Last November, I, a person who is not at all a movie person, not even in the slightest, decided that over the next year-ish, I’d watch one movie in each of Portland’s historic or independently owned movie theaters. The idea was inspired by the hundred-year-old diary I found at an antique market a few years ago. In it, the diarist recorded her daily life, including the movies she and her husband went to see. She recorded 18 movies in the diary and included a very short review for nine of them, sometimes as short as a single word (“Fine.”), never longer than a sentence (“We wished we had gone home instead.”).

My original plan was to watch each of the 18 movies recorded in the diary. I thought it could be a fun way to connect to and learn about both the past in general and the diarist’s life specifically, and a low-stakes attempt to do something outside of my usual creative box. I looked up each title on IMDB and Wikipedia and very quickly learned that all of the movies the diarist and her husband watched in 1923 were silent films (the first movie with synchronized sound didn’t release until three years later), which: no thank you!!! I’m not a regular, modern-day movie person. I’m absolutely not a silent movie person. Nevertheless.

In the process of trying to figure out how I’d approach this project, I poked around the Oregon Theater Project website to see if any of the theaters the diarist and her husband visited were still standing and/or operational (no), and I walked over to my neighborhood video rental store to see if they (1) had any of the titles for rent (yes), (2) had DVD or VCR players for rent so I could actually watch any of the titles I might rent (I forgot to ask), and (3) had any information or advice about how to watch a silent movie (no)—or where to find the music that would have accompanied each title when it was screened for live audiences (no) so that I could play the same soundtrack while watching the movies at home; or whether any local movie theaters screened silent films with live musical performances (not to their knowledge).

Pretty quickly I knew that following through with this approach was more effort than I was willing to put forth. The juice, as they say, would not be worth the squeeze. So I decided instead to watch a movie at each of Portland’s historic or independently owned movie theaters, and I gave myself until the end of 2025 to do so. Close enough in spirit, and a much more manageable endeavor.

I ended up with 16 theaters on my list. (Some people will not consider some of these theaters to be independently owned. I wasn’t super strict with my definition—basically, any movie theater that (1) isn’t a big-box, brand name theater (AMC, Cinemark, Regal, etc.) and (2) is in the city went on my list.). To date, I’ve visited 11 of them, in the following order:

• Laurelhurst Theater – Conclave
• Academy Theater – Gladiator II
• Kennedy School Theater – The Substance
• Cinema 21 – A Real Pain
• Hollywood Theater – Queer
• Living Room Theater – Babygirl
• Studio One Theater – One Of Them Days
• Bagdad Theater – Companion
• Clinton Street Theater – The Encampments
• St. Johns Twin Cinemas – The Phoenician Scheme
• St. Johns Theater – One Battle After Another

There are five theaters I definitely won’t be visiting, as they cater to an audience that I’m not part of and/or their earliest showtimes are too late in the day for me (my hyperactive autistic brain has a very early bedtime):

• 5th Avenue Cinema
• Avalon Theater
• Cinemagic
• Moreland Theater
• Tomorrow Theater

For all intents and purposes, I consider this project complete.

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When I first started this project, I planned to make a very simple mini album documenting it, inspired by Jamaica’s “see it live” mini album and her practice of saving movie ticket stubs.

I envisioned including a full-bleed photo of each movie’s title screen (or, alternately, each theater’s marquee) on one side of a spread and colored or patterned paper and the movie ticket stub on the other—or, like Jamaica did here, affixing the ticket stub to a sheet of transparency over the photo of the movie’s title screen (or the theater’s marquee).

Going into this project, I was also hopeful that more theaters would have photo booths, and that I’d be able to incorporate the photo strips into a potential mini album. Alas, only two of the theaters I visited have photo booths—Laurelhurst Theater and Kennedy School Theater—and neither of them are film, neither of them produce strips in the traditional/expected orientation, and they’re both branded. Sad! (I do appreciate that both photo booths are reasonably priced ($6.00 card, $5.00 cash) and both give you two strips with the same frames, though I don’t like that one strip is color.)

