The Jean Cocteau: The Theatre of Interrupted Stories

The Jean Cocteau is a single-screen movie theater hidden on Montezuma Street in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It had been closed for years. Dark and silent since well before I arrived in Santa Fe with my usual collection of uncertainties and half-formed aspirations. And while I was working at the bookstore across the street, watching the rhythm of foot traffic and the slow dance of afternoon shadows, the theater began showing signs of life under new ownership.

The transformation happened gradually, the way meaningful change usually does. Workers arriving with paint and purpose, the marquee flickering back to tentative life, the smell of renovation drifting across the street like a promise that abandoned dreams sometimes get second chances. Shortly after its grand reopening, during one of those suspended moments between the afternoon rush and evening quiet, when the world seemed to pause and invite investigation, I tiptoed up to the ticket window, asking if I could take a look around.

“Of course,” said a man I’d later learn was the manager, his voice carrying the casual warmth of someone accustomed to curious strangers. He stood from his chair with the unhurried grace of desert living and waved me through the hall with a gesture that seemed to say: Come, see what we’ve built from the bones of something that once was.

Inside, I discovered a small open space that breathed with the accumulated presence of stories—walls lined with books and memorabilia that created their own gravitational field of narrative possibility. At the back, a winding mosaic-tiled hallway inclined upward, opening into a lounge where classic movie theater concessions had been reimagined, mingling with a café-esque menu that spoke of longer conversations and lingering: espresso that promised late-night discussions, sandwiches substantial enough for extended contemplation, bakery items that suggested the kind of place where time moved differently than it did outside.

In the left back corner stood a full bar, its bottles catching the soft light and casting shadows across space. The lounge felt simultaneously modern and timeless, furnished with black baroque pub tables and leather couches that had been arranged with the kind of casual intention that invited both solitude and serendipitous encounters. The space was quiet except for the comforting hum of popcorn makers and the gentle clink of glassware, whispered with the intimate urgency of discovery: Speakeasy.

The Jean Cocteau revealed itself to be far more than a movie theater, more even than the sum of its carefully curated parts. Over the following weeks, I found myself gravitating there with increasing frequency, settling onto a stool beneath one of those tall pub tables with a cup of coffee during daylight hours, or something warmer and more responsive as evening descended, my laptop open before me like a portal to worlds I was still learning to build with words.

It was during one of these sessions that I learned the theater’s origin story: George R. R. Martin had bought, renovated, and reopened the Jean Cocteau according to his own vision of what a cultural space could become. That revelation, combined with the proximity to the bookstore where I spent my days surrounded by other people’s finished dreams, transformed my casual interest into something approaching fascination.

I never expected to meet George R. R. Martin himself in this intimate space, to discover him making a daily habit of presence when conventional wisdom suggested he should have been sequestered somewhere private, wrestling with the complex mythology of his magnum opus, A Song of Ice and Fire. But there he was, as much a fixture of the place as the art on the walls or the carefully selected films on the screen.

Martin has called Santa Fe home since 1979, drawn by the high desert light that transforms everything it touches and the practical promise of fewer snow shovels. A consideration that speaks to the way life’s larger decisions sometimes hinge on surprisingly mundane details. He’s famously deliberate and meticulous in his craft, a writer who constructs entire civilizations brick by psychological brick, who once confessed he didn’t want to reach sixty, looking back on a life littered with unfinished stories. So, he had taken the plunge into completion, into commitment, into the kind of sustained effort that turns possibility into reality.

And when Jean Cocteau went dark, when this particular vessel for stories and community faced extinction, he stepped in, not merely to revive a cinema, but to create something more ambitious: a hub where art, imagination, and human connection could flourish simultaneously, where the boundaries between different forms of storytelling could dissolve in the service of something larger than any individual medium.

Under his stewardship, Jean Cocteau became a breeding ground for the kind of creativity that emerges when like minds are given space to discover each other. I found myself attending author readings by Neil Gaiman and Michael Chabon, their voices filling the theater with stories that seemed to expand beyond the confines of the written word. There were sketch comedy shows that transformed the space into something alive with spontaneous laughter, screenings of new releases alongside carefully chosen sci-fi classics that spoke to the particular obsessions of the community Martin had cultivated.

One evening that remains vivid in memory, Jonathan Nolan—Christopher Nolan’s brother and frequent collaborator—came for a screening and Q&A of The Prestige, that intricate meditation on obsession, identity, and the prices we pay for our art. I was there in the darkness, absorbing not just the film but the electricity of being present for something that felt significant, unrepeatable. Afterward, in that magical transition from public events to private conversation that sometimes occurs when the right people find themselves in the right place, I discovered myself sitting with Nolan, Martin, and a small handful of others in the theater’s intimate lounge.

What followed was less interview than communion: drinks appearing as if by magic, conversations flowing like water finding its natural course, the peculiar pleasure of listening to George and Jon discover commonalities between their different approaches to storytelling, their shared fascination with the architecture of narrative, and the ways different mediums can serve similar emotional purposes.

