Longtime film publicist Karen Larsen inside the Larsen Associates office in San Francisco in March. After 40 years, Larsen is stepping down from her role.
Brontë Wittpenn/S.F. Chronicle
Longtime Bay Area film insiders might have first thought it was an April Fool’s Day prank. But Karen Larsen doesn’t deal in jokes when it comes to her career.
When her firm released a statement announcing that she was “stepping back” after more than four decades of film publicity effective April 1, it came as a shock to the many independent filmmakers, fellow publicists, art house distributors, film festival organizers and so many more whom Larsen has influenced in the Bay Area and beyond.
If you haven’t heard of Karen Larsen, then she’s been doing her job right. It’s a publicist’s task to stay in the background and make sure the client is who becomes the one people know.
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“I always said I was helping someone else with their dream,” Larsen told the Chronicle during a recent visit to her San Francisco office at 360 Ritch St. “I still feel that way, especially with independent and young and new filmmakers. You’re helping, trying to get them the most (publicity) for their film so that the most people see it and it gets the most attention.”
As it turns out, it was Larsen who was living her dream too.
Karen Larsen, left, and Marshall Winn at KQED in 1978 when both were researchers on the PBS show “Over Easy.”
Courtesy of Karen Larsen
Second act
If a publicist were to craft a press pitch on her, it might read: As a girl born in Oakland and raised in Lafayette, Karen Larsen first fell in love with movies going to her local theaters, including the Park in Lafayette and the Orinda, where she smoked her first cigarette in the balcony and once saw Bob Hope in person.
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Movies became her passion while a student at UC Berkeley, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in general curriculum and hung out in the art house theaters near campus and became inspired by the films of Jean Cocteau, Ingmar Bergman and the French New Wave.
Married twice — marriage “didn’t really work out for me,” she said — Larsen embarked on a second act after her second divorce. She quit her job as an elementary school teacher and began working as a researcher, including for KQED’s “Over Easy,” a national PBS talk show during 1977-82, among other TV and radio programs. She even dated renowned Beat poet and City Lights Bookstore co-founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti for a time, helping him on a project to rename San Francisco alleys after noted Bay Area authors, such as Jack Kerouac Alley in North Beach.
She later became a talent coordinator and eventually a film publicist.
Beat poet and City Lights Bookstore co-founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti, left, and Karen Larsen, founder of the public relations agency Larsen Associates.
Larsen Associates
Larsen’s rise coincided with the explosion of film festivals and the independent cinema movement in the 1980s and ’90s. She got her first publicity job with the Surf theater chain owned by local legend Mel Novikoff and eventually struck out on her own, forming Larsen Associates in 1991.
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Larsen not only represented movies by established art house distributors such as Sony Pictures Classics, Magnolia, Neon, Zeitgeist and many others, but also represented festivals and up-and-coming Bay Area indie filmmakers.
“Karen really was the go-to person for all the Bay Area film festivals as we were all growing up,” former longtime Mill Valley Film Festival programmer Zoë Elton said. “She worked with a lot of first-time filmmakers. She has that kind of sensibility both of nurturing and mentoring people, and would really help filmmakers to understand what it takes to get your film out into the world.”
They include Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller, a husband and wife documentary duo who have worked with Larsen since their first feature, “Isadora Duncan: Movement From the Soul” (1989).
Karen Larsen holds a photos of herself working in the 1980s. Her firm Larsen Associates announced that she was “stepping back” after more than four decades of film publicity.
Brontë Wittpenn/S.F. Chronicle
Goldfine first met Larsen in the mid-1980s, when she was working in a post-production house and Larsen was renting office space in the same building.
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“For me, she was this heroine because she was a woman who was doing her own thing,” Goldfine said. “In the mid-’80s, it was still pretty sexist. Seeing her on a daily basis getting her own thing going, while I was in this post-production house mostly being run by men, Karen was this huge role model.”
By the time Goldfine and Geller were ready with their second film, “Frosh: Nine Months in a Freshman Dorm” (1994), they had no distributor and no money to market it. Larsen not only helped fill a preview screening at the Roxie Theater, she attracted press coverage as well.
