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It’s a Friday night screening of The Devil Wears Prada at the Tomorrow Theater on Southeast Division Street. The cocktails are flowing cerulean blue, a drag queen named Violet Hex is hosting bingo, and Eric McGuire just figured out that he brought his sweet mother visiting from Utah to what was quite recently an X-rated movie theater.
The Tomorrow Theater is housed in the former Oregon Theater, which stopped being a mattress-only establishment—at some point management got right to the point and ripped out the chairs—in March 2020.
Did McGuire notice the Mylar mattress hanging over the lobby entrance? The peepholes in the front door? The movie theater seats (not the discarded originals, management is quick to point out) hanging on back walls for sound insulation?
“Perfect place to take your mom from out of town, you know,” McGuire says. He looks at the Vivienne Westwood-inspired fabric art hanging on the walls. “Those aren’t the original sheets, are they?” They are not.
After a change in ownership, a thorough scrubbing and complete renovation, the Tomorrow Theater opened in November 2023, a project of the Portland Art Museum’s Center for an Untold Tomorrow, or PAM CUT, its film and new media center.
As the audience walked in, Amy Dotson, director of PAM CUT and the Tomorrow Theater, pointed up and encouraged them to “make a wish upon a mattress!”
“From the outside, you don’t really know what it is—there’s an air of mystery,” Dotson says. “And then when you come in, you’re like, oh, this is what it is. You kind of have to see it to understand.”
Word of mouth is growing, but it hasn’t quite been a stampede of audiences down Division every weekend (some weekends, though). Every night, PAM CUT asks who’s new to the theater and 90% of the audience raises their hands. About 96% of the audience are not members of PAM, according to Dotson.
The Tomorrow Theater is unusual for a movie house because Dotson and her team typically book two acts a night, often of a theme, but not always movie-related. “It’s this plus that,” Dotson says.
Coming up is “metal weekend,” for example. There’s a screening of Robot Dreams plus hand-drawn portraits by the “Selfie Bot” (back by popular demand). Wayne’s World plus a drawing lesson. OzzFest documentary We Sold Our Souls for Rock ‘n Roll plus a conversation with director Penelope Spheeris on July 27. It’s part of the theater’s “Carte Blanche” series that brought David Byrne to Tomorrow last fall.
They can be wild nights—the fluorescent margaritas help—and audiences don’t behave the way that they might at Regal Cinemas or Keller Auditorium. They chat and linger long after the lights come up.
“We can’t get people to sit down, and then we can’t get people out of the theater at the end of the movie,” Dotson says, amused. “That’s something we didn’t count on.”
Even though the Tomorrow Theater is already 9 months old, it took a full lap around The Devil Wears Prada screening to find an audience member who had ever been there before.
Julie Toporowski heard about the theater on Instagram and saw 1992′s Singles here in June. She loves the fancy new seating (leg room, cup holders, fold-out tray tables like on an airplane), the bonus performances and the movies. She brought her kid along to The Devil Wears Prada and posted an Instagram Story of her bingo card to help get the word out.
“They need to be known,” she says. “This is a great space.”
Laura Bartroff, PAM’s director of communications, heads the team that’s hustling for audiences. The Tomorrow Theater has relied on targeted social media ads on Instagram and Facebook.
“It’s a little bit of trial and error over the past nine months to see what’s working and what’s not,” she says. “Every program is, potentially, wildly different from one night to the next, so it’s trying to get the attention of new audiences far enough in advance to the decision point.”
The real sweet spot is when regular performers like Violet Hex and unofficial PAM CUT house DJ Anjali come with a built-in following and they can rally a crowd.
Opening an independent movie theater in the era of Netflix and chill is admittedly a risk, says Brian Ferriso, the director of PAM. But the appeal of being able to create a de facto new eastside location of the museum and attract new audiences with experimental programming proved irresistible.
“I felt having the film program within the lecture hall of the ‘formal’ museum doesn’t allow it to fully breathe or realize its potential,” Ferriso says.
The museum is leasing the theater with the goal of buying the venue as a permanent location, if all goes well, Ferriso says.
The theater’s hits have been exciting, if not predictable. The black-and-white silent film Hundreds of Beavers set to a live original score by Jet Black Pearl attracted a full house, many in beaver costumes. Lines went out the door and employees scrambled to set up extra folding chairs.
Other popular offerings have been Tay-oncé, a double-feature of Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour and Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé, and a Dec. 23 $5 family showing of Pee-wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special. That one was particularly gratifying for Dotson, who wrote her master’s thesis on Pee-wee.
“We have a sense of humor and a sense of fun and that’s the way it’s supposed to be,” Dotson says. “If I’m getting out of my house and getting out of my jammies, it has to be fun.”
GO: Carte Blanche: Penelope Sheeris & We Sold Our Souls for Rock ‘n Roll at the Tomorrow Theater, 3530 SE Division St., 503-221-1156, tomorrowtheater.org. Doors 5:30 pm, conversation 6 pm, film 7 pm Saturday, July 27. $35.