Will film lights shine on City Lights?

Starr's bookstore doc still seeks funding

A much-anticipated film focusing on a legendary San Francisco literary institution, one with enduring Beat connections, remains in the balance but a history in print of the same city outlet is also in preparation and certainly likely to see the light of day. City Lights fan and local resident JONAH RASKIN, our Bay Area eyes and ears, follows progress on both projects…

STARR SUTHERLAND, an honorary Beat and a dyed-in-the wool rock’n’roller, has been working on a documentary about City Lights Bookstore, one of the few such stores in San Francisco, and City Lights Publishing, one of the few publishing houses in the city.

Sutherland tells me that sometimes the bookstore has bankrolled the publishing company and sometimes the publishing company has bankrolled the store. Whatever, it has been a long and fruitful relationship.

He's actually been working on his doc for more years than he’d like to remember. He has interviewed dozens of individuals, especially writers and artists; interviews that add up to hundreds of hours and that offer a complex portrait of the literary and cultural life of San Francisco.

Sutherland might finish his doc – I hope he does – and then again he might not, at least not anytime soon. To finish it he needs money. Making a documentary takes time, a team of editors and researchers, and, yes, investors. I have had skin in this game. If and when funding arrives, I'm supposed to be one of the writers for the project. I think I have the credentials. So does Sutherland.

Pictured above: Legendary SF bookstore City Lights

I've written and published articles about City Lights, and I know the store intimately well. I've been buying books there ever since about 1975, and City Lights has hosted several book events for me, including a launch for my book teeling the history of ‘Howl’.

Sutherland recently applied for a big grant from a federal agency and didn’t get it. One of the reviewers commented that it wasn’t clear if the doc was about City Lights or Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the founder of the bookstore and publishing company, who died at 101 in 2021. As Peter Coyote, the ex-Digger and voice-over for Ken Burns’ documentaries, noted in an interview with Sutherland, City Lights and Ferlinghetti were virtually one and the same for decades.

That’s the tricky part: disentangling the man from the institution it became after he went on trial in1957 as the publisher of Howl and Other Poems and was found not guilty of violating the obscenity laws. The judge ruled that ‘Howl’ had artistic value. Most every poetry lover knew that.

Ferlinghetti and City Lights went on to accomplish big things after the 1957 trial, during the Vietnam War, the Summer of Love, and all through the rest of the twentieth-century. Now, with Elaine Katzenberger at the helm of the bookstore and the publishing company, City Lights has continued to be a destination for book lovers, fans of the Beat writers and members of the extended Beat family. Katzenberger has expanded the kinds of books City Lights publishes: more books by and about women and people of color than during Ferlinghetti's reign. Bravo Elaine!

Pictured above: Elaine Katzenberger, at the City Lights helm today

Though the store was closed during the pandemic, which hit San Francisco hard, it bounced back and now might be busier than it has ever been with poetry readings and launches for new books about art, politics and cultural revolution. I've attended several of them, including one for a poet from Gaza, including one for Mosab Abu Toha, a poet from Gaza now living in exile in Egypt. The book events have made me feel richly rewarded.

City Lights will go on whether or not Sutherland finishes and releases his documentary, but it would be a feather in his cap and a tribute to the store and its publishing arm if he brought the project to completion. I've watched parts of the documentary and like it. Perhaps what I like best about it is that it honors the many people who work at City Lights, keep it up and running, and who are operating behind the scenes.

One man or one woman can’t sustain City Lights, not even a Ferlinghetti or a Katzenberger. Someone has had to sit at the front counter, sell books, collect money, and connect to customers who seem more than just customers but rather active members of a kind of global conspiracy against corporate interests.

Sutherland might not complete his doc, but John Bugg, a professor at Fordham University in New York, will surely finish his book about City Lights. Writing and publishing a book, as difficult as that might be, is less complicated than making and screening a movie.

Pictured above: The bookstore hosts a launch with authors Pat Thomas and Peter Hale plus late poet Neeli Cherkovski earlier this year. Image: Jonah Raskin

I met with Bugg a few times, have corresponded with him and know that he's a diligent researcher and a skilled wordsmith who will do justice to the store, the publishing company and the people who have kept both afloat through hard times and bountiful times.

A San Francisco without City Lights is quite unthinkable. Looking back at the past six decades one can see that City Lights helped to make San Francisco and to spread its legend around the world. Closure is not imminent, but if and when that day were to come, citizens will rally to keep it going, as they have done in the past. I know I'll lend a helping hand. After all, City Lights has illuminated the darkness and created a global community of writers and readers, activists and rebels.

See also: ‘City Lights, cameras, action?’, September 10th, 2023