On my first trip to Tacoma’s Grand Cinema, an archetypally red-carpeted movie theater overlooking the bustling port, I get the full tour courtesy of executive director Philip Cowan. Cowan is a tall, mellow ex-Texan with wireframe glasses and a deliberate vocal cadence. Befitting his station, he’s adamant about the role of independent theaters in the larger cinematic ecosystem.

“I’m always looking for a ‘wow’ factor,” he says of selecting movies for the Grand. “The film finishes, and audiences do a legitimate wow.”

Unlike the AMCs and Regals of the world, independent theaters search high, low, and in between for this wow factor. Small-budget debuts, experimental foreign fare, remastered esoterica—it’s all on the table. “I view myself as trying to curate films,” says Cowan. “I’m trying to learn the local taste. I read reviews, I track film festivals, I watch a lot of screeners at home.”

Unsurprisingly, Covid hit the Grand hard. Writers’ and actors’ guild strikes haven’t helped. But Cowan seems undaunted. He views it as his mission to bring top-notch film to the masses. As long as there are cinephiles out there, he figures he’ll have a willing audience.

“Sometimes when a film finishes you want to talk to somebody about it,” he says. “Whether because it’s an interesting topic or something controversial. That’s what we want here.”

The Grand Cinema took root in this historic Odd Fellows hall in the mid-1990s and approached financial ruin a couple of years later. Staff and volunteers banded together to bail it out in ’97, assuming debts under the umbrella of a nonprofit. Cowan says the Tacoma arts scene wouldn’t be the same without it. The ensuing quarter-century has produced educational film camps, 72-hour directorial competitions, and the Tacoma  Film Festival (TFF). And, of course, movie screenings. Lots and lots of movie screenings.

“As a nonprofit,” Cowan explains, “our focus is getting a mix of films that draw people and high-quality films. We’re not really interested in films that draw people that are not high quality.”

Though cinema projectors now spin hard drives rather than film rolls, movies are rented from studios using the same general payment model as the old days. Usually, says Cowan, studios take between 40 and 60 percent of ticket sales for their rented movies. The rest goes to the cinema. With large commercial movies—say, this year’s Barbie, the Grand’s highest gross of 2023—the studio reaps a higher sales percentage. For small foreign films, stuff that studios have a harder time pushing, the Grand will pull 60 percent.

This back-and-forth comes to special complexity in the land of independent theaters. Is it possible to uphold taste while balancing the books? Well, it’s hard. 

Attendance climbed from ’21 to ’22 before hitting a plateau. Barbie carried the Grand “way up above that.” But not all movies can be Barbie, which along with that three-hour scientist biopic, represented a post-Covid heyday for the Grand. “We’re still not getting the attendance we did prepandemic,” says Cowan. “No theater is. People got out of the habit of going to movies.”

Thirty miles and some indeterminate number of traffic stoppages up I-5, Seattle boasts its own cinematic cosmos. In terms of independent theaters, the Emerald City is a nerve center. It’s almost more common that a neighborhood has an indie movie house than not. Some have more than one.

I settle into the newest of these on a soaking-wet Monday night, edging into a blue-cushioned folding seat at Columbia City’s Beacon Theater. Standing pat at six rows of eight chairs, the single-screen, employee-owned Beacon opened in 2019, promising, per the Stranger, an “eclectic, curated selection of both new and old, avant-garde and mainstream."

Tonight’s selection, Kotoko, from acclaimed Japanese director Shinya Tsukamoto, slots into the avant-garde category. You’d never find this film in a major chain.
After some fairly cryptic previews—Shinji Sōmai’s P. P. Rider (’83), Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (’65)—but before the feature presentation, Beacon employee Shayna Nowicki introduces the film to rev up the crowd. Oh, right—the crowd! Despite the weather, the evening’s overbearing Mondayishness, the Beacon’s 48 seats are nearly sold out.

“Who was here to see last week’s Tsukamoto film?” asks Nowicki.

A surprising number of people raise their hands. Nowicki smiles, thanks them, and explains how Tsukamoto’s career evolved after he started a family. How his films turned from hopeful to hopeless while retaining their inner beauty….
Clearly, she’s done this before.

“We always do introductions before our films,” Nowicki tells me afterward. “I programmed this particular Tsukamoto series, so I came up with the intros.”

You won’t find anything like this introduction at a larger theater. For that matter, you won’t find it at many indies. “We’ve been doing really, really well,” Nowicki says of the Beacon, highlighting a burgeoning community of regulars.

If the Beacon portrays itself as a film studies major—thick glasses, paperback in pocket, wicked caffeine habit—Capitol Hill’s Central Cinema is that student’s goofy dropout friend. Kevin Spitzer founded the Central back in 2005, turning the old industrial space (variously an auto shop and milk bottling plant) into a comfortable single-screen dinner setup, with booths and tables in place of folding seats.

More Mel Brooks than Shinya Tsukamoto, the Central favors oddball crowd favorites and forgotten bits of nostalgia. Waiters whisk between the vinyl-cushioned benches, delivering pitchers (!) of beer and what might be Seattle’s best french fries (seriously). I dropped in to rewatch 2005’s The Descent, a spelunking spectacular with copious jump scares, and what struck me about Central Cinema, beyond the aforementioned fries, was the room’s gregarious vibe. The audience screamed together, laughed together. Strangers chatted during the five-minute intermission. It was a bit like seeing a movie with friends in your living room, especially with the 9:45pm Friday showtime.

Despite their evident contrasts, what unites these independent theaters—the Grand, the Beacon, the Central—is that gnomic spark, Cowan’s “wow” factor. These places are paeans to an artistic medium that, if major chain ticket sales are any indication, seems headed for artlessness.

The Grand Cinema announced an exclusive option this summer to purchase its building from the Merlino family, its current owners. The nonprofit has a two-year window to raise the funds. Cowan thinks it’ll happen, and when it does, he says, the Grand will secure its place as a bedrock of Tacoma’s cultural scene.

“In that spirit,” I ask him, “what’s your essential pitch to get audiences back in theaters?”

He mulls it over for a moment. “Movies are very much a communal experience,” he says. “When you watch something at home, you never pick up all the aspects of a film that you would on a big screen, with people buzzing and laughing and crying around you. People are emotional creatures. When you can tap into that, it’s a way more memorable experience.”