Senator Theatre

Not wanting to see the Senator Theatre closed on their watch, city officials are offering $320,000 to keep it open - provided the 70-year-old movie house is turned into a nonprofit business. "The Senator Theatre is a Baltimore icon," Deputy Baltimore Mayor Andrew Frank said yesterday. "It's ingrained in the psychology of Baltimore. ... Its closing would be felt in ways that would be manifest throughout the community." Frank outlined the plan Monday in a letter to Senator owner Tom Kiefaber, who has warned in recent weeks that the landmark theater, deeply in debt, could close without financial help.

Is it curtains for the Senator Theatre? The historic and beloved movie house is heavily in debt, and the bank has decided to foreclose. An auction could come as quickly as next month. If the right bidder steps forward, a sale could potentially give the landmark a fresh debt-free start. But a public sale on the sidewalk that resembles the walkway outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre would leave the fate of the Senator in the hands of the highest bidder, who might prefer to hold church services in the grand old palace instead of movie premieres.

Alarmed by the Senator Theatre's close call with the auction block last month, Baltimore's Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation voted unanimously yesterday to establish an immediate six-month moratorium on architectural changes to the Senator's exterior and to recommend to the City Council that the 67-year-old Art Deco building be designated a landmark. The commission voted also to write a letter to the City Council urging it to support the Senator's continued existence as a first-run movie theater.

The Heritage Shadows of the Silver Screen Museum and Cinema is launching a national campaign to select the 50 greatest African-American movies and actors of the 20th century. Heritage founder Michael Johnson announced the campaign Wednesday at a luncheon at City Hall, where Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke, City Council representatives Sheila Dixon, Helen Holton and Rochelle "Ricki" Spector and other dignitaries saw clips from the pending HBO movie "Introducing Dorothy Dandridge."A theatrical screening of the film next week at the Senator Theatre will officially kick off the campaign, Johnson said.

When Steven Spielberg's World War II drama "Saving Private Ryan" returns to theaters today, many Baltimore filmgoers will marvel at the movie's extraordinary depiction of the events of June 6, 1944, when American troops invaded the beaches of Normandy.But what many will not know is that many of the men portrayed in the scene were from Maryland. Historian Joseph Balkoski, whose book "Beyond the Beachhead: The 29th Infantry Division in Normandy," would like to remind local audiences that a piece of Maryland history is up on screen.

After a months-long stalemate over what to do about the ailing Belvedere Square shopping center in North Baltimore, key business leaders, city planners and residents have sat at the same table to map plans for the future.More than 120 people -- including Jim Ward, owner of the half-vacant shopping complex, and Tom Kiefaber, owner of the nearby Senator Theatre -- gathered Saturday at Govans Presbyterian Church in the 5800 block of York Road to develop strategies to revive the area."It was a long process to bring all the interested parties to the table, to a place they could trust each other enough," said David Goldstein, a lawyer, resident and president of Belvedere Square Action Group.

The kid is nervous. He's totally lost, his mind full of "what ifs?" and "what abouts?"He's never been to a movie premiere, never had to hold the door for the Hollywood crowd, never had to find his place among doctors, lawyers and society insiders milling around inside the Senator Theatre lobby.He's just an usher. It's an anonymous kind of job, low-key and low-stress. Somehow he ended up at the door for last night's world premiere of "Liberty Heights." Somehow he got picked to wear the oversized burgundy doorman's jacket, complete with matching hat, white shirt and black bow-tie.

Listen up, hon. The Baltimore of the 1950s lives, and here's how you can find it.Today at the Senator Theatre (which harks back to 1930s Baltimore -- talk about nostalgia!), native son Barry Levinson's latest cinematic love letter to Charm City, "Liberty Heights," opens. Set in 1954 and influenced by his own experiences growing up, Levinson's latest recalls a gentler time, when Pennsylvania Avenue was the center of black culture, when The Block was still The Block, and when, for a Jewish kid from Northwest Baltimore, everything east of Falls Road was uncharted territory.

Starting Friday, the Senator Theatre will run a weeklong series of films from the Library of Congress' National Film Registry. Opening night will feature an 8 p.m. screening of Orson Welles' classic "Touch of Evil" (1958), starring Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh as a honeymooning couple caught in a nightmarish web of corruption in a Mexican border town, preceded by Bugs Bunny in the 1957 cartoon "What's Opera, Doc?" The films will be introduced by cinematographer Allen Daviau.Twenty-five more films will be shown throughout the week, including Gordon Parks' "The Learning Tree," John Huston's rarely seen documentary "The Battle of San Pietro," F.W. Murnau's "Sunrise," the labor documentary "Salt of the Earth" and "The Searchers."

Filmgoers were treated to two outstanding artists introducing groundbreaking films at the Senator Theatre last weekend. On Friday, award-winning cinematographer Allen Daviau introduced Orson Welles' 1958 thriller "Touch of Evil," which delighted the audience with its rich black and white photography and soaring camera work.Daviau, who photographed the Barry Levinson films "Bugsy" and "Avalon," explained that "Touch of Evil," which begins with a legendary tracking shot, owes its distinctive look to the lightweight camera equipment that Welles used -- equipment that gained prominence when used by the French New Wave directors just a few years later.