At this point, I don’t plan to make a mini album documenting this project. Uniformity is important to me in a memorykeeping project like this. If I were to make a mini album documenting this endeavor, I’d want for every spread to follow the same formula. That’s not possible here because I don’t have a title screen photo for each movie, I don’t have a photo of each theater’s marquee (some theaters don’t even have a marquee), I don’t want to use a movie poster for each movie, and the movie ticket stubs (“ticket stubs”) are, frankly, pathetic (I will never shut up about the decline and disappearance of well-designed, quality-crafted physical ephemera). Also—I’m sorry!—movies just aren’t that important to me. I don’t feel compelled to document this project beyond this blog post, and I don’t want to spend more time or other resources on it.

My primary takeaway from this project: more than not being a movie person, I’m not a going-to-the-movies person.

At the movies, there’s too much simultaneous sensory stimuli for my brain to handle. Things that other people can ignore, or that other people don’t even notice, command all of my attention (autistic brains don’t habituate to sensory input the way that non-autistic brains do; we are constantly taking in everything around us, which is why we become so overstimulated so easily and so often). Things like temperature; the volume and complexity of on- and off-screen noises; off-screen movement, which is especially disruptive in theaters that have seat-side food/drink service during the movie; smells—of food, of people, of the facility; and, as in one theater I visited (not pictured), visual clutter (T.G.I. Friday’s-style flair all over the walls, including above and on either side of the screen).

All of these things make it very difficult for me to actually take in the movie: my brain is too overwhelmed by all of the other sensory input it’s inundated with, and I’m too focused on not having an autistic meltdown in public. And that’s before factoring in the whole host of other health issues I have that make existing in public inconvenient, uncomfortable, stressful, etc.!

Do I regret doing this project? Do I feel like it was a waste of time or money? No. I got in a lot of good walks, I saw some parts of Portland I don’t spend much time in, I learned about two photo booths that weren’t previously on my radar (always a win, even when they’re not film), and I learned something important about myself—I learned why I don’t enjoy going to the movies. Having clarity about any aspect of yourself is always helpful.

Will this new knowledge about myself stop me from going to see the Michael Jackson biopic in a theater on release day? Absolutely not. Michael was my first-ever autistic hyperfocus, which developed instantly upon my mom playing for me one evening the first record she ever owned—the Jackson 5’s ABC. I was nine years old, the same age she’d been when the record was released. I will use all of my spoons and every last drop of my sensory and social batteries to experience this movie in person, among like-minded fans.

Best marquee: Hollywood Theater. For sure the most iconic movie theater marquee in Portland, and one of the most well-known alongside that of the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.

Coolest campus: Kennedy School Theater. I wish I’d had more time to explore this place when I was there. (I haven’t gone back to explore it because I have no reason to return other than to explore it and returning only to explore it isn’t worth the spoons for me right now.)

Favorite title sequence: Gladiator II. My relief when it was confirmed it wasn’t made by AI.

Movie I most enjoyed watching: Conclave. Visually stunning.

Theaters I’m most likely to watch another movie at (if I continue to go to the movies after this project): Bagdad Theater (below) or Laurelhurst Theater. Bagdad is enormous, which means it’s very unlikely I’d ever be seated near anyone else; I like that it has balcony seating; overall it’s just a vibe; and it’s close enough to my apartment. Laurelhurst is the closest of the two theaters with a photo booth, and also I love their light fixtures (see two photos above).

Total cost of the project: $91.50, which is less than I thought I’d spend. To be fair, 10 of the 11 movies I went to were matinees; I didn’t buy any concessions at any movie; I purchased 10 of my 11 tickets in person, which was at least $1.00 cheaper per ticket than buying online; and I either walked to or parked in free zones for 10 of the 11 movies.

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For the curious, here are the movies the diarist recorded in her diary in 1923, listed in the order she and her husband saw them. Titles are linked to their IMDB page. A review, if offered, is in parentheses.

• Dangerous Age (“Fine.”)
• Clarence (“It was very good.”)
• Youth to Youth
• All Night (“Not much good.”)
• The Hottentot (“Very good.”)
• Shadows
• One Exciting Night
• Back Home and Broke
• Robin Hood (“Very fine.”)
• Safety Last! (“We wished we had gone home instead.”)
• The Abysmal Brute (“Fine.”)
• The Go-Getter (“Very good.”)
• Daddy
• Where the North Begins (“It was fine too.”)
• Six Days
• Zaza (“Real good but not the old Zaza.”)
• The Ruggles of Red Gap
• The Common Law