Annie Paladino

The cast of Tenderloin

Mark Ellinger spent six years living on the streets, addicted to heroin. When he shot some bad dope and ended up in the hospital for two and a half months, he resolved that things would be different when he got out.

"It was a decision I made that whatever door opens, I was going to walk through it," he said. "That was my modus operandi, and it worked. "

The door that opened was getting a digital camera from a neighbor who didn't want it anymore. Ellinger, who had studied at the S.F. Art Institute when he moved here from Ohio, lived in a single room occupancy hotel in the Tenderloin. When he returned from the hospital, he started taking pictures of the neighborhood, particularly the Beaux Arts architecture .

"The perspective that I started working on and continue working from is to look past the veneer of crime and decay," he said. "Look up, actually. Look up above the street level, because that's where you'll see the architect's original intent."

Ellinger started a blog, Up from the Deep. http://upfromthedeep.com/ This is how director and writer Annie Elias found him when she sought people to interview for a documentary play for the Cutting Ball Theater, about the neighborhood where it resides -- the Tenderloin.

The result, Tenderloin, has its opening tonight (Friday) at Exit on Taylor.

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San Francisco Film Society

The Waiting Room

Medical professionals at Oakland's Highland Hospital emergency department see about 80,000 patients a year. The hospital also has northern Alameda County's main trauma center, so during the year, more than 2,200 severely injured patients go there, whether they have health insurance or not. Documentary filmmaker Pete Nicks' wife works as a speech pathologist at the hospital, so for years he heard stories about the patients at Highland. He wanted to make a film where the voices of the uninsured would be heard. The finished product is The Waiting Room, which screens this week at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

The film tells the stories of patients including a financially strapped carpet layer with bone spurs, a young man with a testicular tumor, and a child who has a high fever and can't talk. Along with the film, Nicks also created a website that includes more stories from the hospital, and he plans to make it interactive so patients to share their experiences.

Nicks talked with us about getting access to the hospital, the power of asking people to tell their tales, and the amazing staff at Highland.

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Photos by Erin Browner

The cast of Killing My Lobster Chops Down the Family Tree.

San Francisco sketch comedy group Killing My Lobster turns 15 this year, and to celebrate, it launches a frontal assault on the idea of family. Killing My Lobster Chops Down the Family Tree opens tonight (Thursday, April 26) at The Jewish Theatre. Director Rana Weber's cultural jabs focus on dissecting families in a progressive society. "There's gay families and straight families, and families with no limbs," she says. The troupe has taken multiple punches at San Francisco's quirks and flaws, and many (OK, some) locals are OK laughing at themselves. The troupe's video "The Coffee Wars" turned the microbrewing trend into a History Channel-esque episode on war between loyalists of different coffeehouses. Another Killing My Lobster viral video presents spending a free day in the city as a Twilight Zone episode -- "Why Is Everybody Here?"

The Exhibitionist sat down with Killing My Lobster's creative director, Andy Alabran, to hear about the hilarity of the troupe's latest show, its plans to buy its own home, and hosting a very merry Quinceanera.

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San Francisco Film Society

Intouchables

At a Tuesday night San Francisco International Film Festival screening of Intouchables, the projectionist found an apropos time to stop the film. Just as protagonist Driss was corralled by cops after a bout of Steve McQueen-like driving and exclaimed "Merde!" the screen went black.

The problem wasn't Driss saying "Merde!" The problem was the subtitle noting its English equivalent. There was none. In fact, the film fest had been mistakenly sent a copy of the movie without subtitles, according to festival staff. But the crowd didn't know this as several attempts were made to remedy the problem. Certainly it turned out to be a boon for the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas' concessionaire.

In the end, the crowd was offered a deal: Stay and watch the film or get a refund/exchange for the ticket. It very quickly became obvious who was and was not a French speaker, as a large portion of the audience filed out.

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John Waters

John Waters' reputation precedes him -- and we bet that gives him no end of glee. The Baltimore native featured the plentiful drag queen Divine in many of his early features, and he took on topics such as baby farms, an adult who lives in a playpen, and a competition between two people to be the most disgusting human on the planet. Waters makes San Francisco his home -- at least part time. He calls his residence in the city "the apartment that Hairspray bought me," referring to one of his biggest commercial successes.

Waters appears tonight (Wednesday, April 25) at the California College of the Arts, screening his 2004 film A Dirty Shame and answering audience questions afterward. We spoke with him several days ago about censorship, bad taste, and what he likes about San Francisco.

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Hanne Blank

Be careful what you assume, and be careful what you consider "normal." So sings the perpetual chorus here in über-diverse San Francisco. As it should be. But there's a big assumption a lot of us probably have overlooked. It involves the heterosexual. It's not that "Some people aren't hetero," but rather, "Hetero hasn't been considered the norm -- or even a thing at all -- for very long." Author, historian, and lecturer Hanne Blank breaks it down in her book Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality. Blank shows how equating hetero with normal affects our laws, cultural institutions, scientific study, artistic expression, and ideas of love and romance. Underlying it all are assumptions about others -- and ourselves -- that most of us have never thought to even acknowledge.

