San Francisco’s Castro Theatre to be remodeled

The Castro Theatre, long a centerpiece of San Francisco’s gay district the Castro, is to be refurbished, according to SFGate.com. The 1922 movie house will soon be back under the control of the family who built it, the Nassers; they intend to keep the 1,500-seat movie palace running as a single-screen repertory house. Theodore Nasser, president of Burlingame, Calif.'s Nasser Bros. theater group, states, “We intend to continue with the Castro’s tradition of providing innovative and highly entertaining movies and festivals” as well as retaining both the current programmer and manager. In the meantime, entrepreneur and community leader Tom Rielly, who founded the Internet community for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgenders, PlanetOut, has formed the nonprofit Castro Foundation in an effort to restore the theater. Rielly has commissioned a feasibility study and launched a fund-raising drive to finance it. It is not yet clear just how the nonprofit Castro Foundation will be of service to the private owners of the Castro, however. While the Castro Foundation mission statement can be found at www.castrotheatre.org, Nasser, for his part, will only say, “We’ll just wait and see.”