In 1958 I snuck into the Rialto Theater in Tacoma Washington to see Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. For a 10-year-old boy, it was an amazing experience. I can still remember sitting in the back row of that theater, watching the movie, not knowing exactly what to think except that I had experienced something that made me feel almost adult. It was that experience which probably began my life long relationship with movies and the movie theater experience.
Early this year I realized how the movie scene I had embraced and loved was being fundamentally changed. You might call it a one-two punch that made me really consider whether the time of seeing films in theaters was passé, just too expensive, maybe even dangerous.
On a Tuesday in late February I went to a 4 o’clock matinee of the film, Parasite, at the Varsity Theater in the University District. This year’s Best Picture Academy Award winner, Parasite was also named Film Comment’s Best Film of 2019 and received almost universal critical acclaim. And while I wasn’t expecting much of a crowd, as it turned out I had the whole place to myself. Yes, I was the only person in the audience.
The film was both riveting and unsettling. I could understand the reason for all the praise. No American film would dare to address the issue of class in such a powerful way—gender probably, race maybe, but not class. Why is that? Have we all bought the Hollywood cool-aid that everyone can make it is America if they just work hard enough? Or are we just indifferent to the poverty that ha become so prevalent in America today.
But what unsettled me the most was being the only person in the audience. It was spooky, and as I left the building the man at the concession stand thanked me for coming. It turns out I wasn’t just the only person seeing a particular film. I was the only person in the entire theater that afternoon.
Flash ahead to March 18th. We’d just gotten back from a risky, but enjoyable trip to southeastern Arizona, when it was announced that the 46th annual Seattle International Film Festival was being cancelled because of the Corvid19 pandemic. The festival and I go back 34 years, and since 1985 I have always started my summer with SIFF. I was even a volunteer for three festivals. But this year it was going to be different.
In her March 19 Moviegoer Column, New York Times film critic Manohia Dargis talks about the “sense of loss” she felt when movie theaters in Los Angeles and New York were shut down in early March. I felt that same sense of loss when SIFF 2020 was cancelled, and I wondered if my experience at the Varsity three weeks earlier had been a foreshadowing of what was to come. For not only was the festival cancelled, but all the movie theaters had gone dark.
It wasn’t the first time in the last 5 years that I have felt we were in danger of losing a lot of the movie going experience. Seattle was once known for its neighborhood theaters. In those days, the 1980’s and 90’s, I sometimes day dreamed of one day running my own neighborhood movie palace, a place like the Harvard Exit on Capitol Hill, which was a regular film festival venue. I remember clearly standing in line at the Egyptian and Harvard Exit waiting to see films and chatting with film-goers. Those are great memories.
But the Harvard Exit was sold to a developer and unceremoniously closed after the 2015 festival, part of Landmark’s dismantling of the last of Seattle’s neighborhood theaters between 2014 and 2016. The closing of the Harvard Exit and also Cinema Books on Roosevelt that same year was the first time I felt that the era of seeing movies in theaters might really be coming to an end. It didn’t happen in 2015 because SIFF stepped in to buy and screen films at the Egyptian, while developing some nice mini-festivals and educational programs at its Uptown venue. The Majestic Bay flourished in Ballard, the Metro in the district kept its doors open with more adult concessions and programming, while Landmark’s last theater the Crest, Film Forum, the Grand Illusion, and Scarecrow Video continued to offer films for a variety of cinephiles.
What was most scary this time around, and why the end of movie theater experience seems much closer today than it did in 2015, was the closing of the theaters. But while the pandemic has shown how close the in-theater experience is to demise, there is other another probably more important force that is working against theaters, streaming.
Before people were forced to stay-at-home because of the pandemic, many were already staying at home to watch movies. In her Moviegoer column, Dargis mentions the “steady drumbeat of complaints about watching movies in theaters,” and the growing “bafflement” of many about why anybody wants to go into a theater at all. Expensive ticket prices and overpriced concessions are major complaints, as are shabby theaters, while being in a theater with only three or four other people can be unsettling, as I found out when I went to see Parasite.
The rise in streaming services has also led to limitations on film distribution through theaters. I learned that in December when I wanted to see Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story in a Seattle theater. It was screened for only a couple weeks in one theater, and I missed it. When I investigated I found out that Marriage Story was financed and distributed through Netflix. With more and more feature films are being financed by streaming companies this is likely to be the fate of many good independent films, because the streaming companies are only required to allow features to be shown for a few weeks in theaters, and then they are pulled from theater distribution and only seen through the streaming service until the market is exhausted. And what could be the final nail in the coffin of the movie theater, the pandemic, has been a boon for Netflix and Prime Video.