More recently, they turned to Larsen to help them pack Bimbo’s 365 Club for the filming of a big scene of their upcoming documentary, “Everywhere Man: The Lives and Times of Peter Asher.”
Filmmakers “from all over the country and all over the world began to rely on her because she really, in so many ways, has been the go-to … she knows this area so well,” Geller said. “She’s been part of the art scene all the way through, and she’s just really enjoyable to work with.”
Actor Glenn Close, left, and publicist Karen Larsen during the publicity campaign for “Maxie” in 1985.
Courtesy of Karen Larsen
Big-name clients
Coincidentally, filmmaker Steven Soderbergh is one of her first and last clients. Larsen represented several Soderbergh titles over the years, beginning with his audacious debut “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” which had its world premiere at the 1989 Sundance Film Festival. Larsen was in the audience.
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Soderbergh’s latest, “The Christophers,” which opened in Bay Area theaters just last week, is one of her last titles.
Larsen remembers the filmmaker once conducting a Q&A after a screening at Landmark’s Embarcadero Cinemas wearing silk pajamas.
“All the audience could focus on was his outfit, and finally somebody said, ‘Where’d you get that?’” Larsen recalled. “He said, ‘When I come to town, I go to Haight Street to the vintage shops.’ He said he had, like, three pairs of silk pajamas.”
As a publicist, every client is a friend, whether they’re difficult or not. But Larsen said she clicked with more than a few celebrities over the years, including Glenn Close, who she first worked with on the 1985 film “Maxie,” and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who was in four films she publicized.
“We just got along,” Larsen said of the late Hoffman. “One time we just hung out in Yerba Buena Gardens. He was staying at the W (hotel), so I took him over there to show him the waterfall and all that stuff, and we just talked.”
United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta, left, and Karen Larsen embrace in 2017 during the publicity campaign for “Dolores,” a documentary directed by Peter Bratt.
Courtesy of Karen Larsen
Another time, she was shepherding Andie MacDowell during her stop in San Francisco when the actor was due to take a lunch break.
“She said, ‘Instead of lunch, can we go to look at clothes?’ And I said, ‘Where do you want to go? Macy’s?’ She said ‘No, I want to go to San Francisco designers.’
“I got so much press on this because everybody phoned in (to the local media) that she was in their shop. She bought a lot of stuff, and she talked me into buying some shoes. The next time I saw her, I was wearing those shoes, and she said, ‘That was my idea. I’m so glad you bought those.’”
Another pal was Dolores Huerta during the publicity tour for San Francisco filmmaker Peter Bratt’s “Dolores” (2017), a documentary on the United Farm Workers co-founder.
“We really hit it off,” Larsen said of Huerta. “She was here for several days. We’d go to Mission Pie, and then she had a particular kind of burrito she liked. So we spent a lot of time together, even when I wasn’t being paid to do it.”
The walls in film publicist Karen Larsen’s Larsen Associates office in San Francisco are covered in movie posters.
Brontë Wittpenn/S.F. Chronicle
Fax machines and bicycle messengers
Posters for “Dolores” and “Capote” (2005), which features Hoffman’s Oscar-winning performance as Truman Capote, are two of the few treasures Larsen will take home as she packs up her office near Oracle Park.
Her two-room office could be mistaken for an archive, with file cabinets full of publicity materials stretching back to the ’80s, and shelves of movie screeners on both VHS tape and DVD. The office has a museum-like quality, harking back to a time when San Francisco had significantly more art house theaters, newspapers and alternative publications. In those days, press announcements printed on brightly colored paper were sent to the media via snail mail and fax.
Folders can be seen in the file cabinet of long-time film publicist Karen Larsen in the office of Larsen Associates in San Francisco in March.
Brontë Wittpenn/S.F. Chronicle
“The way that you communicated with the world — whether it was the filmmakers, distributors, the film teams or journalists — was totally different,” said Tim Buckwalter, who has worked for Larsen sporadically since 1991 and will take over the business, now renamed Larsen Associated. “There was a lag time. We had a fax machine. A bike messenger would come and we’d say, ‘Can you take this VHS tape over to the Chronicle?’”