As I became a more regular presence at Jean Cocteau, as frequently as Martin appeared there himself, he eventually began to notice me. Not with the wary attention that celebrities often develop toward strangers, but with the genuine curiosity of someone who finds human behavior endlessly fascinating. He started conversations the way a master storyteller approaches a new character, with questions that revealed as much about the asker as the asked.

George R. R. Martin is, as you might imagine, an interesting and remarkable man, though he seems to take particular pleasure in keeping his most acute observations to himself, like a poker player who never quite shows his full hand. I would see him emerging from that snake-like hallway that connected the theater to the lounge, watch him move behind the bar with the casual expertise of someone who understands that the best conversations often require the right liquid accompaniment, and know that another evening was about to unfold in directions I couldn’t predict.

He would hand me a drink prepared with the kind of attention that suggested he’d been watching long enough to know my preferences, to top off his own with the unhurried exactness of someone who has learned to savor rather than rush. We would settle onto one of his black leather couches to talk about everything and nothing. The peculiar alchemy that transforms strangers into something approaching friends.

One of the most intriguing aspects of these conversations, aside from the unexpected questions he would pose about writing, about life, about the strange business of trying to make sense of human experience through narrative, was the way he would sometimes begin speaking in the middle of what felt like an ongoing conversation. Not our conversation, necessarily, but some larger dialogue he was conducting, perhaps one that had been interrupted earlier, or maybe one he was having perpetually inside his head with characters who had become so real they demanded their own voice in his daily life.

In those moments, it felt less like we were getting to know each other in the conventional sense and more like I was being granted access to the overflow of a mind constantly engaged with the process of story creation, allowed to listen as he told stories with no clear beginning or end, fragments of larger narratives that existed somewhere between reality and imagination.

I never brought up my own writing during these conversations, though the impulse was constant and strong. Something about the dynamic we had established felt too precious to risk contaminating with the usual ambitions and anxieties that writers carry like invisible baggage. I didn’t want our developing friendship to become tainted by considerations of leverage or opportunity. I didn’t want him to begin seeing me as another aspiring writer seeking validation or connection, rather than simply another person who found pleasure in the art of conversation.

Eventually, as these things tend to happen, I met a woman. What began as an attraction quickly transformed into something more complicated and ultimately destructive, a relationship that became controlling and prison-like, demanding choices that gradually separated me from the things and people that had given my life texture and meaning. My world contracted, and I stopped going to Jean Cocteau, stopped showing up for those conversations that had begun to feel essential to my understanding of what it meant to live as a writer in the world.

For six brief days, when Martin made a rare and quickly abandoned foray on Facebook, we maintained a tenuous digital connection. He added me with what felt like genuine warmth. And then he abruptly deleted his account with the kind of decisive action that suggested he’d remembered why he preferred the analog world of face-to-face interaction. After that, we lost touch entirely. Our friendship became another casualty of choices that seemed necessary at the time but were revealed, in retrospect, as profound mistakes.

The friendship George and I developed, brief though it was in the grand scheme of either of our lives, continues to fascinate me years later. Martin’s mind operates on frequencies that most people can’t access, which would have to be true for someone capable of imagining something as vast and psychologically complex as the world of Game of Thrones, of creating fictional civilizations that feel more real and morally nuanced than most actual human societies.

That such a mind had recognized something worth engaging in me, had chosen to mix drinks and share stories and create space for the kind of conversation that exists purely for its own pleasure. This remains one of those experiences that can’t be replicated or fully explained, only appreciated for what it was: a gift that arrived without announcement and departed without ceremony, leaving behind the kind of memories that become more valuable with time.

George and I only ever spent time together within the walls of Jean Cocteau, and when I look back on those suspended evenings, I realize the theater served as far more than a venue for films or a convenient hangout spot. It functioned as a hub for creativity in the deepest sense. A space where art and imagination weren’t merely displayed but actively generated through the collision of curious minds and compatible spirits.

Martin himself was both the architect and the usher of that creative energy, the person who had envisioned what such a space could become and then made himself available to participate in its ongoing creation. Though life carried me in directions that made such regular communion impossible, I’ll carry with me always the memory of those days at Jean Cocteau, where stories came alive not just on the screen but in the conversations that surrounded them, where the boundaries between reality and imagination became permeable enough to allow magic to pass back and forth between worlds.

In the end, perhaps that’s what the best cultural spaces provide: not just entertainment or education, but the opportunity to discover that the stories we tell and the stories we live exist in constant conversation with each other, that the line between audience and creator is far more fluid than we usually allow ourselves to believe, and that sometimes the most important narratives emerge not from careful planning but from the simple willingness to show up and see what wants to be born from the meeting of minds that understand the sacred responsibility of keeping the world’s stories alive.