The Last Balcony: An Oral History of the Uptown

I wrote an oral history of my favorite cinema, the Uptown Theater on Connecticut Ave. NW here in DC, for the Washington City Paper. I love the oral history format. Cutting this down to publishable length tested me. My apologies to the various people whose comments were cut for length.

AMC Theatres declined to make attendance figures available for publication, but they told me they've ticket up slightly in the last year. I hope that means the Uptown will stick around a long time.

Appendix! A probably-incomplete list of films I saw at the Uptown, compiled from memory, by year.

1993: The Abyss [Extended Edition]

1996: Vertigo

1998: Godzilla (the awful Roland Emmerich one), The Thin Red Line

1999: Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace, Sleepy Hollow

2000: The Perfect Storm

2002: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

2004: Spider-Man 2

2005: Good Night and Good Luck, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, King Kong (the underrated Peter Jackson one)

2006: Mission: Impossible III, Superman Returns

2007: Spider-Man 3, Blade Runner: The Final Cut

2008: Iron Man, The Dark Knight

2009: Watchmen, Terminator: Salvation

2010: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1

2011: Super 8

2012: The Hunger Games, The Avengers, Prometheus

2013: Iron Man 3, Jurassic Park (20th anniversary 3D rerelease), Gravity

2014: Captain America: The Winter Soldier

2015: Tomorrowland

2016: Ali, Independence Day: Resurgence

2017: Close Encounters of the Third Kind 

2018: Ant-Man and the Wasp