The massive wave of megaplex building by the four largest movie theater chains is dragging down the movie exhibition industry, according to recent articles in Business Week and The Economist. It's probably cold comfort for a beleaguered independent movie house to hear that the national chains are suffering, but the articles make plain that the two kinds of businesses are barely related.

The problem is that while movie ticket sales are way up, at any one time there's still only 14 or so movies that the mass market is interested in seeing. When you have 20-plus screens, and a rival chain across the street has 30, that leaves you with a problem that showing hit movies on several screens can't solve.

Seattle has yet to be overrun by megaplexes, as only the Meridian 16 meets The Economist's definition of the term ("megaplex" = more than 15 screens). But that theater has been forced by its downtown neighbor, Pacific Place, to spread most of its movies over multiple screens -- last weekend, a mere eight movies were showing, with two showing on three screens and four showing on two screens. Last weekend, Pacific Place, with a mere 11 screens, actually showed one more movie than its neighbor.

According to The Economist, the national theater chains initially hoped to fill their extra screens with foreign or independent movies, but have largely given up on that strategy (understandably so -- at a Christmas season showing of the excellent Japanese movie Afterlife at a Tulsa, Oklahoma 20-plex, my wife and I were two of three people in attendance). Which is why the megaplexes are not the enemies of Seattle's indie and pseudo-indie movie houses -- there's very little overlap between the indie houses and the chains, and our pseudo-indie chain, Landmark/Seven Gables, has smartly programmed around the offerings downtown, showing indie, foreign, and revival movies in the theaters on the cusp of downtown, while maintaining a chokehold on the near-northside market with their more mainstream theaters (the Guild, Metro, and Varsity, and the discount house the Crest). While a wave of bankruptcies and theater closings is likely for the movie exhibition business in general, Seattle's market looks comparatively healthy -- at least until Northgate Mall gets its planned multiplex, with 6,000 more seats to fill.

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The Henry Art Gallery was one of three Northwest museums (the others are the Boise and Portland Art Museums) to receive the largess of Seattle-bred California software entrepreneur Peter Norton. Norton and his wife Eileen recently pared down their huge collection of contemporary art, parceling out around 1,000 works -- mostly considered minor -- to 28 U.S. museums and London's Tate Gallery. Other than the Tate, New York's Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, most of the recipients are lesser-known regional institutions with a commitment to contemporary art. Better-known contemporary art museums, such as Columbus, Ohio's Wexner Center for the Arts, Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, even L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art (where Norton is a trustee) were left off the list -- though some of these may be in line for later donations of greater artistic and monetary value. The Seattle Art Museum turned down a group of works offered to them by the Norton Foundation. "We felt what they were offering was not right for us at this time," spokesperson Linda Williams told the P-I.

The 22 works by 21 artists given to the Henry are largely unknown to me -- which I don't feel too badly about, since Michael Kimmelman assures us in The New York Times that "most of [the artists in the donation] are young, lesser-known, or unknown." The Henry did get a piece by George Stoll, familiar to Seattle gallery-goers from shows at Winston-Wächter and Meyerson and Nowinski galleries, as well as work by Sean Landers, Alix Pearlstein, Chris Finley, and a glass artist, of course: Therman Statom, who has worked at Pilchuk.

Send gossip and complaints to eric@thestranger.com.