You, Me and the UC Theatre

I’m glad the place is back in use, but honestly? When the UC Theatre closed its doors in 2001 (for what would be a decade and a half), it felt like a part of my life was over. Sure, now you can go there and see bands and everything, but … dude, if you’re standing in line to get in there at 11:30 on a Saturday night, it’s supposed to be because you’re seeing The Rocky Horror Picture Show (complete with freaky-deaky floor show folks). Not Green Day.
But I feel so displaced every time I drive past the thing.
How many nights did I spend in front of that massive screen? That was where I first saw Apocalypse Now. It was where I first saw Gallipoli and The Last Wave and Les Parapluies de Cherbourg and Repo Man. It was where I saw Tim Curry in fishnets and pearls more times than I can count—the UC played The Rocky Horror Picture Show for a record-setting 22 years. The theater had (has) an unusual U-shaped footprint so that the main auditorium is kind of tucked away in the back—it gave you the sense of something that was much bigger on the inside than it was on the outside.
And it was. That’s where I first saw the films of Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel and Pedro Almodovar, of Roman Polanski and John Waters. With the theater’s dedication to exuberant eclecticism, you might find anything on their calendar. You might end up in front of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Arabian Nights. Or perhaps, Pink Flamingos. Yeah, I’d go on to take some film studies classes in college, but no one had to explain to me what “auteur theory” meant because I learned it in my teens at the UC Theatre. That place was my classroom, as much as any room in my high school. It taught me was “transgressive” really looked like; it taught me about subjectivity and taste and high and low culture and to question whether the distinction had any real meaning. It taught me to value the eclectic—and the eccentric.