One night in the early 1990s, I entered the Neptune Theatre in the University District, found a seat, and began watching a movie that changed my life: Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice. In the mid-1990s, in the same neighborhood, I watched Charles Burnett’s The Glass Shield at Metro Cinemas. One night in the early ’00s, I listened to the melancholy robot in Moby’s “Whispering Wind” as I waited at the nearby Seven Gables to watch Claire Denis’s one-night-stand odyssey, Vendredi Soir. When the movie started, the screen fell over the Seven Gables’s mural of a prince and princess having a moment on a medieval bridge.
My reason for these recollections is that the theaters that formed them no longer exist. Seven Gables is closed, the Neptune is now a popular music venue, and the Metro Cinemas keeps changing hands—it’s currently AMC Seattle 10. All three were once a part of Landmark Theatres, a company that used to be a giant but is now barely a ghost. Its presence in Seattle has been reduced to the Crest in Shoreline.
But the University District has managed to survive this catastrophe, largely because of the Grand Illusion Cinema, which is still going strong. In fact, Grand Illusion is experiencing a renaissance.
