A citizen’s cry to save the Osio, plus a plea to get the point of photography.

I had planned on 650 words on the latest development in the saga of Monterey Downs. (In short, the county has a letter it doesn’t want the public to see, telling the city of Seaside that the county wants a bigger piece of the tax-sharing pie when land annexation for Downs happens – if it happens.) But so many things have happened between the time I received that letter and now, I’ve changed course. Check the Weekly’s website for the Downs story, and the letter.

Here, instead, two items, on the theme of moving pictures.

First, turn to page 38 and check out Walter Ryce’s beautiful and painful love/goodbye letter to Osio Cinemas, Monterey’s jewel box of an indie movie house, which closed abruptly on Monday evening. Osio managing partner Mark Borde emailed me Monday morning to tell us of the closure. The reasons, as Borde told me and as Ryce’s piece explains, are myriad: an expensive conversion to digital two years ago didn’t result in more eyes before the screens; competition from online streaming services like Amazon Prime and Netflix have changed viewing habits and we’re going out to fewer movies in general; the dumbing down of American culture means when we do go to out to the movies, we care more about explosions and superhero remakes than smart documentaries and foreign films.

It’s demoralizing. But Borde and his partners are business people and shouldn’t be forced to lose more money than they have. That’s reality.

A friend of mine – we were baby reporters together at a Los Angeles wire service a few decades ago – was to have his first film open at Osio on Friday. Kurt Pitzer, who went on to become a war correspondent and co-wrote (with Saddam Hussein’s chief nuclear scientist) The Bomb in My Garden: The Secrets of Saddam’s Nuclear Mastermind, produced the film Runoff. Pitzer’s wife, Kimberly Levin, wrote and directed it, and it’s her first feature-length film. It’s a dark and foreboding look at the collapse of a farm family as the chemicals they use to sustain growing vegetables and raising animals turn on them in unexpected ways. I had the misfortune of telling Pitzer that instead of interviewing Levin for a story, the opening at Osio had been cancelled.

The irony: Runoff is now available on demand on most cable services.

I received an email late Tuesday from Monterey resident Andrew Kennedy. He’s trying to form a citizen’s committee to look at possibilities for the future of the Osio and he wants a cross-section of the community to help. If you want to support the cause or help, send him a note at Save the Osio, c/o Andrew Kennedy, PO Box 51700, Pacific Grove, CA 93950.

Part two, on painful pictures.

Weekly photographer Nic Coury spent the past weekend as he does every World Superbike race weekend, photographing the action at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca. In addition to shooting for the Weekly, Coury is regularly hired by motorsports magazines to photograph motorcyle and auto racing, here and elsewhere, like the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

On Sunday, Coury was packing his gear during the final race of the day when disaster happened. A pack of racers had entered turn one in the final race of the day and crashed. Bodies and bikes were thrown through the air and into the dirt. He grabbed his gear and began shooting, and captured Spanish racers Bernat Martinez and Daniel Rivas Fernandez in the heart-wrenching final moments of their lives. One photo went on our website and others were sent to the Associated Press, which distributed them worldwide. The hate mail and nasty social media comments to Coury flowed.

The words of his good friend Andrew Wheeler, a prominent professional racing photographer and himself a motorcyclist, are better than anything I could write in this case. “Every time one of us, be a racer, a commuter, a fun rider, whatever, throws a leg over a two-wheeled bike… [we] realise its potential as far as danger goes.

“I have been at many races where there has been a death,” Wheeler writes. “It’s not pretty, but going at someone because it’s their job as a documentarian is not cool.”

MARY DUAN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com or follow her at twitter.com/maryrduan