Movie Paradise

A badly framed image of Washington’s Uptown Theater. This would have been in 1988 because the theater is showing Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Lately I’ve been listening to the streaming service Pandora when I walk in the morning. One of the “stations” I like is Ennio Morricone Radio. It plays the music of film composer Morricone, who scored more than 500 films before his death at the age of 91 this year. He’s best known for his music for Sergio Leone “spaghetti westerns,” especially The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, the film that transformed Clint Eastwood into a movie star.

One piece by Morricone that always sends me tumbling into a wormhole of memory is his theme from the 1988 film Cinema Paradiso. The movie tells the story of a famous Italian director who returns to the town where he grew up and recalls how, when he was an adorable post-war moppet, he befriended the projectionist in the town’s little theater and began a life-long passion for movies. I saw the film when it came out but I wasn’t especially impressed. From what I can remember, I thought it was a little saccharine. Perhaps I should see it again.

The movie came out when I was living in Washington, D.C., and had plenty of time for movies since I was new in town and didn’t know many people. Looking back, it seems like I spent much of my existence at that time cocooned in darkness, immersed in the aroma of popcorn, and staring raptly at images on a screen. Not a bad way to spend time. On weekends I would get the Washington Post and plot out my strategy. (This was when newspapers still ran movie listings.) The city seemed crammed full of movie theaters, and a lot of them were within walking distance or accessible by Metro. Maybe I’d catch a matinee at the Circle Theater on Florida Avenue, or walk down to the Kennedy Center and catch a double-bill at the American Film Institute. Or perhaps make the short walk to the jewel in Washington’s movie crown, the Uptown Theater on Connecticut Avenue at Cleveland Park, and see the latest Hollywood blockbuster on the huge curved screen. The movies I saw there ranged from the sublime (the 25^th anniversary screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey) to the ridiculous (Howard the Duck). Sit in the right spot near the middle of the theater and all you could see was movie screen.

I had a lot of options back then. The two big chains in town were the Circles, owned by the Pedas brothers, who put up money to back the Coen Brothers’ first movies, and KB Cinemas. The theaters ranged from the big screen on Wisconsin Avenue at Friendship Heights, to a bunch of smaller screens at the Foundry, in Georgetown down by the C&O canal. There was also a Circle Theater on Pennsylvania Avenue not far from the White House, but I think that one showed mainly second-run features. I remember seeing Repo Man there once. There was a big theater below street level on K street, where I saw things like Aliens and the first Tim Burton Batman. That might have been a KB theater. There was another big theater up Wisconsin by Rodman’s drugstore. I remember one summer when all the big releases flopped and that theater began screening older films. I saw The Bridge on the River Kwai and Dr. Strangelove there. There were theaters way up Wisconsin Avenue at Mazza Gallery, where I remember seeing Until the End of the World and a re-release of Orson Welles’ Othello.

The Avalon was a beautiful old theater on Connecticut below Chevy Chase Circle. My wife-to-be was involved in a charity event once where they had a premiere of the Bond flick The Living Daylights there in 1987. The actor who played the villain, Jeroen Krabbé, was there and a couple of women who had bits in the film as “Bond girls.” Also arriving were more people than the theater could hold, since the charity organization had blizzarded the region with free tickets. I managed to squeeze in with some friends, but even 33 years later my wife can’t recall the chaos of the event today without shuddering.

One Saturday I decided to catch the first matinee of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X at the big Circle theater on Florida Avenue. I showed up just before showtime to find the theater still closed, the doors locked. I waited. And waited. No one arrived to open the theater and eventually I left in disgust, my movie game plan for the day in shreds. I wrote a letter of complaint to Circle Theaters and received some free passes in response. Maybe that was because at the bottom of the letter I typed “cc: Spike Lee.” At the time the director had accused theaters of crediting receipts for Malcolm X to other movies to deliberately underreport its box office, so I figured Circle might be a little paranoid about giving Spike more ammunition for his charges. Since I was the only person waiting to get into the theater that morning, I suspect this particular screwup had little impact on the film’s earnings