How much will the slow death of movie theaters that began 15 or so years ago accelerate over the next year? SIFF will likely return. Although they had to close their whole operation and layoff staff because they were so dependent on revenues from the 25-day festival, they are now finishing a strong fundraising campaign. But what will have changed when they return? Will SIFFs emphasize the technological platform for experiencing film rather than the in-theater experience? When will the Egyptian and Uptown theaters open and will enough people come back to keep them alive?
The smaller, volunteer-run venues, like the Film Forum and the Grand Illusion, with their quirky programming are also likely to continue. But will the bigger commercial theaters, the screens where most people see their movies, survive?
This May, as the time arrived for the 2020 festival to start and all the theaters were dark, I found myself thinking more and more about my life-long love of the movie-going experience. I remember going to small neighborhood and art house theaters in Denver, Boston, Eugene, and Providence R.I. In Seattle, I remember seeing the Andromeda Strain and Star Wars at the Cinerama–it’s permanently closure was just announced, The Purple Rose of Cairo at the art house Ridgemont, the Stunt Man and Lone Star at the Guild 45, Finding Vivian Maier at the Seven Gables, Blue Velvet at the Harvard Exit, and everything from the Wings of Desire to The Shape of Water at the Egyptian. For me, it was always a treat to go to the movies, and there was always something to look forward to.
But my most vivid memories are of tramping between the Egyptian and the Harvard Exit theaters during the days when most of the film festival was held on Capitol Hill. Those were exciting days. Seattle was a film town and the festival was alive with energy, people talking about what they had seen and racing to the next venue to see something else. There were great theaters everywhere, and I could walk to most of them, join the crowd, and see something wonderful, and if it wasn’t, I could leave early, race to another venue and see something else.
I’m hoping the film festival will return in 2021 as strong as ever, and that the Egyptian and Uptown theaters will be open again at least by the fall, so that I can spend a few rainy fall days at the movies. But if that doesn’t happen, well 62 years is a pretty good run. I guess I can’t complain. Still I know I’m still going to feel the loss deeply, if and when the movie theaters go dark for good.
2021 Postscript: 2020 brought tragedy to the Seattle theater community, when on Christmas Eve a fire destroyed the Seven Gables Theater in the University District. It didn’t have to happen!
The story is one of one of deterioration and neglect and, as a result, sadness and anger for those of us who understand the evolution of movie theater culture in Seattle during the last 30 years of the twentieth century.
The Seven Gables was the initial venue in what became the Seven Gables chain of neighborhood theaters started by Randy Finely in 1976. Those theaters were the network around which a community of movie goers in north Seattle and Capitol Hill coalested. In my approximately 32 years of Seattle movie going between 1985 and 2017, about 80% of my non-festival film viewing was at the Egyptian, the Harvard Exit, the Seven Gables, and the Guild 45, all initially Seven Gables theaters.
The Seattle Times article on the destruction of the Seven Gables described it as a “warm and welcoming” place, and it surly was. A 250 seat venue, with a salon instead of a lobby, where once-upon-a-time the ownership held foreign movie poster auctions.
Randy Finely sold the theaters to a local owner in 1986, and it was sold again to the Landmark Theater Chain in 1989. The theaters continued to thrive under Landmark, but then in 2003 Landmark was taken over by the LLC Production Company. This probably set the stage for the eventual demise of the chain, and the fire that destroyed the Seven Gables. The LLC group sold both the Harvard Exit and the Egyptian in 2014-15. The Egyptian was saved as a venue by SIFF, but the Harvard Exit was sold to a developer and is now housing a foreign consulate. Then it closed both the Seven Gables and the Guild in 2017, apparently hoping to sell both theaters.
However, record shows that LLC then essentially abandoned both buildings. The Seven Gables was awarded landmark status in September of 2017, yet apparently no effort was made to maintain or secure the building. Neighbors and theater goers complained to the city. An investigation generated a November 2020 report which resulted in an emergency order from the city to the owners saying that the building had become a “threat” to public safety and health, and ordering the the building be closed and secured by November 12th. 42 days later the Seven Gables was destroyed. The fire in the wood framed building was so extensive that no determination of it’s cause could be made, and it has since been demolished.
But many questions remain. Why would LLC allow the theater to deteriorate so completely if they were trying to sell it? And why did it take the city so long to act when neighbors were reporting the theater’s deteriorating condition as early as the fall of 2017?