Earlier this year, a comics blog reached out to Cinefamily Accountability and solicited an essay on Sammy Harkham and Cinefamily. [1] This is that essay.
I was pleasantly surprised when Sammy Harkham emailed me. Surprised, because I had been trying to reach Sammy’s younger brother Dan— though I’d never actually met either of them. Pleasantly surprised, because nearly everyone I’d spoken with described Sammy, the artist, as “the good one,” “the nice one,” or “the talented one.”
This was 2018, mere months after the disastrous collapse of the Cinefamily, a single-screen movie theater on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles. Sammy and Dan founded the Cinefamily in 2007, hand-picked an Executive Director, and installed themselves on the organization’s Board of Directors. (A former Board President later characterized meetings to me as “friends just hanging out and drinking.”)
For most of a decade, the Cinefamily had seemed a joyful and glorious place, hosting the best screenings and events of offbeat Los Angeles. Except Cinefamily had a darker side. Management and Board Members were out of control. Staff and volunteers were physically and emotionally abused. Money was embezzled and fake attendance numbers were reported to distributors. Published reporting at the time depicted men in positions of power engaging in sexual assault. I talked to people who described worse. One long-time insider told me he understood Cinefamily to be “basically a criminal enterprise.”
News of all this broke in August 2017, and the Board quickly accepted the resignations of the two individuals subject to the most horrific allegations. The Board suspended Cinefamily operations; it promised an independent investigation and a town-hall-style meeting. But there was no open meeting, and the Board was dogged by charges that the investigation – the one Board Members claim cleared themselves – was hardly independent. Then, after months of silence, Cinefamily’s Board announced the organization’s dissolution.
As a longtime patron and supporter (“black card member” for the real heads), I was initially heartbroken at the loss of Cinefamily. I pressed the Board for details. How could black card members support the organization? What even happened, and how was it allowed to happen? Would the Board make people whole? (Full disclosure: I am a $250 creditor.) I got no reply.
With only silence from the Board, I looked for clues elsewhere— and found a big clue had been dropped in October 2017 with the California Secretary of State. The Harkhams were not, as the Board had promised, working to make things right. They had instead quietly filed paperwork to rebrand the theater. They were gambling on the public’s short attention span. To provide a record, I launched the website Cinefamily Accountability.
To understand what had happened, I talked to over three dozen Cinefamily stakeholders, including staff, volunteers, and members. I talked to Board Members and top management—including both Disgraced Figures. I examined internal financial documents and talked to experts in Board governance. There was no dispute about the fact that Cinefamily had left identifiable victims in its wake, the main question was how the Board would move forward. With the Harkhams having filed a new LLC for Fairfax Cinema, we seemed to have an answer.
I’d written to Dan — the brother named on the LLC paperwork — but in June 2018 I received an email not from Dan but from Sammy.
“Hi Jon,” he began, “Your email has been forwarded to me and I wanted to take the opportunity to answer your questions.” As we traded emails, he acknowledged problems at Cinefamily and explained that “I am taking the reigns [sic] on this new endeavor… so that I can vouch for everything we are doing.” Sammy pointed to “a goal for a transparent, accountable, and healthy business for EVERYONE” (emphasis in original). Before leaving town, Sammy offered “to get together for a coffee and a biscuit and a chat” on his return to continue the conversation.
I was disappointed — though not shocked — that this meeting never happened.
Sammy and Dan ultimately opened Fairfax Cinema on Christmas Day 2019. After controversy caused distributor A24 to pull out of the opening night show, Sammy posted an apologetic “open letter to the community,” promising “full transparency, by communicating openly both within the company and with the public.” Simultaneously, and in a different register, Fairfax Cinema attacked critics on social media. Fairfax Cinema was weighed down by its ties to Cinefamily, but it was ultimately the COVID-19 pandemic that closed theater doors in March 2020.
The space reopened in October 2020 as Brain Dead Studios. New management told the press they are “just leasing the space” from the Harkhams, though the arm’s-length-landlord line was also sporadically deployed at both Cinefamily and Fairfax Cinema. Brain Dead has declined to answer detailed questions about ties to the Harkhams or Cinefamily. The new entity is structured, unlike Cinefamily, with no public oversight. We don’t know if or how Cinefamily assets were transferred to this new entity—or if the new entity may be on the hook for Cinefamily liabilities. We do know the Harkhams still own the property. We also know that in November 2022, Sammy Harkham was listed as a programmer at Brain Dead.
Despite his recent denial to the New Yorker, there does seem to be a film-centric drive around Sammy. His family purchased a movie theater. In between founding Cinefamily there in 2007 and Fairfax Cinema in 2018, he released a 2015 short film he’d co-written and -directed. His latest work — the graphic novel “Blood of the Virgin” — would seem to emphasize his pulsions: it is set in and among a particular Southern California film scene. One recent review in The Guardian commented on “Harkham’s portrayal of LA’s seedy, grindhouse scene.” A review in Kirkus praised the book’s “psychologically complex” exploration of “the bad behavior of Hollywood.” In the L.A. Times, Carolina Miranda concluded the work is “about… ultimately, what it means to ‘make it’ in a biz that carries the word ‘exploitation’ in its core.”
Sammy’s made it — and he knows from exploitation. The Cinefamily scandal is one of Hollywood’s cautionary tales about boys behaving badly, and Sammy was involved since day one. Strange how little he gets asked about that.
[1]
After requesting this essay, Henry declined to publish it, which, frankly, was kind of annoying.