I live within walking distance of three independent movie theaters. There's the queen of them all on Hawthorne Boulevard, the Bagdad, a large single-screen cinema built in 1927 and refurbished by the McMenamins pub chain in 1991. There's CineMagic, a small employee-owned one-screen theater dating to 1914 on the other end of Hawthorne. And then there's the multiscreen Laurelhurst, less than a mile away.
Within minutes on a direct bus line are two multiplexes in downtown Portland, as well as a multiscreen arthouse theater and the cinema at the Portland Art Museum. A short drive gets us to two other high-quality independent movie houses: the Hollywood Theater and Cinema 21. (Within walking distance is also the Clinton Street Theater, where they've been showing the Rocky Horror Picture Shore weekly since 1978, including during the pandemic!)
I love going to the movies. And so when the pandemic hit, one thing I mourned (other than the obvious) was the loss of my movie-going life. On March 18, 2020, I walked with my camera down to the Bagdad to get a photo of their marquee in the morning light, seen above. "The Force Will Be With You Always," it read, breaking my heart. What if it never re-opened?
Humans invented the language of cinema. We taught ourselves to intuit flashbacks and the condensing of time, and how sound can begin to tell us something before the picture even begins. Cinematic language has evolved, of course, as languages do. Never was that more obvious recently than when I pre-watched a 45-minute version of a PBS documentary about Audre Lorde, before showing it to my students in my Communication 101 class. A Litany for Survival is from 1994, and it relies heavily on Lorde reading her poems. I warned the students it would require more focus than the Netflix shows they binge now. Most of them hated it, I could tell, but they were also afraid I would catch them looking at their phones after I asked them to try to concentrate for its duration. A handful loved it, and maybe more than a few will have learned from a film that "self care" is not a hashtag invented for Instagram, but a political act as defined by a radical Black lesbian poet with cancer.
Once during a class discussion about social media, students asked me what people did before scrolling took over our lives. I thought about what my life was like at their age. "We watched movies," I told them.
Just think of some of the films of 1994, the year I turned 21: The Usual Suspects, Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, Legends of the Fall, Natural Born Killers, Speed, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Reality Bites...the Winona Rider version of Little Women. So many good ones! An education in themselves.
I went to see the Greta Gerwig version of Little Women twice in theaters in 2019, once with my husband, and then later on my own, to experience solo and sort through all of the hyper-feminine emotion it brought up in me. (There is nowhere better to cry alone in public than a movie theater.) Even now I get a little teary thinking about the scene when Jo watches her first book getting printed. Women making art! I wrote in my notebook after that second viewing, sitting at a pub on Stark Street, drinking a beer alone. It was not until my third viewing, watching in our den at home with the script on my laptop, that I unpacked the skillfulness of the editing – and how it relies on our evolved understanding of the language of cinema.
There was one time at the movies when a friend and I sang ABBA songs to get discounted tickets to Mamma Mia. Or the time I saw Joe Versus the Volcano with a high school pal, at the historic Elsinore theater in Salem, Oregon. The film kept breaking, and the projectionist kept fixing it. Yet we stayed because we paid our money and we wanted to see how it turned out. As I recall, I have only ever walked out of one movie: Mr. Wrong with Ellen DeGeneres, seen sometime in 1996 at a second-run, discount cinema in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
Then there was the time in 2011, shortly after we met, when Chris and I nearly broke up after buying tickets but before watching Midnight in Paris. The film gave us time to think about what we wanted to say to each other afterward. We've seen hundreds of films in theaters together since. We sit up front so Chris can see, and out of habit now, I always whisper to him the text that he might not be able to read.
I remember getting advance screening tickets to American Pie in 1999. The theater was packed, and I sat next to a teen with his friends. He asked why I was alone. "My boyfriend is getting popcorn," I told him. "Oh," he said, "I thought you were a loser with no one to go with you to the movies." You're a loser if you can't do anything alone, I thought to myself.
There is a special pleasure in going to the movies by yourself. Most recently, I went to an afternoon showing of The Souvenir: Part II at the Portland Art Museum. And a week before that I saw a $6 matinee of The Worst Person in the World at the Laurelhurst Theater. I bawled through the final third of the film, snot and tears soaking my mask. Afterwards, I washed my face in the bathroom, then walked home, content to have a mile to myself to consider what the movie meant.
The first documentary I ever saw on the big screen was the surfing film The Endless Summer. It was sometime in high school, 25 years after its debut, at the funky independent Salem Cinema in the basement of a parking garage next to the library in my hometown. My mom thought I would enjoy seeing a documentary in the theater, and she was right. I wish more theaters showed documentaries regularly.
