042 - Something Else
Thursday, April 5th, 2007Rich came up with Soloplex 1. Possibly one of the best names for a theater ever.
I had a dream once, as a college student, of buying the rundown old theater in the neighborhood (the Westgate theater in Beaverton, for the locals in the crowd) and turning it back from a 5-screen multiplex into a single-screen Cinerama theater. The theater would run the BIG films: the David Lean epics, How The West Was Won, and so on. It'd show Hatari in 3D, and show cartoons before the movie started. Popcorn would be a buck, and tickets would be 10, but totally worth it to see Peter O'Toole's face 50 feet tall. It was a noble dream with little hope outside of Powerball of getting funded.
When the theater was demolished last year, I sighed and felt a little down over the entire thing. It's a niche that deserves some thought. Second run theaters and art house theaters running classics and indie films aren't great money makers, but they get by. Add in the "dinner and drinks" element that the McMenamins theaters provide, and one can do quite well indeed. But there's something about the movies that demands a sense of scale. In San Francisco, Rich and I saw Night At The Museum on a screen so small, it should have come with a TV remote and a Playstation 2. That's not how a movie should be seen. A big movie needs a big screen.
I understand that, with space to build a theater being as expensive as it is and one screen only being able to show one film at a time, that you'd basically have to be a bored billionaire to afford the endeavor. But what a public service that would be. I watched Lawrence of Arabia for the first time on a 19" TV screen, and afterwards felt almost ashamed that I had to do that. The preservation of cinema shouldn't be limited to the celluloid, but the methods of absorbing the films themselves.
~Matt