Washington also had some great repertory houses. One of them was the Biograph, a former autobody repair shop on M Street at the edge of Georgetown. I remember seeing Ross McElwee’s surprising and funny documentary Sherman’s March there with my wife-to-be. It was probably one of our earlier dates. There was another theater in the heart of Georgetown on M Street. Its name escapes me, but the theaters were up a narrow flight of stairs. The aforementioned wife-to-be and I saw Withnail and I there, but we were in such a Withnail-like state that we barely remember it. There was another movie theater on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown, but while I lived in the area it showed only one movie—Caligula. I never saw it.

Then there was the AFI. I spent hundreds of hours in that theater, which had car parts—hoods, bumpers, trunks—attached to the walls as sound buffers. They had some great programs there. I remember an Alec Guinness festival where I got to see a lot of his classic Ealing comedies for the first time, and also a Billy Wilder program that blew me away. One time they showed Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, with star Joseph Cotton in attendance. I bought a copy of his autobiography and he signed it. (Years later I visited his grave in Petersburg, Virginia. He signed nothing for me that day.)

The Library of Congress had regular movies in its little screening room. In 1987  I attended a screening of the 1927 film Wings (winner of the first-ever best picture Oscar, then called “best production”). The film’s star, Charles “Buddy” Rogers—all flashing white teeth and smoking-jacket elegance—mingled with the crowd before the film, bringing a hint of old-time Hollywood to Washington. The National Archives also showed films on occasion and I remember seeing Anatomy of a Murder there.

Sometimes I served as the Washington stringer for The Hollywood Reporter and reviewed the occasional film or play. I covered an international film festival where I saw movies from all over the world at various theaters across town. Once I attended a screening of a documentary about filmmaker George Pal at the Motion Picture Producers’ Association screening room. Another time my editor in Hollywood asked me to review the 1986 movie Good to Go. Later renamed Short Fuse, it starred Art Garfunkel as an investigative reporter and played out amid Washington’s Go-Go music scene. The movie was so terrible it was not released anywhere else, so far as I know, and the studio never held a screening for critics. That meant the responsibility of getting word out to THR’s readers rested on my shoulders. I snuck out of work to catch it at the Florida Avenue theater one cold fall afternoon. Watching the movie, I quickly understood why the studio had avoided screening it for critics, but the climactic scene took place in Washington’s Old Pension Building, which was one of my favorite places in the district. To the best of my recollection, that was the scene were Garfunkel starts nodding his head in time to the beat, signaling his acceptance—perhaps it was even late-blooming love?—of Go-Go music. The movie did nothing for either Garfunkel or Go-Go or, for that matter, my career as a critic.

So why did the theme from Cinema Paradiso trigger all these memories? I can thank another one of the Circle Theaters. This was the Outer Circle, a little two-screen theater in uptown Washington on Wisconsin Avenue between Tenleytown and Friendship Heights. It primarily showed foreign films and smaller independent releases. I think I saw Betty Blue, Ken Russel’s Gothic, and Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused there. And every time I saw a movie there the theater had a song playing over the p.a. in the little lobby area. I could not identify the piece, but it tugged at my memory. I would stand in the lobby and wrack my brains. What was that song? It was an instrumental—something wistful and melancholy. I knew I had heard it before. But where?

Not until years later, when I heard Morricone’s theme from Cinema Paradiso, did it hit me. That was the song I used to hear at the Outer Circle so many years ago. It made perfect sense, too. Why not play a song from a movie about the joy of movies in a movie theater?

Looking back, I realize that I had been living in my own Cinema Paradiso at the time. Now it appears to be a paradise lost. The pandemic has decimated movie theaters. The big chains are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and the little independent theaters are fighting to keep their heads above water. I was heartbroken when I heard that Washington’s beautiful Uptown Theater closed back in March.

I haven’t been in a movie theater since sometime last winter. Nowadays you can watch movies on your phone. But who wants to do that? Not me—at least not until someone makes a phone as big as the Uptown.