I remember waiting in line in the mid- to late-1980s in San Francisco with my sister to see a matinee of a Bond film being released that day. The theater's sound system was so extraordinary that I can recall how the rumble of the action sequences felt in my ear bones, but I cannot remember which 007 movie it was. (San Francisco is home to Dolby; and yes, both my sister and I were too young to see that movie without a parent or guardian.)
I am certain I saw Star Wars at a drive-in theater in Dallas, Oregon at age five or six, but no one alive can verify this for me. The year I turned seven (or eight?), I got the Empire Strikes Back soundtrack album for my birthday, even though I had not yet seen the movie. I begged to see it, going so far as to leave the movie listings page of the newspaper sprawled open on the kitchen table every day, showtimes circled. (I listened to the soundtrack while I wrote this.)
How can I describe in retrospect the feeling of seeing The Rise of Skywalker at the Bagdad on Christmas Day in 2019, to a packed house of 1,000 or so? The swelling of emotion as the opening bars of John Williams' theme played! The whole theater cheered.
It was a moment when none of us in the audience knew what was to come in 2020. Not the pandemic, not the election. But we had the movies.
One of last films I saw before theaters closed for COVID-19 was the World War I film 1917, on a 86-foot wide screen at the Cinerama Dome on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. That was on Jan. 4, 2020. The historic location hasn't yet reopened, which is ridiculous in a town full of so much movie money.
The last movie I officially saw in a theater before the pandemic was on March 6, 2020, the day I defended the short thesis film I made for my graduate school program. As celebration for finishing grad school, Chris and I got tickets to the Portland International Film Festival. That night we saw Clementine in the elegant beige screening room in the basement of the Portland Art Museum.
Like all moviegoers, I have some blind spots and biases. I'm indifferent to animation, even though I know a bunch of talented animators. I find the violence of the Marvel universe tedious and the stories bland. I hate it when good plays are adapted poorly to the screen; they are different mediums, after all. The ham-handed hagiography of most biopics grates on me. But I really will watch just about anything.
For a brief period in early 2007, I lived in a suburban Miami apartment complex attached to a multiplex that mostly showed blockbusters. Sometimes on Sundays I would open my front door and check the movie times on the marquee. I'd pop into any movie that was playing, just to have something to do. I've mostly blocked out this not-so-great time in my life, but I do remember seeing Spiderman 3 and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. For a few hours on lonely Sundays, mediocre movies were a cheap refuge from my own thoughts.
And then there were the movies that got me through the pandemic. The zanier the better. Palm Springs; Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga; and Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar among them. All were a balm, watched safely at home.
The first movie that Chris and I saw after we were both fully vaccinated was on April 12, 2021 at the Bagdad. Godzilla vs. Kong. It was terrible. But there we were after a 13-month hiatus, masked and vaxxed at the movies, laughing out loud again in the company of strangers. We were giddy with joy as we walked home. This week, I plan to see The Lost City, down the street at Cinemagic.
And guess what? Every single one of the movie theaters near us in Portland made it through the pandemic.
Love,
Erika
PS: My Oscar picks are:
The Power of the Dog for Best Picture. (Seen at Hollywood Theater.)
Denzel Washington for The Tragedy of Macbeth. (Seen at Cinema 21, and it was visually stunning – although I did briefly fall asleep during it, which is rare.)
Olivia Coleman for The Lost Daughter. (Seen at home, regrettably not in a theater.)
Best Doc is hands down Summer of Soul. (Seen at Hollywood Theater.)
And for International Feature Film, The Worst Person in the World. (Seen and adored at the Laurelhurst Theater.)
THE NEWS
All the links…
I love a story about a long walk. These guys walked 50 miles of Los Angeles in a day.
Regular readers of this newsletter know that I often include a link to a news story about yoga pants. It's a nod to the origins of this newsletter – it got its start in 2013 as a way of updating people about the yoga class I was teaching at a neighborhood community center. What little I knew about writing a yoga newsletter was that it couldn't be too self-promotional. A newsletter has to include other content to entice people to class, which works out just fine if you're also a writer. I don't teach much yoga anymore; maybe someday I'll write about why. And so I don't write often about yoga anymore, either. But a good chunk of the readers of this newsletter are people who once attended my yoga classes. I'm so grateful you've stuck around. Thank you.
So for newcomers to the Windfall Dispatch, that's why there's almost always a link to a story about yoga pants. This week’s link is from the Wall Street Journal, so it might be behind a paywall. If so, do a search for the headline: What if Working in Sweatpants Unleashed Your Superpowers?