page_title: Orson Welles Cinema
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Orson Welles Cinema / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: The Orson Welles Cinema on Massachusetts Avenue a few days after an electrical fire caused it to close in May 1986.
context_page_description: The Orson Welles Cinema was a movie theater at 1001 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts that operated from 1969 to 1986. Showcasing independents, foreign films and revivals, it became a focal point of the Boston-Cambridge film community.
context_section_description: Film personalities associated with the Orson Welles Cinema include the first house manager, future actor Tommy Lee Jones, during the spring of his senior year at nearby Harvard University. Producer-screenwriter John Semper (Class Act, Spider-Man) was an employee, as was the Brazilian film composer Pancho Sáenz, future writer-director Martha Pinson and future sound editor David E. Stone.
  The career of writer-producer Fred Barron began in 1975 when he used the history of Cambridge’s The Real Paper as the basis for a screenplay, Between the Lines. When Joan Micklin Silver brought Hester Street (1975) to the Welles Cinema, she was joined at the Welles Restaurant by Barron and others. When someone asked what she would direct next, she answered that she was looking at screenplays. Barron stood up, left the restaurant and returned with his screenplay. The success of Between the Lines (1977) led to a short-lived television series, also titled Between the Lines.
  On January 2, 1975, Nicholas Ray appeared at the Welles for a Q&A session after the showing of the David Helpern documentary, I’m a Stranger Here Myself. Other filmmakers and musicians who made personal appearances or visited at the Welles Cinema included Peter Bogdanovich, Edward Dmytryk, Ed Emshwiller, Jean Eustache, Gary Graver, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Jim McBride, Vincente Minnelli, Nicholas Ray, George A. Romero, Harold Russell, François Truffaut, Orson Welles and Neil Young. After Steven Lisberger premiered his Cosmic Cartoon (1973) at the Welles, the animated short received a Student Academy Award nomination, and he went on to make Animalympics and Tron. Rob Morris, former film intern, busboy, and waiter (for the restaurant next door) started a two-man company that created the first commercial multimedia computer system in the mid 1980s.
caption: The Orson Welles Cinema on Massachusetts Avenue a few days after a fire that reportedly started in a popcorn machine caused it to close in May 1986
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