Closing Attraction
The Dupont 5 Will Always Have a Tiny Place in Our Heart

By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 11, 2008

Everything's closing. Aren't you sick of everything closing? Aren't you sick of the stories about everything closing? It could be its own full-time beat at the paper now, the wistfully poetic last-call report from doomed roadhouses, dive bars, record stores, drag queen cabarets, indie-rock art galleries, Yenching Palace, A.V. Ristorante Italiano, the Childe Harold and that polka place in Jessup. Everything's closing and CVS is opening.

I say: The Dupont 5 movie theater is shutting down on Sunday.

You say: Good!

Well, now, hold on there. Was the Dupont 5 that bad?

You say: Yes! It was! Don't write anything sad! Are you nuts?

Then we'll merely submit that some of us liked it. Maybe we liked it more as a feeling than an actual place -- that little thrill of taking in a small-budget, critic-friendly movie that you stop and see, at the last minute, on your walk home from work through Dupont Circle. ("One, please," you'd tell the unhappy person in the small box office at 1350 19th St. NW.)

It was sorta New York. They built it that way, the original owners, in 1987, after shuttering the bigger Dupont Theater that once faced Connecticut Avenue on the other side of the building. (The old theater had 360 seats and one screen and was built in 1948 -- and closed in 1986 after a marathon run of "Hannah and Her Sisters.") The owners wanted the new, smaller theater to feel like a page out of Tama Janowitz's New York: compromised on space, but big on ideas, and crawling with film majors. It was about Saturdays unspooling like film, a film about your make-believe life in the city. Fresh flowers and bookstores and funky movies.

Think back to being sardined into one of the Dupont 5's teensy auditoriums on a freezing Friday night, to see another new Woody Allen movie blow it yet again. Everyone would be exhausted from just trying to get into the theater alive, get tickets, get popcorn, get seats, which always creaked, which did nothing for the lumbar, and there was that wet, woolly smell of overcoats and scarves. Everyone in a Dupont 5 audience had coughs. Always the same dumb Fandango ads before the trailers, with the paper-bag puppets. The bathrooms always smelled, and 10 people were always waiting to get into them. Management swapped the men's room for the women's room a few years ago, which only made things worse.

It was like seeing a movie in a troopship. It required discipline. Even Moviefone couldn't improve life at the Dupont 5. How is it possible to regard all that with joy?

It just is.

And now the last of the central city's dumpy movie theaters is going dark, like others before it. Among the recently departed are the Outer Circle on Wisconsin Avenue (weekend matinees of period movies about royalty, always mobbed with old ladies), the Inner Circle on M Street (mysterious filmgoers playing hooky from work, to watch documentaries about torture), the Foundry (seven screens, down, down, down in that Georgetown office building basement) and the Janus 3. (The Heinous Janus, despised for the pillar in one auditorium that obstructed the view for people in three rows.) Gone, baby, gone.

Sentiment is not exactly in order for the Dupont miniplex, except for those of us with nostalgia-prone hearts way bigger than any of its five screens.

"The lease was ending and the landlord wanted to do something else with the space," says Andy DiOrio, a spokesman for the Kansas City-based AMC multiplex chain, which in recent times and after much consolidating of the movie theater biz, inherited the Dupont property when AMC bought the Loews chain in 2006.

The Dupont 5 is so not the kind of theater AMC likes to run. AMC favors the creation of pretty and enormous theaters, but inventively so, with comfy stadium seating and thunderous sound systems, in higher-end retail settings -- new urban, ersatz village settings adjacent to a Barnes & Noble or a Designer Shoe Warehouse or a Buca di Beppo. "Our guests like the synergy with all the other tenants," DiOrio says.

The Dupont 5 once had synergy, but of an outdated sort: Above its art-house ambitions still sprawls the grand, old Dupont Circle Building, which used to have cheap office rent and all sorts of idealistic, nonprofit tenants. A few steps away from the theater, the Benetton clothing chain used to preach its sweateriffic brand of world peace.

That all dwindled in the 2000s -- the Benetton became a Krispy Kreme; the nonprofit groups mostly vacated for law firms -- and the tiny Dupont 5 theaters, ranging from 59 seats in Auditorium 2 to 139 seats in Auditorium 4, started to somehow constrict even further. (Phone calls Thursday to the Dupont Circle Building's landlord were referred to a broker, David S. Crowley, who is handling the deal with the new tenant. Crowley wouldn't reveal what's coming, even though the deal is complete. "It's a national chain with a new, exciting concept going in," is all he says. "It's retail. It has nothing to do with movies.")

Neighbors may have been sad when word of the theater's closing got out in late August, but they did not rally to save it ("Not that [AMC] was ever aware of," DiOrio says), and they did not write much in the way of sonorous letters and Web postings bemoaning progress, which tells you something right there. Even the gays of Dupont Circle -- who were loyal patrons of the Dupont 5 from the "Longtime Companion" era up through the triumph of "Brokeback Mountain" showing on four out of five screens in early 2006 -- couldn't be bothered to intervene.

The Dupont 5 was a few dozen extremely familiar steps away from the south escalators of the Dupont Circle Metro station, between a Cosi and a Ben& Jerry's, and not far from Olsson's Books & Records. Here you had a perfect world of second and third dates. You could always see someone standing in front of the Dupont 5, wondering if his or her date was going to show up. (This was before everyone owned a cellphone.) A few hearts were broken in front of the Dupont 5.

That was then. Let's go in.

"One, please, for the 4:30 'P.S. I Love You.' "

It seems wrong to end a love-hate affair with the Dupont 5 at a dead-boyfriend flick starring Hilary Swank, but the title is somehow apt, and it's a movie all the same, on a Tuesday afternoon, and it beats being at the office. Besides, we already snoozed through the Bob Dylan movie the other afternoon at the Dupont, "I'm Not There." ( So not there.) We already saw "I Am Legend," "Charlie Wilson's War" and "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead."

Inside Auditorium 2, the smallest one, there are two pairs of young women waiting for "P.S. I Love You" to start, and another woman, alone, intently rummaging through her purse. The young women chitchat for five minutes, then 10, then 15. Finally, at 4:45, one of them says, "Do you think we should go tell [the employees] that it still hasn't started?"

Or we could just sit here.

We could sit here and talk about bad dates at the movies.

Two of the women leave and tell the manager, then come back. "They didn't even realize," one of them announces. There is a clattering of footsteps and slamming doors and then, just above and behind us, the warpy sound of a projector hastily coming on. The Fandango paper bags tell their terrible jokes about getting tickets online, and then we see trailers for movies that will never play at the Dupont 5.