Free admission Rob Nilsson and Members of Tenderloin Action Group in Person Local filmmaker Rob Nilsson (Signal 7, Heat and Sunlight) in 1991 founded the Tenderloin Action Group, a weekly acting workshop open to anyone on the streets or in a San Francisco shelter. It has led to a feature film, Chalk, still in progress, with characters based on members of the workshop. Tonight we present a selection of the videotaped workshops, introduced by Nilsson and TAG members Denise Caviliere, Destiny Costa, Edwin Johnson, and Johnny Reese. "That raw footage was bottled lightning," Nilsson has commented. "It was a collective human cry." "There is such pain, such pain," says Nilsson, "but I've learned about lives I never knew before. The people who come to our workshop are stripped down in terms of their needs and there's no room for the kinds of pretensions you usually find around filmmaking. Our actors are what they are; they're grounded, I think, in a straight-ahead truthfulness about their lives." (Quoted in N.Y. Times, 2/14/93 and S.F. Chronicle, 4/11/93)