SceneF — Movie Showtimes for California, Florida & Hawaii (MCP server)

Built by movie lovers, for movie lovers and their assistants.

SceneF started in San Francisco — one of the last great moviegoing cities: single-screen neighborhood houses from the 1920s, repertory calendars that change nightly, 35mm and 70mm prints, midnight movies, and yes, the multiplexes too. It now runs 56 regional boards across California, Florida and Hawaii — Los Angeles to Sacramento, San Diego to Maui, Miami to Pensacola. Each board brings venue schedules and a third-party showtimes data service together, with source confidence and freshness so callers can see what the listings are based on.

Remote MCP server, streamable HTTP, no API key, read-only — and a local stdio server in this repo, running the same ten tools.

Every tool except scenef_resolve_board takes a region — "sf", "la-central", "oahu", "sacramento", … — and omitting it means the default board (sf), never a guess from where you are. Use scenef_resolve_board for a named place and scenef_now with no region for the current list of boards. Times are each theatre's own wall clock: Hawaii runs two or three hours off Pacific and keeps no DST, and each board reports its timezone with its data.

https://scenef.com/mcp

Connect

Claude Code

claude mcp add --transport http scenef https://scenef.com/mcp

Claude Desktop / any MCP client (.mcp.json / client config)

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "scenef": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://scenef.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Also listed in the official MCP registry as com.scenef/showtimes.

Or run it locally

This repo is also a local MCP server — Node, stdio, no proxy. It speaks the protocol itself and reads the same board over SceneF's public REST API. The same ten public tools and matching rules are available on either transport. REST caching can make the two responses differ briefly.

npx -y github:speedwarnsf/scenef-mcp

Claude Desktop / any stdio client

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "scenef": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "github:speedwarnsf/scenef-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

From a clone, or Docker

npm install && npm start

docker build -t scenef-mcp . && docker run --rm -i scenef-mcp

No API key, no account, no configuration. It sends User-Agent: scenef-mcp-local/1.1, issues nothing but GET, and has no write path anywhere in it.

npm test first runs offline regressions against the saved hosted schema contract and fixture feeds. test/contract.js calls all ten tools against the live board and validates every payload against the output schema the server advertises, and test/parity.js diffs this server's tool definitions against the hosted endpoint's. For a local preview, set both SCENEF_BASE_URL=http://localhost:3017 and SCENEF_MCP_URL=http://localhost:3017/mcp. No external schema refresh is claimed by a successful offline run. If that preview has a limited dataset, set SCENEF_PARITY_REGION=oahu (or another populated nondefault board) for the regional probes; the default is la-central.

Tools

| Tool | What it answers | | --- | --- | | scenef_whats_playing | Ranked films for tonight / tomorrow / the weekend / a date — when the window covers tonight, opens with Notable tonight: scarcity facts with receipts (measured seat counts, final nights, lone 35/70mm prints, posted discounts, live events) | | scenef_search_showtimes | Showtimes for one film or theater, with date and hard time filters | | scenef_theater_info | One theater: address, neighborhood, standing discounts, upcoming board | | scenef_film_details | Year, runtime, rating, cast, trailer, the nearest upcoming showtimes | | scenef_plan_movie_night | Constraints in (time window, genres, formats, theaters), a plan out | | scenef_discounts | The cheap nights, board-wide | | scenef_coming_soon | What's opening next | | scenef_resolve_board | A city, ZIP, neighborhood or alias to the board that covers it — or a refusal that says which kind of no | | scenef_now | Right-now snapshot: what's catchable at this hour | | scenef_accuracy | Our own verification record — checks run, failed, and unreachable |

Board-reading tools answer for one regional board at a time — pass region to pick it. Preserve every returned ticket, calendar and film URL exactly, including regional paths and ?region= hints. Invalid hard date/time filters return a refusal and warnings, never an unfiltered success. No ads or paid ranking. The repertory houses get the same billing as the chains — a lone 35mm print at a neighborhood house is exactly the kind of thing this server exists to surface, whether that house is in the Richmond or in Hilo.

scenef_whats_playing in concise mode returns the total showtime_count and just the next screening in showtimes; detailed mode adds showtime rows, about 200 across the answer. scenef_film_details and scenef_search_showtimes return the 40 nearest showtimes in concise mode and up to 200 in detailed. showtime_count is always the total and showtimes_complete says whether the array is all of it; narrow by date or theater for the rest.

Why trust it

• Showtimes come from venue schedules and a third-party showtimes data service. Many showtimes, including most chain theaters and some independents, come from that service rather than from the theater itself; they are labelled source_tier: licensed-feed and carry the weakest claim on the site. Every returned screening carries confidence, source_tier, sources, and verified_at in both concise and detailed modes.
• data_as_of is the dataset publication time. verified_at and freshness describe a screening's source evidence; a fresh dataset can retain older rows. Freshness measures recency, not correctness. Confirm stale or retained listings with the theater before relying on them.
• The verification record is public — including the checks that failed: scenef.com/api/accuracy.

The local scenef_now.sources summary counts theater health the way the hosted server does, one theater at a time, and names each theater whose listings may be out of date in the hosted words. It reads that health from each listing's freshness.source_status, so a theater with no listings on the board is not visible locally and is not counted; the hosted count can be higher by those theaters, and the payload's basis and the prose's closing Data: line say so. Apart from that line, the edge-cache note below and input-validation errors (the MCP SDK words those differently; the limits are the same), every answer's prose is the hosted server's, line for line. Per-screening freshness comes from the canonical REST feed on both transports; the local server keeps the feed's allowance, retained and source_status, and ages age_hours and status from verified_at at call time, as the hosted server does.

The REST doors are served through an edge cache that, once a copy expires, answers the next request from the expired copy while it refreshes. The hosted server reads the current dataset and never sees such a copy. The local server asks again (three retries over about three seconds) when the edge reports a stale copy; if the edge is still serving it after that, the answer is built on it and says so in one line after the footer, and data_as_of is that copy's.

Prefer plain HTTP?

The same data is served REST-style — see scenef.com/agents for the full contract: /api/listings · /ask · OpenAPI · llms.txt

Contact

[email protected] · scenef.com