Eddie Muller, the Czar of Noir

Growing up in San Francisco as the youngest of four children, Eddie Muller, 52, always wanted to be a writer. His father was a well-known sports writer for the San Francisco Examiner and Muller was drawn to his father’s work. He never romanticized writing, though, because he saw how hard his father had to work at it every day. “I love great writing,” says Muller, "but you do it, whether you’re inspired or not.”

Muller did not head straight into journalism. After a public high school education which he says was “horrible,” Muller took a detour to art school. He then worked as a print journalist for 16 years. In the 1980s, Muller was put off by the trend toward increasing corporate control of the press. Acknowledging his own independent, contrarian streak ("I have a great resistance to entrenched corporate culture”), Muller decided to strike out on his own.

Muller has since delved into projects that capture his imagination. He has been a filmmaker and actor; he has written seven books, three of them on film noir, which have earned him the nickname “The Czar of Noir.” In 2002, Muller started the San Francisco Noir Film Festival.

Muller and his wife, Kathleen Milne, have lived in Alameda since 1989.

You’ve worked many different jobs. How would you describe yourself? Bottom line, underneath everything else, I’m a writer. That was what I set out to be. I’ve written everything from articles, books and screenplays to museum labels. The museum labels are really hard. Shorter is the challenge. It’s one of the great travesties of the Internet that it allows people to blather on and on.

What publications have you written for? I worked for Chilton Company for 10 years. I wrote about the shipping and airline industries. I wrote for publications overseas. I was a stringer for all sorts of things and wrote on topics ranging from sports to changes in business logistics.

You have such a broad range of interests. Um, those things weren’t necessarily interesting! I was paying bills and learning my craft.

When did you start the San Francisco Noir Film Festival? We will be celebrating the tenth anniversary in January, 2012.

What are your responsibilities as the organizer of the festival? I pick the films. I convince the studios to let us show the films, which is not always easy. I am the face and voice of the festival and I do many of the commentaries on the DVDs.

What hooked you on noir? I always was fascinated by mid-20th century America. It clearly had to do something with my dad. In the very impressionable years when I was a boy, I didn’t have access to my father’s world. When I turned 16, I got to see this whole other world of the fights and it totally fascinated me. The fighters were such interesting characters.

None of that was popular in the '70s and '80s when I was growing up. In some respects, I always acted like a preservationist for aspects of American culture that I find fascinating. I really love these movies. There are timeless qualities about the films. Not only do they provide a historical look at that America, but the films themselves are better made and smarter than films made today. They were films made by and for grown-ups, as opposed to super-hero movies today, which are made for boys by slightly older boys.

What are some of the classic noir movies that you’ve shown at the festival? Where to start? Out of the Past, Criss Cross, Sunset Boulevard. Some are justifiably famous while some are unknown. With the profits, we were able to restore this film called The Prowler, which was all but unknown because many of the people who worked on it were blacklisted. It got great reviews and finally is out on DVD.

What are the basic elements of noir? There is noir content and there is noir style. Noir style, in the 1940s, was a very dark, foreboding approach to telling a story. They were mostly crime stories and the protaganists most often were the people committing the crimes. There are strong contrasts between dark and light and there is something menacing about the world.

Content-wise, a true noir story is about compromised people who do something that they know is wrong, but they do it anyway. A classic noir story is about a man who wants the unobtainable woman and she only wants money, so he commits a crime for the money. And it all goes bad. That’s Double Indemnity.

Why did you move to Alameda from San Francisco? This city is about as un-noir as you can get! I can give you a simple answer: I’ve been able to park my car in front of my house every night for 20 years!

What do you like to do in Alameda? We enjoy the fact that we can walk around.

Because you’ve parked your car. Right. When we moved here, we used to complain there was no where to go eat. Now we can eat out at a different restaurant every night, there are so many good places. We eat way too often at . We also like and .