She appears Tuesday (April 24) at Good Vibrations on Valencia. We spoke with her recently about her book.

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Pink & White Productions

Estelle goes to work.

People are often surprised when I tell them that I never really liked porn. It is not a judgment call; porn just never did anything for me. After being exposed to different parts of the industry in the past year, though, I realized that wasn't completely true. Most of the porn I'd seen before 2010 was mainstream porn, which always looked staged. I fuck, I watch people fuck, and that's not what it looks like to me. But when I was exposed to queer porn, a new door opened. I couldn't pinpoint what was different, but something definitely was.

Shine Louise Houston

Last week I was invited to watch a day of filming on the Crash Pad Series. The series and website is based on Pink & White Productions' first film The Crash Pad, which was released in 2006 and remains popular. (Pink & White was named Best Dyke Porn Studio by SF Weekly in 2009.)

"Its premise is that somewhere in San Francisco there's a secret apartment," says performer Jiz Lee. "If you're lucky enough to be given the key, you can visit the crash pad and have the best sex of your life. There are rules, which include only using the key seven times before passing it on."

Shine Louise Houston, the head of Pink and White productions, explains "the premise of Crash Pad was inspired by Essex Hot Tub, a 112-degree hot tub located in a beautiful yard in the back of a house. The owner changes the keypad code every now and then; it is one of Berkeley's best-kept secrets." (Read an interview with Shine Louise Houston posted during last year's Good Vibrations Indie Erotic Film Festival.)

I arrived Saturday morning to a house in San Francisco that has been turned into a porn set. I was greeted by Lee, Houston, and Tristan Crane. Our talent for the morning was Estelle and Christoph. I walked into the living room, which led to the set. Houston explained they had just redecorated with a new bed. To decorate it they hired a bed stylist -- who doesn't have a bed stylist? apparently it's a real profession. Across the bed was a cupboard filled with sex toys such as plug-in vibrators made by Hitachi.

Click through for the rest. (Warning: NSFW)

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Kevin Hees

Are you ready for Bill Bellamy?

"I got nine felonies -- bitch, I'm Bill Bellamy!"

The famously esoteric Berkeley rapper Lil B immortalized the comedian Bellamy (who first came to public recognition in the 1990s as an MTV host) with an unlikely song last summer for no other apparent reason than a convenient rhyme. The real Bellamy, for his part, offered himself up to do the remix, but, alas, it never materialized.

Bellamy snatched up his favorite enterprising young comedians that he met from the four seasons he spent hosting the show Who's Got Jokes on TV One for his Ladies' Night Out tour, which stops at Cobb's Comedy Club for three nights starting Friday. A special from the tour called Crazy Sexy Dirty airs on Showtime on June 2.

During a phone interview, the congenial Bellamy politely juggled his responses with exchanging pleasantries with an admiring female fan at a Manhattan Starbucks who sounded like she wanted to attack him (sexually). He promised that, despite the name, the show won't leave men out and, in fact, it might actually be a good place for a guy to meet a new chick.

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SF Weekly art director Andrew J. Nilsen gives you a first-person perspective of what it took to compete with the top-notch racers in the recent Bring Your Own Big Wheel 2012, a race down Vermont Street, which is as twisty and curvy as the famous part of Lombard Street, except it's not famous (and its surface just looks like road, rather than fancy-schmancy bricks).

The video (set to the Dead Kennedys' "Police Truck" among other tunes) also includes pre-race tuning and customization as well as front- and rear-view perspective of the downhill action.

Nilsen got such a kick out of this project he created another video on what the race looked like from the sidelines -- except things are going backward, at four times their normal speed.

"Party!" says Nilsen.

Click through to see his creation.

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Ken Yeung

Jolie O'Dell is one of my favorite San Francisco writers. In the brief time we've known each other, we have eaten lunch at a strip club, gone trampolining at the House of Air, and played charades at the Palace Hotel after Brian Wilson beat us both in the SF Weekly Web Awards for "Best Twitter Personality." By day she's a whipsmart tech journalist, formerly of Mashable, and now of VentureBeat. By night, you can find her waxing domestic at her kick-ass blog, The Single Housewife. O'Dell recently published her first book, Android Photography: A Guide to Mobile Creativity, which teaches you how to create, edit, and share pics with the Android's in-phone camera. Filled with practical tips, app low-downs, and lots of gorgeous photos to inspire, I want to buy this book and I don't even own an Android phone. O'Dell and I talked about her book, whether lesbian hook-up apps are a pipe dream, and Feminism 101.

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