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The Portland Art Museum’s film and new media center, PAM CUT (Center for an Untold Tomorrow), has announced the creation of the Tomorrow Theater, a new venue for multimedia storytelling that will open this fall.
Taking over the space at 3530 SE Division St. that was once home to the X-rated Oregon Theater, the Tomorrow Theater is envisioned as much more than an upscale movie house, according to PAM CUT director Amy Dotson.
“We started realizing what a spectacularly interesting space that was—and how many lives that building has lived. It started as a vaudeville variety house in 1924, then it was an arthouse movie theater, a Spanish-language movie theater,” Dotson tells WW. “Obviously, then it became an X-rated movie theater and beyond. But it has this interesting and rich history that in a strange way dovetails with the direction we’re taking PAM CUT.”
Related: The Oregon Theater was the last adult theater in Portland.
The Tomorrow Theater will allow PAM CUT to screen films while the Whitsell Auditorium is closed during the construction of the Portland Art Museum’s Rothko Pavilion (which is slated for completion in 2025). But the new space will differ drastically from the Whitsell, Dotson says.
“Every night, if we show a film, there will also be at least two other art forms that are represented in the space,” she says. “So it might be that we’re telling stories through food plus the movie plus drag or dance or some other kind of art.”
Dotson says that when the Tomorrow Theater opens, it will feature six shows a week. The full programming slate and partnerships will be announced this fall, with the New York-founded SPRING/BREAK Art Show kicking off the theater’s opening in partnership with PAM CUT. Although Dotson is contemplating more outré ideas.
“If I want to show a thousand nights of Patrick Swayze and we have a pottery wheel in the corner and some dance and we have a roadhouse menu and somebody’s upfront doing Patrick Swayze poetry on demand, all the sudden that gets interesting,” she says. “Because I can watch Patrick Swayze at home—I can watch Patrick Swayze on my phone—but if you have people that are coming at it from different entry points, you can experience it different ways.”
As for the redesigning of the space, Dotson promises “futuristic vaudeville vibes” and “tongue-in-cheek nods to the old Oregon Theater” (courtesy of Andee Hess and Makrai Crecelius from female-owned Portland interior design studio Osmose, whose work will be familiar to fans of Oaks Amusement Park and Salt & Straw).
Meanwhile, the theater’s menu will be handled by Leather Storrs, former chef and owner of Noble Rot, putting the finishing flourish on Dotson’s dream of a movie theater that transcends establishing notions of moviegoing, and embodies her multipronged approach to cinema and art.
“I’m just as excited about Minecraft as I am about the new Wes Anderson movie,” she says.