It’s not quite tomorrow, but the much-anticipated opening of the Portland Art Museum’s new cinema across the river does have an official opening date (November 3), and a most fitting celebrity name attached to it—none other than Talking Heads frontman David Byrne. 

The new theater is an outcropping of PAM CUT, or, if you’re catching up, the Portland Art Museum Center for an Untold Tomorrow. True to its name, the organization has been steadfastly future-focused from the time it took over the NW Film Center, a community institution that operated within PAM since 1978, but was rebranded to more closely align with the museum last year.

The NW Film Center was famous for running the much-celebrated Portland International Film Festival, which skipped 2022 after a few pandemic pivots and has yet to announce concrete plans for its future. 

Until now, PAM CUT screened films at the Whitsell Auditorium, a 376-seat theater inside the West Side museum. The Whitsell is undergoing renovations as construction of the museum’s forthcoming Rothko Pavilion continues—a structure bridging PAM’s two separate buildings, named for the lauded abstract painter, a one-time Portlander.

What is now the Tomorrow Theater started life as a vaudeville venue. But from the mid-seventies until it foreclosed in 2020, it endured as something of a last holdout under the nondescript name, the Oregon Theater: Most Portlanders knew it as the longest running X-rated theater in the city. Today, its conspicuously inconspicuous facade has been transformed into a multimedia arts project bent on accessibility—as much for the artists and filmmakers whose work it shows as the audiences of cinephiles and civilians that it hopes to attract. 

Amy Dotson, PAM CUT’s executive director, has maintained a consistent mission from the organization’s launch, moving programming in an interactive direction, and embracing VR and projects requiring audience participation, with the goal of democratizing participation. “Multi-sensorial storytelling that’s not just for some,” Dotson called it in an interview last spring.  

Perhaps on the furthest end of that spectrum was Symbiosis, an immersive exhibit in which participants (a more apt word than viewer) wore suits and experienced the sights, sounds, textures, tastes, and smells of a bug’s life in a virtual reality simulation. 

Moving forward, programming is structured around an artist takeover model, for which the new space is plenty flexible. “It’s simultaneously a cinema, a performance space, an experimentation hall, and a community gathering place,” Dotson wrote in a press release.

So, David Byrne won’t likely be screening anything too racy. You may have seen his name on marquees around town recently, broadcasting the new restoration of his historic, now-40-year-old concert film, Stop Making Sense. But the Tomorrow Theater's inaugural show has Byrne slated for something else: a Portland-themed live issue of his nonprofit activist magazine, Reasons to Be Cheerful, which will include a screening of the film Spike Lee made of Byrne’s Broadway show American Utopia. Stop Making Sense is also slated to show later in the month, among a dizzying array of other projects.

Byrne’s takeover is the first in a series dubbed Carte Blanche, in which a slew of artists will be given full creative authority to transform the space for their creative needs. January will bring Oscar-winning costume designer Ruth E. Carter as the next artist in the series. Additional events fill out the theater’s Thursday through Sunday programming, including upcoming tributes to Dolly Parton, Paul Reubens, and John Waters. 

The programming is expansive, but as for the space’s checkered former life, press materials soberly claim: “The space nods to its past, with an eye toward the future.” 

Tomorrow Theater opens November 3; tickets for David Byrne’s live magazine show go on sale October 16 at noon PDT.