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Description of Pictures: Including pictures taken with Allyn "AJ" Johnson during the "Fabelmans" member screening event. Johnson created the collage in the 1970s when he worked at the Biograph Theater in Georgetown.
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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
AFICOL_220430_07.JPG: The Biograph Theatre Mural Collage
The Biograph Theatre mural collage was put together over 18 months, mostly at night, by Allyn Johnson, a long-time employee of the late, lamented Georgetown repertory film house and close friend of owners Alan Rubin and Leonard Poryles. The images came from hundreds of classic (and not always classic) movie posters than the pioneering theater had accumulated since it opened in 1967. Measuring 24 feet by eight feet, it was finished in 1975 and installed in the hallway connecting the theater and its restrooms.
When the Biograph closed in 1996, Johnson, by then well established in the historic restoration business, removed the mural and transported it to his home in Northern Virginia, where it remained in storage until its own revival.
The Biograph opened and closed with the same double feature: Jean-Luc Godard's MASCULINE-FEMININE and Jean Renoir's A DAY IN THE COUNTRY. Closing night also featured PINK FLAMINGOS at 11:00 pm, a nod to the midnight movies and John Waters films that were a staple of Biograph programming.
AFICOL_221115_05.JPG: Allyn “AJ” Johnson, John Kelly
AFICOL_221115_09.JPG: Allyn “AJ” Johnson was the former-Biograph employee who created the movie mural at the theater
AFICOL_221115_17.JPG: In Memorial [sic]
Alan Rubin, whose Biograph Theater if Georgetown was for 30 years an incredibly important and influential champion of repertory film, both domestic and foreign, introducing many new directors to Washington audiences, championing animation, documentaries and the avant-garde., while producing numerous week-long specialized festival programs. (among [sic] them FilmFest DC, the Jewish Film Festival and Expose Yourself, featuring local filmmakers). He also helped champion the then=new concept of midnight movies when John Waters's notorious "Pink Flamingos" played there for a full year in 1973.
Alan passed away November 6th [2022] after a long battle with Parkinson's.
Alan, it has been an amazing experience to be my friend and mentor for fifty years
Thank You ... AJ [ Allyn “AJ” Johnson ]
Alan Rubin
Leonard Poryles
Description of Subject Matter: The Biograph theater operated on M Street in Georgetown from 1967 to 1996. Longtime Biograph employee Allyn “AJ” Johnson created a montage of movie posters through about 1975. In 2019, the mural was installed in the lobby at AFI/Silver.
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
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