he first time I walked into the new Broadway Metro expansion a few
months back, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It felt as though I’d tripped
through the wardrobe into Narnia.
One minute I’m outside on regular old Willamette Street, looking at
a nondescript, boarded-up façade where the old Scan Design furniture
store used to be, and the next I’m standing inside the protean bloom of a
cool new movie theater.
It felt like magic. I didn’t realize the innards of a city block contained so much space
and so much possibility.
Construction workers clomped by or stood hovering on ladders amid the stacked
building materials and coils of cord on the floor. Tapping and drilling and the scratch of
things being moved echoed across the ceiling. The air smelled of fresh angles.
But what struck me most of all was the impression of space opening up into more
space, ample and yet cozy, and the crackle of opportunity it held — like the crackle of the
first reel being fed into a projector’s sprockets.
Over the course of several weeks, I would check in with Edward Schiessl, the Metro’s
managing director and the dreamer and driving force behind this massive project, which
more than doubles in size the existing Metro on Broadway. As Schiessl led me on regular
tours of the space, I had the sense of watching a scene fill in frame by frame: first a
theater with no seats, and then, next week, a theater with seats, and suddenly a theater
with a screen.
And now — now, after months in the making, it’s finally complete, and Eugene moviegoers
are in for a surprise: a bigger, better Metro, at once ultra-modern and vividly nostalgic, a
tribute to the hypnotic pull and artistic endurance of cinema itself.
I caught up with Schiessl on the eve of the Broadway Metro’s grand opening, to be held
Friday, July 19, to get the scoop on what’s up with the new digs, and what we can expect.
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