The Uptown Cinemas in Lower Queen Anne lie dark. The site's 84-year history as a movie showcase came to an end Sunday evening, Nov. 28.
AMC, the national chain that had operated the theater in recent years, announced a few weeks back that its "Uptown 3 has been identified as a theatre that no longer competes effectively in the marketplace." Who am I to argue? In this millennium I've gone to the Uptown mostly to attend advance screenings. Those were jampacked. On other, rare visits to catch a movie already in release, I pretty much had the place to myself.
That's not how I remember it from my first days in Seattle. When I arrived in autumn 1965, the Uptown still had one screen. So did all the other theaters in the area, but the Uptown wasn't just another moviehouse. It seemed uptown in the Manhattan sense (like the Beekman or 68th Street), classy and smart. What was on that single screen was usually distinctive, and audiences turned out for it.
At that time there were a handful of Seattle movie theaters with some claim to being called art houses - theaters where foreign, independent or otherwise "niche" films were shown.
Only the Ridgemont up on Greenwood was committed full time to this specialized market, especially subtitled foreign-language films, but the Uptown was among the hemi-semi-demi-art houses - to appropriate a nuance from "What's New, Pussycat?," a Woody Allen-scripted comedy of that era. So were the U District's Varsity and Wallingford's Guild 45th. More often than not, these places were showing something other than mainstream Hollywood releases.
For my grad-student money, the Uptown outpointed the others. It was then part of the vast Sterling Recreation Organization empire, the one where SRO would book the first runs of such English-language esoterica as "The Knack ... and How to Get It." "The Knack" was the brilliant, multiple-envelope-pushing farce Richard Lester had managed to knock off in between his Beatles films ("A Hard Day's Night" and "Help!"); it took the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Sidney Lumet's "The Pawnbroker," featuring Rod Steiger's powerhouse performance (and some transgressive nudity), opened there. I believe "The Collector" made its local bow at the Uptown, and if "What's New, Pussycat?" did or didn't (that would have been just before my time), Allen's "What's Up, Tiger Lily?" certainly did. In 1968 "Petulia," Lester's sad, savage satire on the contemporary American scene, was showcased there. That's the last title I associate with the Uptown's golden age, though don't take that to the bank.
I've tried to Google up more history of the theater's evolution, to nail down just when SRO sold the place, and when it was infected with the multiplex virus.
For an interim of indefinite length, it appears that the once-singular theater did serve as just another among many movie emporia. True, in recent years there were signs of the old art-house identity being reconstituted; but even when one or more of the three latterday screens were occupied by a foreign or otherwise arty, offbeat picture, it wasn't an exclusive booking; you could see the film elsewhere. The Uptown's days as a destination moviehouse were long past.
One thing you can find via Google is the cyber footsteps of a "New Uptown Cinema" movement. Some people are missing their neighborhood theater already, and dream of reviving and transforming it. We may yet see it light up again on the southwest corner of Queen Anne Ave and West Republican.[[In-content Ad]]
