Film mavens and filmmakers in San Francisco have long known about the marvelous, lovingly curated series known under the names "Strange Sinema," "Cinema Soiree" and others in which Oddball Films and SF Media Archive founder Stephen Parr would screen a selection of clips from his archive, all on a specific theme, and never more than once. At 8 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays, in the midst of his dizzying archive loft space at 275 Capp Street, Parr put on shows for a devoted base of curious fans and friends, culling gems from his archive that perhaps only he held the keys to — an archive that will now have to be sorted and relocated by other film lovers now that Parr passed away unexpectedly on October 24.

As Mission Local reports, Parr's death was "possibly as a result of complications from Parkinson’s disease," though the details remain unclear.

What is clear is that his Oddball Films archive, some 50,000 film prints and 25,000 analog video and audio tapes, a good deal of which you can explore and stream for free in digitized form on his website, is going to need a new home, and film experts are trying to figure out where that might be.

Friends described Parr as nerdy, intense, and also generous and always hospitable.

A documentary short about Parr, called Oddball, was made just a year ago, and you can watch it in full here. Parr tells filmmakers Joshua Moore and Matthew Rome that he felt he was more in the memory business. "I’m screening memories," Parr says in the film. "I’m screening history, I’m memorializing it to a certain extent, reinvigorating it, giving it a new take, recontextualizing it, remixing it."

The archive has everything from historic footage, to 1960s commercials, to quirky bits of home movies and industrial reels of factory operations. He was a collector of the discarded, the specific, and the curious bits of filmed history that might otherwise get lost to time and careless peoples' closets and basements.

And as Mission Local notes, filmmakers the world over came to know him as the go-to source for such oddities, when they needed to use them for their own work.

7x7 profiled Parr in May and noted that, "The laundry list of companies that have licensed [Oddball Films'] footage for everything from TV commercials to music videos is just as impressive and ranges from news organizations (BBC), film heavyweights (Dreamworks) and documentary producers (National Geographic). Even the band Motley Crue has been an Oddball client."

Also, though, as local historian Chris Carlsson tells Mission Local, Parr was one of those characters that defined our city, at least in an era that that may have already passed. "The guy was actually in the spirit of the Mission that I think of as the artistic, sharing, open-minded, curious and friendly attitude that people have had here for a long time. That does seem to be dying, and it’s sad to have one of the stalwarts of that spirit pass away.”

No sooner did the news spread this morning that the great Prince was dead at age 57, but local party promoters and DJs were gathering up their Prince records and putting out the word that there'd be dancing tonight. As Marke B. at 48 Hills shows us, there's already a half dozen parties planned for tonight, Thursday, April 21, to honor the legendary artist whom the New York Times calls "a wildly prolific songwriter, a virtuoso on guitars, keyboards and drums and a master architect of funk, rock, R&B and pop."

Among the things planned are Sweater Funk & Friends Celebrate Prince at the Make Out Room (10 p.m., free), this Prince Tribute at the Cat Club (9 p.m., $7 after 9:30), and an all-Prince set in the always 80's-rich DJ set of DJ Jim Hopkins at 440 Castro.

80's dance party Sexitude PM, at Oasis, hosted by D'Arcy Drolinger will be doing a Prince tribute tonight, too (9 p.m., $8 advance, $10 at door).

Will there be some impromptu dancing in Dolores Park as soon as work lets out for most people? Probably.

And no doubt Heklina will do something at Mother (Saturdays at Oasis) but it won't be this weekend because she's in Hawaii doing a road tour of Mother at Hula's in Honolulu. Also, the Bowie drag tribute required a couple months to pull together, and this one surely will too.

See more Thursday Prince events here at 48 Hills.

Related: San Francisco Fans React To Sudden, Inconceivable Death Of Prince

At the opening of what turned out to be a triumphant, shutout Game 5 of the World Series for the Giants on Sunday, a tribute montage played on the Jumbotron honoring the late Robin Williams, showing him in a bunch of his most famous roles. And throwing out the ceremonial first pitch were the three Williams children, Zak, Zelda, and Cody, with longtime friend Billy Crystal playing catcher.

As the Giants posted on their Twitter account, the three Williamses issued a statement saying,

We are honored to be here in support of the tribute to our father, someone who loved his hometown and especially the Giants. For all of us, it is a tremendous delight and a little surreal to throw out the ceremonial first pitch of a World Series game for our team to our dad’s best friend. We could not think of a better way to celebrate his memory. Let’s go Giants!

Zak looked genuinely overwhelmed, and moved, after throwing the pitch to Crystal, and Zelda and Cody Williams both looked on from the side of the mound. As the AP reports, Crystal and Zak then hugged in front of the cheering crowd.

Robin Williams had been a longtime Giants fan, having moved to Marin County as a teenager, and he famously came out onto the field at AT&T Park cheer the Giants on in 2010 during the National League Division Series, weeks before the Giants won that World Series.

USA Today has more photos, and below is the full video from MLB.com.

