Goodbye, Harvard Exit

I went out of my way, last weekend, to visit a little movie house that will close down next month. The theater is called the Harvard Exit. My wife and I drove through the rain, parked on the street that the theater was named for, and had a little lunch - OK, a lot of lunch - before we headed in to see the movie.

The theater is in a great old building. It used to be the Womans Century Club. Here’s a cool video from the Seattle historical museum, MOHAI:



We walked into the theater, through its green doors, the ones that exit onto Harvard Street. A disinterested clerk took our $16 (it was a matinee). I suppose the poor bastard is going to be looking for a new job in the new year, so it’s hard to get upset at him.

Off to one side is a lobby more like a sitting room, with a candy counter and soft chairs to sit in. There are paperback books, piled up, for you to read, and plastic cups for ice water. You could sit by the faux fireplace and while away an hour, waiting to meet your party or waiting for your show to begin.


I took pictures of the old projector and the fireplace and the carpet. Theater carpets get me all nostalgic. It’s a thing.

Fireplace

Old projector, hardly digital

Carpet - it's a thing

Theaters have been closing down in Seattle for years. I remember seeing “The Story of O” at a midnight showing at the Neptune theater, way, way back in the day. More recently, I think I saw “Paprika” there, around 2007. A few years back, the Neptune shut down as a movie theater. It’s a venue for live performance, now.

My wife and I went to see the Buffy Sing Along at a midnight showing at the Egyptian, years and years ago, and we’ve been to movies there, now and again, including “Beasts of the Southern Wild”. Earlier this year, they closed the Egyptian, soon to reopen as part of SIFF.

I’m not too tempted to get weepy about Landmark Theaters that are closing down. There are more scheduled to go, but SIFF reanimates some of them, like the Uptown Theater in Queen Anne. Between SIFF and Sundance, there are lots of venues for slightly off-beat movies.

But we’ve seen movies at the Harvard Exit every few months. Recently, we saw “The Tale of the Princess Kaguya” at the Harvard Exit, and, also recently, “Pride”.

The movie we saw this weekend was called “Zero Motivation”. Here’s a picture:

Are you motivated?

It was a slacker film in the Israeli army, and if you want to know more about it, well, this isn’t the movie for you.

So, goodbye to the Harvard Exit -

Remember that sitting room? With the projector and the carpet that I took pictures of? Remember how I waxed sentimental about how you could while away a few minutes, have a moment, a memory of the day, something more than images flickering on a screen for a couple of hours?

The Lobby

I’ve never seen anyone sitting out there.