Silent Film in the Tenderloin
Club Foot Quintet perform original scores to
“One Week” & “Day Dreams” by Buster Keaton
Saturday July 26, 2025 | Doors 7pm Show at 7:30pm
At the Great American Music Hall | 859 O’Farrell St. SF, CA 94109
$20 GA / $35 Reserved Seating | Purchase tickets via See Tickets
TLM Members get $10 Off
A special Sounds of the Tenderloin program at the Great American Music Hall explores the silent film era in the neighborhood, featuring Richard Marriott’s Club Foot Quintet performing original scores to two short films by Buster Keaton: “One Week” and “Day Dreams” (a premiere!). Plus presentations on the Tenderloin’s film exchanges by Kathy Rose O’Regan of SF Film Preserve and on Market St. Movie Marquees by Jim Van Buskirk and SF Neon.
During the silent film era, the Tenderloin was the heart of San Francisco’s cinema scene. TLM presents a program exploring the history of the city’s nascent movie industry, downtown’s multitude of extravagant theaters, and its robust culture of movie-going. This “Sounds of the Tenderloin” program features local legends the Club Foot Quintet performing live music–as was the fashion in the silent era–to two early short films by Buster Keaton: One Week and Day Dreams, the latter of which was filmed in SF and for which composer Richard Marriott premieres a new, original score!
Silent Film in the Tenderloin is co-presented by SF Film Preserve, a new local organization that “restores, preserves, and provides access to the world’s cinematic heritage” and features SFFP’s Executive Director Kathy Rose O’Regan presenting on the concentration of “film exchanges” in the Tenderloin, which functioned as local distribution hubs for SF’s proliferate cinemas. Jim Van Buskirk and Randall Ann Homan and Al Barna of San Francisco Neon survey the neon signage and iconic marquees of the movie palaces that lit up Market St. in the heyday of cinema.
This program is part of TLM'sSounds of the Tenderloin series, which animates the neighborhood's undersung cultural history through live music and is supported by a grant from the Specified General Fund for the Museum Grant Program under the California Cultural and Historical Endowment.