All previous Robin Williams coverage on SFist.

San Francisco lost a legendary figure in the arts and drag community this week with the passing of Arturo Galster. Tributes to the performer — known for his impeccable Patsy Cline and appearance in the film Vegas in Space — have been flooding his personal Facebook page since his death was announced.

Marke B. of the San Francisco Bay Guardian writes that Galster was integral in a "moment in the late '80s and early '90s when SF's drag scene unmoored itself from polite old school diva kabuki into a squall of gloriously punky, ironic camp."

Galster's exact age and cause of death are unknown, but sources say he was injured last Saturday, following a Peaches Christ production of Showgirls at the Castro Theatre. The Guardian says Galster had a head wound, but didn't see a doctor, and it may have been the result of an altercation in Dolores Park. We'll update you if any further details come to light.

Watch Galster as Patsy Cline with his band the Memphis G Spots performing "Rio Grande" on the Lavender Lounge show in 1992.

Update: Per a reader tip, Arturo Galster's family has released a statement clarifying his cause of death:

"The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for the City and County of San Francisco has ruled that homicide was not the cause of Arturo Galster's death. Arturo was the victim of a violent attack 36 hours before he died, but it was unrelated to his death. The Medical Examiner has not issued his final report but has stated to the family that the most likely cause of death was congestive heart failure."

[San Francisco Bay Guardian]

For your little afternoon break, please appreciate James Garner acting his ass off in this brief scene from The Americanization of Emily (1964), also starring Julie Andrews. He delivers a monologue about war and warmongering that's still prescient today in a film written by Oscar-winning screenwriter by Paddy Chayefsky (Marty, Network). The movie, according to both Garner and Andrews, was one of the personal favorites of both of their careers.

Garner died Sunday at home in L.A. He was 86.

Jose Julio Sarria, who in 1961 became the first openly gay person to run for political office in the U.S. — running unsuccessfully for the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco — died at his home in New Mexico this morning at the age of 90. The San Francisco native and World War II veteran is also known for founding the Imperial Court system (a pre-RuPaul's Drag Race contest, if you will) after declaring himself in 1965, in drag, Empress Jose I, the Widow Norton. Because of his pioneering work at the forefront of the nascent battle for LGBT rights in 1950s San Francisco, he's been called "The Rosa Parks of the Gay Rights Movement."

Sarria rose to local fame in the growing gay community of San Francisco in the late 1950s at the Black Cat bar in North Beach, where he was nicknamed "The Nightingale of Montgomery Street" and was known for his nightly performances of one-woman operas. He always closed each night by having the audience join hands and sing "God Save Nelly Queens" to the tune of "God Save the Queen." He performed regularly at the Black Cat until it closed in 1964.

After serving in the military despite his diminutive size — he allegedly "seduced" a recruiting officer to approve his admission despite being under the five-foot minimum height — he returned to San Francisco to go to college and become a teacher. His drag career began after being arrested on a "morals" charge (for alleged solicitation, which he denied), and realizing that he would have to abandon the teaching thing with that on his record.

Likely because of his own arrest, and having the soul of an activist, Sarria regularly admonished patrons at the Black Cat to stop living in secret and be proud to be gay. He famously said, "United we stand, divided they catch us one by one." He became a scrappy pioneer in combatting police harassment in an era when regular raids by police on gay bars in San Francisco were commonplace. Patrons were rounded up and charged with something archaic like being "inmates in a disorderly house" and often either saw charges dropped or had to plead guilty and pay a fine. Sarria brilliantly began a campaign to get more of these LGBT people to plead not guilty and force a court trial, overloading city courts and causing prosecutors to have to seek more evidence against them. The campaign eventually forced an end to these police raids, and kept San Francisco from having a Stonewall-style riot in the following decade.

Sarria also fought against the arrests of drag queens that regularly happened on Halloween, on charges of dressing as women with "the intent to deceive," by making handmade signs for them to pin on themselves saying "I am a boy."

He decided to run for political office in 1961 after police pressure on the gay community had begun to intensify, and after garnering 6,000 votes in the election, he shocked local leaders who for the first time realized that there was a gay voting bloc they might have to cater to in future. When Harvey Milk launched his first campaign in 1973, Sarria was there by his side.

While Sarria founded a number of pioneering organizations for gay rights, like the League for Civil Education, the Tavern Guild, and the Society for Individual Rights, his greatest legacy has been the Imperial Court, which has grown into a national organization that functions like the gay Shriners or Lion's Club, complete with annual drag balls and local coronations. He declared himself Empress of San Francisco after winning a drag ball in 1965, making reference to legendary town kook Emperor Norton, and since then the Court has continued to crown an Emperor and Empress each year. (Sadly, Marlena's bar in Hayes Valley, which was an ersatz clubhouse for Court folk, closed for good earlier this year.) The Imperial Court, which now has 67 chapters in the U.S., raises money for charities like the Matthew Shepard Foundation, and the Tijuana AIDS Project.

