Fire at Berkeley’s East Bay Media Center erased decades of film history

A firefighter walks out of the East Bay Media Center on 1939 Addison St. after it was destroyed by a massive fire before dawn on Monday,. The media center’s teaching equipment, studios, festival screening room and 35-year archive of local and regional filmmakers were destroyed. Credit: Ruth Dusseault/Bay City News

Just two weeks after the passing of its co-founder Mel Vapour, the East Bay Media Center was destroyed in a massive fire in the predawn hours of Monday. 

At around 3:15 a.m., a fire broke out at the center’s home, 1939 Addison St. in Berkeley. 

Crews arrived to find 30-foot flames breaching the roof. Officials evacuated residents from nearby apartment buildings, and neighbors watched the firefight from the street as the building was consumed and the roof collapsed.

The building was unoccupied at the time and no one was hurt, but a 40-year-old film cultural center was lost. 

The East Bay Media Center has provided equipment, training, mentoring and a screening room to Bay Area filmmakers since the mid-1980s. 

“Today, I’ve just been in shock and trying to recover and get my feet on the ground,” said the center’s owner Paul Kealoha-Blake. “To think of the media center and the loss that we have, I mean, we had all sorts of hardware, intellectual properties, archives, etc. — the entire festival history.”

Kealoha-Blake said there were countless items in the building spanning back to when it was Grassroots Video, before it became the East Bay Media Center. 

“I had stuff in there from the very beginning,” said Kealoha-Blake, realizing his personal archive was lost in the fire as well, and just how far back it went. “I had originally come to Grassroots Video to get three-quarter inch equipment so I could document the 1984 Democratic Convention in San Francisco.”

For 34 years, the center hosted the Berkeley Video & Film Festival and screened documentaries, narratives, experimental and animation films, and Film School Shorts by the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles. Kealoha-Blake said the festival archive was lost in the fire. 

The EBMC was in the process of accepting applications for its popular summer Teen Media Camp, which will no longer be possible.

“I just can’t believe it,” said Kealoha-Blake.

One of the most important filmmakers associated with EBMC was pioneering African American filmmaker Allen Willis, who died in 2011. He documented Lawrence Ferlinghetti and many of San Francisco’s Beat-era poets. Willis’ significant works included Stagger Lee, a jailhouse interview with Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party.  Willis won an Emmy for his 1972 film Can You Hear Me? in which documented young black poets. 

The Berkeley Pacific Film Archive has preserved a collection of Willis’ films, but Kealoha-Blake is unsure if Willis’ smaller projects were lost in the fire. 

“Allen had covered a tremendous amount of Berkeley history,” said Kealoha-Blake. “Even his small pieces. Love On the Rocks was a film he had done with kids who were writing love notes on the rocks in the Berkeley Marina area. I mean, its endless. I’m pained even to think about it.”

The East Bay Media Center is gutted by fire. Credit: Ruth Dusseault/Bay City News

Aside from the production equipment, Kealoha-Blake said that in the last two months, the center had been putting together shipments of festival archives to send to a company that would digitally transfer their holdings from film.

“We were doing what we could,” he said, still letting the shock set in. “Even as I’m talking to you, you know, I’m remembering scenes and pieces of film. Oh, gosh.”

The cause of the fire is still under investigation, according to the Berkeley Fire Department. The flames gutted the entire structure and blew out the windows, but on the wall facing the street is a certificate of recognition from the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association for “Outstanding Renovation and Restoration of An Office Building, May 1979.”

“Yeah, that’s right there!” said Kealoha-Blake, “For me, as a documentarian, what a remarkable thing that is to see. It’s still there with this burned out whole, it’s so sad.”

The Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association certificate of recognition remains screwed to the side of the East Bay Media Center. Credit: Ruth Dusseault/Bay City News