In Portland, the cult of alternative moviegoing is thriving while it shrinks elsewhere in the country.
"Oslo, August 31"The problem, the distributors told Burr, is that there are very few art movie screens left in the city and the majority of them are controlled by Landmark Theaters, an arthouse chain based in Los Angeles. Landmark claims that their Boston screens are being taken up by a couple of this summer's arthouse hits -- "Beasts of the Southern Wild" and "Moonrise Kingdom" -- and that they have too many films queued up to save a spot for "Oslo."
This is actually a common condition in many cities even bigger than Boston. The independent theaters where art and revival movies thrived in an earlier era have vanished, or been gobbled up by corporate chains based elsewhere, and the variety of films available on a given night is considerably less than it might be. There are, arguably, more movies in theatrical distribution today then ever, but in most cities there are fewer places than ever where that multitude of films can be seen.
Not so in Portland, where the urban core -- a circle with a radius stretching from, say, City Hall to (pointedly) the intersection of 43rd and NE Sandy -- is home to more screens dedicated to art, indie, alternative, foreign, and experimental film than to Hollywood blockbusters. In that area, you find the independently owned/operated Northwest Film Center, Cinema 21, Living Room Theaters, 5th Avenue Cinema, Mission Theater, Clinton Street Theater, Bagdad Theater, Cinemagic Laurelhurst and, at the outer limits, the Hollywood Theatre, plus the Regal Fox Tower, the main corporate home of alternative movies in Portland. All of those theaters almost always -- or at least regularly -- show stuff that's not in the multiplexes. For that sort of fare in the same area, there are but three choices: Regal's Pioneer Place multiplex and the two Regal multiplexes at the Lloyd Center. I count 29 primarily indie screens and 24 mainstream screens. I don't think there's another major American city where the downtown movie scene has a similar aspect.
That surplus of indie theaters in Portland has several implications. For one, there are more screens to debut more films than most cities -- and that includes cities much bigger than Portland or Boston. In any week, the NFC, Cinema 21, Living Room, Clinton Street and Hollywood account for as many as a dozen premieres, some for a single night, most for a full week minimally. As a result, and throwing in the annual film festivals that most often play at those theaters, Portland sees nearly 1000 new titles annually.
Secondly, if an indie film does find an audience in Portland but has to move out of the theater where it debuted to make way for a new film, it has other screens to appear on, meaning it can stay in town for months. Just last year, such films as "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," "Pina," "Drive," "The Guard" and "The Tree of Life" played in Portland for far longer than in other cities of any size simply because they were able to draw enough of an audience after months to make it worthwhile for the owners of various indie theaters in town to keep showing them.
The shame at the heart of Burr's story is that Boston once had the definitive alternative cinema scene in the country, with the famed Brattle, Coolidge Corner and Orson Welles theaters practically inventing the idea of the calendar movie house that mixed classic titles, new foreign releases and American indies on their schedules. Now, sadly, that day seems to have passed the city by. And, indeed, most other American cities as well.
It turns out that in movies, as in so many other things, tiny Portland has an embarrassment of riches to enjoy.