In 2006, with the help of then Supervisor Bevan Dufty, a section of 16th Street outside the Harvey Milk branch library was renamed Jose Sarria Court.

There is to be a memorial for Sarria in San Francisco, with a date and venue TBA.

[LGBT Weekly]
[BAR]
[Wikipedia]

SFist was saddened to hear that Corie Woods, the author of this week's SFist Memoirs article paying tribute to the late Warren Hellman and his Hardly Strictly Bluegrass legacy, passed away suddenly on Wednesday. She was 34. Born and raised in the East Bay, Corie was a huge part of the Bay Area music community now reeling from the loss.

Here are a few words from Corie's best friend, Emily Hirsch (pictured above):

I will always remember the fun times we had there [at Hardly Strictly], even when it was foggy and freezing. As you can see in the photo we look weathered but happy. Corie loved staking out a place and bringing lots of treats to eat all day while we listened to the music. She was friends with so many people that we would constantly run into people she knew who I couldn't ever keep track of. She was truly in her element there, surrounded by good music and lots of friends.

An audio recording of Corie's full interview with SFist, which was recorded on Tuesday night at Whiskey Thieves, can be downloaded here.

To the many folks who knew her, Sunday's concert will be both a tribute to Corie and her beloved Warren Hellman.

Update: The cause of death has not been determined. The autopsy results will reportedly take two to three months.

We don't know the full details just yet, but we'd heard that former child star Gary Coleman was hospitalized in Utah after falling in his home, and he has now died at the age of 42 of an intercranial hemorrhage. Here, People has an obituary, which they'd obviously been preparing just in case. Above, in lieu of Keyboard Cat playing him off, we give you this swell YouTube tribute.

August Coppola, who served as dean of the College of Creative Arts at San Francisco State and who created the famed Tactile Dome at the Exploratorium, died last week at his home in Los Angeles and the obit is just running today. The cause was a heart attack and August, brother to Francis Ford Coppola and Talia Shire and father to Nicholas Cage, was 75 years old.

He was an inspiring professor for whom a 150-seat theater is named at San Francisco State, and he was obsessed for a time with the idea and taboo of touch -- he even wrote a novel (now out of print) about a man who interacts with the world through touch.

He is also remembered for having pushed the City of SF to establish a High School of the Arts, which currently enrolls 1000 students.

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MSNBC giveth, and we couldn't resist. So here it is, all 3 hours of it for your scanning pleasure, in case you slept/worked through the televised event.

Great man, brilliant musician, bizarre icon, lover of children -- whatever you think of him, he has passed on to next plane of life. And much like they would for the death of the pope, throngs of the faithful and members of the news media from the world over will descend upon the Staples Center in L.A. for the Michael Jackson Memorial today, and it shall be relentlessly covered, on every channel, and in every newspaper, until all concerned have run out of breath, and ink. Below, our aggregate of updates.

• Our bros at LAist, note that MJ's casket will actually be on display at The Staples Center and that the LAPD have deployed so many officers to the area that the 1984 Olympics "pale in comparison." Also, they covered the gathering, and the merchandising, outside the Staples Center late last night.
• The Chron's got a live Twitter feed and a live video feed of the proceedings.
• The AP talks to fans worldwide, and did this interactive retrospective.
• The NY Times reports on the hot, illegal online market for tickets, and on the lineup of performers which includes Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, Lionel Richie, Mariah Carey and Usher.
• CNN is liveblogging.
• Everything starts at 10 a.m., and the elephants have already rolled in. As Defamer puts it, "See you in hell."

The details were fuzzier before, and it seemed like the place was being prepped for some kind of exposure. Now it is becoming clear that the co-owners of Neverland, a real estate firm called Colony Capital LLC, want to offload the place to some entrepreneur or mega-wealthy fan so that they can turn it into the tourist attraction it seems destined to become. They opened the property to the news media on Thursday, seemingly with the hope of showing it off to potential buyers. And Michael hadn't even been living there for four years -- after his 2005 child molestation trial he felt the spirit of the place had been destroyed, and he moved to another house five miles up the road. In 2008 sold a share of the house to Colony Capital in order to assist with $24 million in mortgage arrears. So the road trip is still on, kids! All you have to do is show a press credential or pretend to be a wealthy buyer to get in!

The NY Times has this nice slide show of Neverland, which smacks a little of a broker's sales portfolio, especially since the place has pretty much been emptied of furniture. That is, except for the ice cream cart which was a gift from Elizabeth Taylor.

Sadly, for all concerned -- including the deceased -- Michael Jackson's public memorial is going to take place at the Staples Center, Tuesday, July 7th at 10 a.m. and tickets will cost $25. We're guessing Diana Ross is going to sing. In any event, we still encourage the die-hard fans and all those who never say no to a road-trip to swing on by Neverland, where plenty of sod-laying and moving van activity seems to indicate that something is going to happen there... and at the very least it will likely open as a tourist attraction that will rival Graceland both in size, and bizarreness.