That analog hustle extended to how Larsen built and maintained her media relationships.
“She had an amazing Rolodex,” Buckwalter recalled. “She had a Rolodex that had a metal shell over it that you would whip open … and it was full. You had to memorize everybody’s phone number because if you were at the opening of CAAMFest and something amazing happened, you went to the pay phone and you called Datebook.”
Publicist Karen Larsen takes a phone call in her office.
Courtesy of Karen Larsen
Larsen is a longtime favorite of those in Bay Area media. In December, she was honored with the Marlon Riggs Award for impact on local cinema by the Bay Area Film Critics Circle. (Full disclosure, this Chronicle writer is a voting member.)
Larsen Associates also served as a training ground for young people who eventually became publicists themselves, or other jobs in the movie industry. There was a regular rotation of college interns, recent graduates and even older people between jobs in the always volatile world of the independent movie business.
Chris Wiggum, a veteran publicist for Pixar since 2009, worked for Larsen Associates during 2004-08 and credited Larsen for trusting him with handling projects with autonomy, only stepping in to assist when needed.
Wiggum marveled at her energy. Larsen was known for making herself available to clients at all hours, from an early morning pickup from the airport to staying at an after-party past midnight.
“I don’t really understand it, to be honest, because she would outlast me,” Wiggum said, with a laugh. “I would go to events for films or a film festival party and I would get so tired, I’d just want to go home. Karen would never go home. She would always be there to the bitter end.”
Publicist Karen Larsen holds a promotional card for the film “Maxie,” featuring Glenn Close, at the Larsen Associates office in San Francisco in March.
Brontë Wittpenn/S.F. Chronicle
Veteran San Francisco publicist Betsy Abendroth remembers getting her first PR job out of college with the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival in 2005, when Larsen Associates assisted with publicity.
“I worked in her office two days a week,” Abendroth recalled. “I was so intimidated by her when I first met her. I was like, ‘Man, she knows everything. She knows everybody. I just hope I don’t mess up.’
“I very quickly realized how much I could learn just by sitting back and watching her, and she was very lovely and very kind to me.”
Even years later, Abendroth found Larsen to be supportive.
“When I decided to start my own agency, I was really nervous to tell the other publicists in the market. I didn’t want to seem like I was stepping on anybody’s toes. But Karen was the first I told and she was so supportive and congratulatory,” Abendroth said. “We met for coffee shortly after that and she let me ask her 3 million questions.”
Abendroth is far from the only person who has asked Larsen for advice. She has been a willing resource for decades — although sometimes it can get a bit taxing.
“I do these consultations all the time with everybody — like several a week at one point,” Larsen said with a smile. “Young filmmakers would call it ‘pick your brain.’ I had an intern once and he would answer the phone — it was before cellphones — and he had a sign that he made with ‘BPA’ on it (for) Brain Picker Alert. He would say, ‘Karen, there’s somebody on the phone,’ and he’d hold that up.”
Karen Larsen looks through a collection of movie posters accumulated over the years of film publicity work in the Larsen Associates office in San Francisco in March.
Brontë Wittpenn/S.F. Chronicle
Still busy
Nearly a month after stepping down from her role, Larsen still does not use the word “retirement.” She’s also still packing up her office.
Larsen Associated will become a fully remote operation, so she is resigned to the fact she will have to part with some physical evidence of the memories she will carry with her always. “I told the landlady, at least four months,” Larsen said. “I don’t have a big enough house to take very many things.”
Meanwhile, she is organizing a reunion for “Over Easy” and worked on an event on Tuesday, April 21, to support District 10 Supervisor candidate Theo Ellington.
Indeed, the projects haven’t stopped — they’ve shifted. She looks forward to enjoying more time with her family, which includes three children, nine grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. A voracious reader, she is a member of a book club (Virginia Evans’ “The Correspondent” is a recent favorite), goes to a monthly lunch with four friends who are or were publicists or journalists, and attends the occasional Cal football and San Francisco Giants games.
“People say, ‘Why are you leaving?’ It’s like, well, I have to sometime,” she said. “I don’t want to drop dead on the job and leave this mess for people to clean up.”