

"We're going to present a full spectrum of cinema" at what will become the reborn Rialto Cinemas in downtown Sebastopol, Boyd said.

The nine-screen theater will offer the sorts of art, foreign, classic and documentary films he showed for a decade on five screens in the theater on Santa Rosa's Summerfield Road, across from Howarth Park. He'll add mainstream and family movies in the league of "Moneyball," "The Help" and "The Ides of March."

"We're going to curate it the same way we curated it before," he said. "We're just going to have a broader palette of colors, if you will."

The 900-seat Sebastopol Cinemas was built in 1995 by Dave Corkill's Petaluma-based Cinema West theater chain. Corkill said he is selling the Sebastopol operation to focus on "building new, large theaters in larger communities."

A relatively small theater such as Sebastopol's is "better suited to smaller operators who can pay more attention to them," Corkill said.

Boyd plans to close the Sebastopol theater from Tuesday through Thursday and make some initial improvements to the building. He plans additional upgrades this summer and fall to the multiplex on McKinley Street near Sebastopol's police station

He noted that many Sebastopol residents patronized his former theater in east Santa Rosa.

"Some people will now be closer to us, some will be a little farther away than they were," he said.

Boyd had to vacate the Summerfield Road location in August of 2010 when the lease expired and property owner Lynn Duggan awarded it to the Santa Rosa Entertainment Group owned by Sonoma County's Tocchini family. The firm operates a chain of California movie houses that include Santa Rosa's Roxy Stadium 14, the Airport Stadium 12 near Windsor and Healdsburg's Raven Film Center.

The Tocchinis upgraded the Summerfield Road theaters and reopened them in November of 2010 as the rebranded Summerfield Cinemas. The venue has continued to run mostly independent, art and foreign films.

Joe Luis of Santa Rosa Entertainment Group said he's not sure that the Summerfield Cinemas will feel much impact from the opening of a similar theater 10 miles away in Sebastopol.

Since vacating the Summerfield Road location 20 months ago, Boyd has operated the mobile Rialto Cinemas. It has brought to downtown Santa Rosa's 6th Street Playhouse occasional films, performances of London's National Theatre Live and the Sonoma County Jewish Film Festival.

The Jewish Community Center contracted with Boyd's company to screen live performances of the Metropolitan Opera of New York City at the Jackson Theater at Sonoma Country Day School.

"One of the interesting things is that Dave (Corkill) approached us,"Boyd said.

He was attending the Toronto International Film Festival last year when Corkill phoned to propose that they become partners in the Sebastopol Cinemas.

Both Boyd and Corkill said separately that they decided it made better sense for Cinema West to sell and move on, and for Rialto Cinemas to develop the Sebastopol theater into an operation more actively tailored to the community.

"We played independents, but it hasn't been our focus," Corkill said. "It is their (Rialto's) focus."

Rialto Cinemas already has scheduled some special screenings in Sebastopol. The theater will show encore performances of La Traviata from the Metropolitan Opera Live in HD Series on May 9 and 12.

The radio show, This American Life, will show on May 10, and the documentary "Wagner's Dream" on May 14.

Boyd removed the Rialto marquee from the Summerfield theater in August of 2010. "It got a little dark there for a while," he said, "but we've found the light at the end of the tunnel."