Everyone knows that “movies” as we have known them for over 100 years are on the verge of radical change. Indeed, since at least the late 1970s, with the introduction of home video, an implacable force of change has been on the march. Home entertainment centers, iPods, Bittorrent trading, and the world wide web itself are just a few of the mutations that have revolutionized how we view movies and how we find out about them. One of the most vivid shifts among so many such alterations is that a movie, as we customarily know it, may cease to be a physical thing. Taking a page, as it were, out of the aesthetics of Monroe Beardsley, who argued that a work of art is a perceptual object rather than a physical one, movies are now more often than not a digital object.

Predictions of the eventual digital hosting, projection, copying, and so forth, of movies have been rife since the early 1990s, or at least since the inception of Wired magazine. But who would have thought that Portland, Oregon — a drink water town in a state no one has ever heard of — would some day become the epicenter of a digital projection revolution?

Well, so it has come to pass. In early December, 2006, the six-screen Living Room Theaters complex opened in Portland’s downtown gentrified area, specifically at 10th and SW Stark. As its website announces, Living Room Theaters will be a complete leisure experience, with a restaurant, a bar, free wi-fi, and six small auditoria (the largest has 65 seats). The company putting the project together has a sister theater also going up in Miami, but the owners maintain that the Portland unit is the flagship of what they hope to be a national chain. What is most unusual about Living Room Theaters is that the founders also plan to exclusively screen independent and “speciality” (i.e., foreign) films, often trafficking in films that have not even premiered in the United States, and they add that in some cases they will be dealing directly with the filmmakers, circumventing the lugubrious, arcane, and outsider-excluding mechanics of national distribution, the stumbling block that fells most bright ideas in film production and exhibition.

Shawn Levy of the Portland Oregonian has covered the theater’s advent the most thoroughly of local papers. The brain child of Felix Martin, Ernesto Rimoch, and Diego Rimoch, Living Room Theaters is at the very least an ambitious enterprise that prides itself on its energy conservation and green policies, and it aspires to tear customers away from the mundane reliance on popcorn, candy, and soda pop as inevitable movie time concessions. Writes Levy, “Martin and his partners currently operate a firm which converts celluloid prints of movies into digital files that can be projected in moviehouses, and they are establishing connections with independent and foreign filmmakers who don’t have distribution in the United States.”

What’s curious is that about a year earlier Cinetopia, another digital theater with eight screens, a full restaurant, and “gourmet” butter for popcorn, went up in Vancouver, Washington, a neighboring burg situated but just across the Columbia River, and it appears to have made itself a rousing success by showing a mix of popular hits, such as Casino Royale, along side the studios’ definition of art films, such as Babel, as well as digital projection of football games on Sunday and Monday, among other special events. By coincidence, Cinetopia calls its three fine dining theaters, where waiters serve spectators candy, pop, beer/wine, and/or hot meals prior to show time, Living Room Theaters. The presence of these two venues within 15 miles of each other suggests that Portland and environs is plugged unwittingly into the zeitgeist.

One wonders if the ernest founders of Living Room Theaters know what they are getting into. From the local arena to the national they may be greeted with resistance or, worse, indifference. Circumvented distributors may not be so happy about offering up at good terms the films that Living Room Theaters in fact does want to book. Film fanatics may decide that it is still cheaper to stay home with their own theater-equivalent presentation than to wend their way to a part of town where it is difficult to park and expensive to play. And finally there is the issue of where Living Room Theaters resides, which happens to be a busy but recently gentrified section of the city called the Pearl District, yclept thus for reasons no one can remember. The residents consist of mostly very wealthy but conventional-minded people living in high rise condos, who are more likely to be frustrated at the fact that the theater is showing the latest intellectual Argentine thriller rather than Superman Begins. Worse, the company’s founders may have overestimated the town’s general appetite for off-beat entertainment, although the theater complex’s presentation as a multi-faceted “experience” may indicate an awareness of this possibility. It’s Seattle, up north, that is the real movie town; Portlanders watch lots of movies, but have a very narrow appetite.

Worst of all, Portland filmgoers have long been dominated by a succession of large dominating theater chains, all of which have flirted with federal anti-trust suits. Currently, it is Regal Cinemas that owns most of the city’s screens. Outside of the Regal chain, there are a handful of independent theaters scattered around the city that show either second run, revival, or repertory calendars, among them the Cinema 21 and the Hollywood theater. Each successive corporation that rules first-run theater-going experience in Portland has been aggressive in the past about preserving its hegemony.

Be that as it may, Living Room Theaters has announced its first schedule and the company appears to be living up to its self-imposed mandate. Among the films slated for screening, a mix of new and recent, are Agnes and His Brothers (German director Oskar Roehler’s award winning domestic drama), Claude Chabrol’s The Bridesmaid, the Edward Norton starer Down in the Valley, Look Both Ways (Australian helmer Sarah Watt’s blend of slacker ethos and animation), 13 Tzameti (Gela Babluanni’s hard-edged descent into masculinist competition), and a revival of Wordplay, among 14 titles.

This is all well and good for Portland viewers, but what are the international implications? High tech may advance and improve, but people themselves don’t change and mostly what new technology does is appeal to people’s inherent laziness; thus, downloading a movie for home viewing is easier than getting up and fielding numerous obstructions in order to get to a theater. More optimistically, cheaper is better when it comes to poorer countries, which still rely on and enjoy the communality of public screenings. What it comes down to is what the film industry likes to call product. If Living Room Theaters can triumph over inertia through must-see movies, than their model may be one other theaters and other countries may follow.

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