Noir City 6: Notes from the Margins

• Friday's opening night was near-capacity, despite a raging rain storm. Saturday's program did in fact sell out the 1400-seat Castro Theater. Yes, San Francisco is film mad!
  
• Noir City always has a literary bent, not surprising when you think of all the great writers associated with the genre. A book table is always doing a brisk business. Saturday evening featured a book sigining from the authors of a new noir fiction collection, A Hell of A Woman. See The Evening Class for interviews with the authors at from the signing.
  
• Host Eddie Muller not only wrote a story for the Hell of a Woman book, he then went out a made a 20-minute movie out of it, featuring the venerable noir icon Marsha Hunt. The Grand Inquisitor premiered (favorably) on the Saturday night bill, and Marsha Hunt herself graced us with her considerable presence.
  
• Crime writer extraordinaire James Ellroy proved to be a great warm-up act for Saturday's showing of one his favorites, The Prowler, leaving us all "reamed, steamed, and dry-cleaned." Muller revealed that he put the touch on Ellroy for some funds toward the new print.