TODAY AMERICAN CA$INO: This documentary, filmed in Baltimore, explains how the current economic recession affects the working class. The film's premiere screening, to benefit the Community Law Center, takes place at the Senator Theatre, 5904 York Road, at 7:30 p.m. The screening is followed by a panel discussion. Tickets are $10. Go to senator.com. PEACHES: Electronic musician Peaches is no peach. Her songs are best known for their explicit lyrics, and her stage shows, which often explore gender identity, can get raunchy.

CABARET Euan Morton: Taking inspiration from Karen Carpenter (his muse) and Boy George (his most famous role), this Broadway actor brings his broad take on cabaret this week to CenterStage. It's the theater's second plate of its self-described "theatrical tapas," yet Morton's lively show should be more than filling. His four-day run starts 7 p.m. Thursday. Web: centerstage.org DVD 'Up': A rat that cooks? Talking cars and silent robots? The animators at Pixar specialize in harebrained ideas that seem doomed to fail.

"Touch of Evil" opens with a mind-blowing traveling shot that starts at the level of a belt buckle and then swings left and right and up as a quicksilver figure sets a time bomb and places the device in the trunk of a car. Continuing in one unbroken movement as a blonde and a millionaire get into the car, the camera pulls away into a panoramic view of the border town of Los Robles, Mexico, then floats down to follow Mexican narcotics investigator Vargas...

City officials are moving ahead with plans to sell or lease the historic Senator Theatre to an operator who would keep it running as a movie theater or convert the 70-year-old landmark to a performing arts venue. In a request for proposals issued Monday, the Baltimore Development Corp. said it is seeking plans that would keep the 900-seat theater active, allow it to serve as an anchor for nearby communities and maintain the building's art deco exterior and interior features. The city purchased the financially troubled theater's mortgage in May after the owner, Thomas Kiefaber, was unable to make payments on a $1.2 million loan that the city had partially guaranteed.

In the Hollywood version of Wednesday's auction of the Senator Theatre, the auctioneer would have intoned, "Going once, going twice," and right there, in the pregnant pause before he lowered the gavel to the podium and consigned the historic Art Deco movie house to the wrecking ball, a sudden outpouring of community support would have materialized, It's a Wonderful Life-style, to bail out the plucky owner and hero of our story, Tom Kiefaber. Or maybe in a slightly more realistic version, the theater would have been bought by a mysterious bidder who turned out to be a rich, eccentric movie buff and promised to keep the place going.

Viewers coming together in an adrenaline rush or an aesthetic high as they soak in pristine images from a beautiful big screen. That's been the promise of American moviegoing as a major piece of our culture - a promise that the Senator Theatre has fulfilled year after year. The good news from Wednesday's auction is that the Senator won't become a church hall or a college auditorium. But it will take ingenuity and commitment on the part of movie lovers and arts funders to see that the bad news doesn't come.

A masterpiece of avant-garde filmmaking becomes a masterpiece of restoration with Manhatta. Film historian Bruce Posner spent almost four years on this inspired salvage job, using some of the same cutting-edge digital tools developed to restore better-known pictures such as Kurosawa's Rashomon. The labor paid off: This print renews the sharp, gritty luminosity of the 1921 collaboration between photographer Paul Strand and painter Charles Sheeler. It plays Saturday at 3:30 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art, a perfect setting for a quintessential art film.

Senator owner lauded by theater group Senator Theatre owner Tom Kiefaber, whose financially troubled North Baltimore landmark is scheduled to go on the auction block in 12 days, is being lauded by the Theatre Historical Society of America for his devotion to the 70-year-old movie house. Karen Noonan, president of the society, said her group will be making a presentation to Kiefaber during its visit to the Senator, set for 1:45 p.m. today. In the 20 years since Kiefaber bought the Senator from his family's theater business, it has become a showpiece among the nation's few remaining single-screen theaters.

Classic film screenings continue at the Senator Theatre this weekend with Carol Reed's magnificent The Third Man, starring Joseph Cotten as a pulp novelist visiting postwar Vienna, where he learns that his good friend, Harry Lime (Orson Welles), has died. Or has he? Gorgeous (Robert Krasker won an Oscar for his stark black-and-white cinematography) and witty, the 1949 movie includes a great monologue from one of the principals in which we learn the connection between Western morality and the cuckoo clock.

The Senator Theatre will go on the auction block July 21. The date was set at Thursday's monthly meeting of the Baltimore Development Corp., which will be overseeing the sale; the minimum bid will be $1 million. No location or starting time for the auction has been set. "If someone is willing to come and bid the million dollars, that's acceptable, and they'll own a theater," BDC executive director Kimberly Clark said. "We'll work with those folks on an outcome that's best for the community."