My daily commute to the spacious and sprawling Seattle campus of Boxoffice.com includes a nice, drive-by view of the newest, fanciest, most moviest multi-multiplex in the zipcode: The AMC Loews Alderwood Mall 16. If that name included -orama it would be perfect. As we cruise by I often ask my driver, Bosco, to slide the tinted windows down so that I may take in the view. It's an impressive building; a fortress, and I live near the Largest Building in the World, so I know a big building when I spot a big building. I saw Transformers at the AMC Loews Alderwood Mall 16-orama, but giant robots aren't the only giant things I have seen at the multiplex. Oh, no.

The first movie I ever saw in a multiplex was Deep Throat—on a date, because, yes, I am that smooth of a guy. I would peg the year at 1977 and the theater in this small Oregon town had maybe four screens: each featuring other films deep and/or throaty. Younger readers may be surprised to learn that adult entertainment; oh hell: porno, was mainstream suburban entertainment for a brief time, distributors even advertised in Boxoffice® magazine; a topic we will explore here more slowly, methodically and rhythmically in coming weeks. Now, the history of exhibition is a twisty, windy thing and the story of the multiplex doesn't begin on one hot, sweaty summer night in 1977, but upon the sawdust floors of the penny arcade a century ago with a New Yorker named Marcus Loew. Now I'm not of a mind right now to render a complex and beautiful award-winning graphic (though I could) charting and chronicling the famous names, theatrical entities, mergers, divestitures, and shady transactions that shape-shifted, Optimus Prime-like, into the pornoless octomulticineplex in your town, but the end product of such an exercise would feature this name: Garth Drabinsky in big Pantone® color-matched letters.

Though the story of the multiplex begins with the sounds and flavor of Coney Island it reaches its full ice wine bloom in the Great White North with a man the U.S. Government would like to put behind bars; a wanted fugitive from justice who just last week was a judge on Canada's most popular new reality show. The theatrical impressrio responsible for such stage hits as Ragtime and Fosse is the recipient of Canada's highest civilian honor, the Order of Canada, yet if he ever makes a quick trip to Detroit to watch the Red Wings play the Maple Leafs, we'll throw him in chains and not for being one of the inventors of the multiplex; but for 'aggressive accounting', whatever that may be. Money is not within my area of expertise.

Drabinksy was a young Toronto lawyer when he partnered with Canadian movie industry pioneer N. A. Taylor to create the newest, grandest movie-going experience ever: a cinema complex with movable walls, computerized ticketing, staggered start times, one giant concession stand and eighteen screens. All in a shopping center's basement. And they called this, this thing: Cineplex. It was this adventure that lead to Drabinsky, et al to merge with Canadian Odeon Theatres. Ten years ago, Cineplex Odeon merged with Loews delivering to us Loews Cineplex Entertainment. In 2006, Loews Cineplex merged with AMC, founded 80 years ago in Kansas City (where we started at about the same time), to bestow upon me the AMC Loews Alderwood Mall 16 Theatrimetrocinecomplexotron.

O-rama.

So, if you want to know whom to blame just click here.

K

220 45888