Making a movie of memories from Sun-Ray
The place that opened in 1927 as Riverside Theater — the first in the state equipped to show talking pictures — now is silent, its screens dark.
Its last picture show was last weekend.
Carlos Alvarez was one of the people who went to the theater, partly to see one more movie there and — in his case — partly to make a movie there.
He has been filming a documentary about Sun-Ray Cinema.
He says this documentary isn’t about real estate, leases and all that led to the closure of Sun-Ray in Five Points. That does come up in the interviews he did. But this, he says, is a documentary focused on the people who went to the theater and worked at it — and them coming to some sort of closure about it closing.
“Sun-Ray is not a place, but rather a people and an energy, and while the sun will rise on it again, I know that it will never quite be as it was,” he said.
He obviously isn’t alone in his nostalgia and sense of loss. But in the week that it became a silent movie theater — and not in a Charlie Chaplin way, or a flashback to the temporary pandemic closure — I liked the idea of writing about that loss as seen through Alvarez’s eyes.
Partly because they’re focused on this meta project — a film about a place where people went to watch films.
Partly because his eyes are only 19 years old.
I’m sure some 19-year-olds are excited about the new ownership’s plans to renovate the old building and make it a live music venue called FIVE. And for some who are much older than 19, this change brings a sense of nostalgia for the era in the 1990s and early 2000s when it was Club 5.
But for those of us who are going to miss the theater being there, this felt larger than the loss of one place to watch movies.
Alvarez felt that. Even though he grew up in the age of streaming, he still has a love of going to a theater to see a movie — particularly the theater in Five Points.
Movies with grandmother
Alvarez says his relationship with film started with going to movies with his grandmother, Francine Stofanik.
When he was in second grade, he started seeing movies with her nearly every weekend, typically near where she lives in Orange Park. They continued their movie-going through when he was in high school at Stanton College Prep. His grandmother’s favorite movie is “La La Land.” They saw it together when it first came out, then three more times.
In high school, he also started going to movies on his own most weekends — at Sun-Ray Cinema.
He’d go there to watch movies he’d been hoping to see. But he’d also go there to see movies he knew nothing about, trusting in owners Tim and Shana Massett to put interesting and important films on the theater’s two screens.
“And I really cannot think of a time when I was disappointed,” he said.
When the pandemic hit, Alvarez spent some of that time exploring film history. That’s when he became sure that he wanted to do more than watch movies. He wanted to spend his life making them.
At Stanton, he took a film class taught by Brandon Cox, another champion of Sun-Ray, and made two short films. The second one, “Fiasco,” screened at film festivals in Jacksonville — the Jacksonville Film Festival and Sun-Ray’s Sleeping Giant Fest — Seattle, New York and Spain.
He headed to Florida State last fall. And after two semesters there, he was accepted into the school’s prestigious BFA program in the College of Motion Picture Arts. He’ll start that program this fall. He’s already started what he describes as “my first large-scale documentarian endeavor.”
‘The beauty and sadness of it all’
After he heard the news that this was the end for Sun-Ray, at least in this location, he started going to the theater most days during the last month. He hung out there, trying to absorb as much as possible, see whatever films were being shown and shoot his own film. He figures that maybe the latter was a bit of a coping mechanism.
“Being there, capturing the kinds of moments that define Sun-Ray in my memory and why I loved it so much, felt purposeful and took me out of grieving the space a bit,” he said.
With the help of friends Tony and Sunny Gupta, he filmed everything from the restocking of the candy to the sweeping of floors. He interviewed patrons and workers and heard their stories of connection to the place.
He was there on the final night for a screening of “DoggieWoggiez! Poochiewoochiez!”
When the theater became the SunRay in 2011, continuing the venue’s long film history, this was the movie that was shown. It is described as a surrealistic remake of a 1973 film consisting entirely of borrowed clips from countless dog films.
It’s safe to say it is the kind of movie that you won’t find in the cineplex anytime soon. But it was a big hit at SunRay.
Alvarez says that on that final night at the theater — which extended after the screening to people staying and sharing memories — “the beauty and sadness of it all coalesced into an energy that I’ve never really experienced.”
He went to Los Angeles this week, seeing backlots and film museums on a family vacation that added even more inspiration for what lies ahead — starting with taking what he shot at Sun-Ray and making a film.
He hopes to have about a 40-minute film completed by the end of the year. He plans to make it available free online. He’d love to have a screening in Jacksonville.
“Though with Sun-Ray gone, I’m not sure where that would be,” he said.
The Sun-Ray owners have talked about re-opening somewhere else. Here’s hoping that happens. But even if it does, what happened this month was the end of something in Five Points.
Alvarez says he’s still processing that as he edits what he captured in the closing weeks.
“The thing that Sun-Ray’s closure elucidated for me is that I think cinema is a perpetual machine of connection,” he said. “The films I saw at Sun-Ray brought me closer to myself, and brought me closer to the people I watched them with, but also brought me into a greater community of film-lovers in Jacksonville that I hadn’t known about … until I first went to Sun-Ray.” mwoods@jacksonville.com
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