Uptown Theatre

The 70mm revivals aren’t as frequent as they used to be. Actually, I don’t think they’ve had a 70mm series since the 90s? I imagine, if the Uptown does host a 70mm series, it will be after the summer movie season, since attendance will drop and there won’t be any event films coming out until Thanksgiving.

If I had a wish, I would hope for a science fiction/fantasy series starting with the Star Wars films, Star Trek, Superman, Alien, all in 70mm. I read that 20th Century Fox was going to re-release a director’s cut of Aliens in theaters like they did the recent Alien one. Perhaps, they could show it here. Even older films would be nice to revisit. I remember watching Vertigo, in a restored 70mm print with a remastered soundtrack. The movie looked like it had just been shot yesterday. The print was so sharp and scratch free!

What would be really cool is if this theater had digital projection capabilities.

I just rememebered that I forgot to add two movies to list of recent movies at Uptown before Road To Perdition. Again, if am wrong please tell me! Here are the two movies before Road To Perdition.

05/16/02 Star Wars Episode II: Attack Of The Clones
06/21/02 Minority Report

Are there any 70mm revivals coming to this theater anytime soon?

To Ron3853 Have you ever done any research on the Warner Theatre in Pittsburgh? If so please contact Dave Grau. At

I lived in DC for a couple of years in the mid 90s and enjoyed a couple of fun trips to the Uptown – to see Twelve Monkeys at a full house right after the great blizzard of 99, and American President and Twister…One of the attractions was also a fantastic 1960s era Chinese restaurant up the block which attests to being a meeting place for Dean Rusk and the Russian delegation during the Cuban Missile Crisis – great sizzling rice soup.
Ron’s list also brought to mind one other sadly lost trend…that even great roadshow houses in the 60s & 70s had to put a double feature on once in a while in a fallow period…Studios would package some classics or a couple picture at the end of their runs and give us another taste…Another casualty of VCR/DVD that we don’t have that anymore…Remember seeing A Touch of Class & Paper Moon on the same bill in New York on wide release and Paul Mazursky’s The Tempest paired with a Richard Pryor concert film at the Loews State 2…we can only dream…Thanks Ron for sharing that great research

I saw How The West Was Won & It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad World when they came out originally in this theatre. I used to spend a lot of time at the zoo nearby and remember poor Smokey The Bear in his concrete cage looking forlorn and bored.

George Senda
Concord, Ca

Actually Bill, believe or not…I’ve never lived in DC, although I have lived in NYC, Chicago, but mostly Pittsburgh. I’ve made it a hobby to research first-run theaters in various cities to see what movies they played each week. I always liked the DC movie theaters ever since I visited the city wih my family on a vacation when I was 11. That’s why I chose to put DC on this website first. Check out other cities and theaters in Washington for more lists as I can add them.

I still have more researching to do, as so far I’ve been trying to get 34 cities from the period 1960-1975. Trying to borrow microfilms of other cities' old newspapers is a process that is slower than molasses in January and they will only lend you 6 reels at a time.

I hope to eventually get all research on this website for posterity from 1957-1981 for all 34 cities that I have been researching…and NYC will be my biggest challenge.

I know that “Star Wars” in its first release at the Uptown did play over a year. Watch for another posting at some time and I’ll take the theater up to December 31, 1981.

As you can see there were occasional spells where no appropriate new first-run films were available to be released, such as 1960, 1961, and the mid-70s, so the Uptown occasionally resorted to second-run rilms or rereleases played there to fill in until the next big box-office spectacular worthy of the theater was ready for release. This accounts for the double features as well as the foreign films.

In the first half of the 1970s, MGM trotted out “Gone With the Wind,” “2001,” and “Doctor Zhivago” every year as a part of what it called “MGM’s Big 3.” In some cities it was “MGM’s Big 4” with “Ryan’s Daughter” added. Usually this package played at one of the theaters in each city which had formerly shown “roadshow” films.

For excellent reading regarding motion picture theaters in Washington, D.C., try MOTION PICTURE EXHIBITION IN WASHINGTON, D.C.: AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF PARLORS, PALACES AND MULTIPLEXES IN THE METROPOLITAN AREA, 1894-1997, by Robert K. Headley, published by McFarland & Company, Publishers in 1999.

Seeing the title Car Wash almost made me fall out of my chair. Earthquake in Sensurround…now that was a crazy experience. The Odeon in my hometown even had nurses and ambulances on stanby for the premiere screening. When the theater started to shake (with the help of huge speakers installed in the auditorium), my best friend promptly threw up in the seat next to her. She was immediately ‘treated’ in the lobby by the medical staff. That beautiful theater is now closed and abandoned.
2001: A Space Odyssey was released three times at the Washington Uptown?

I thought 2001 had its world premiere in the Loew’s Cinerama in NY.
And why does Washington still have a great classic theater like this and NY nothing? And now they’re destroying the Henry Miller. If Penn Station were around today I’m sure they’d be chomping at the bit to tear it down as well. Does anybody have the money to convert Toys R Us back into the great Criterion?

I remember the Uptown first as a Todd-AO theater in the 1950s when it had beautiful projection and sound. Unfortunately, the conversion to 3-strip Cinerama was a giant leap backward in sound as they used early solid-state amplifiers that produced sound that just sat there behind the screen and rattled, a far cry from the realistic Cinerama sound that the Warner had previously had. They seemed to keep these amps for the 70-mm Cinerama which followed, and it was quite a few years before the sound was any good. Now, of course, they have the best.

The Uptown is certainly one of the premier movie theatres in the metro DC area. It suffers from two serious shortcomings, unfortunately: lack of parking (for late shows, the Metro does not run late enough to make it home) and some of the most unpleasant staff I’ve ever seen at a theatre. Whereas most cinema staff are just plain incompetent, the staff at the Uptown border on hostile. They won’t stop me from coming, but I do hope Loew’s boots the lot and trains the next set in customer service!