Portlanders love to love their airport. There’s the Stumptown coffee, the Powell’s bookstore, the local restaurants, and perhaps the most photographed carpet in the world. So what else could PDX put in front of passengers? While other airports add yoga rooms and rooftops pools in the quest to tempt travelers, PDX has welcomed an outpost of the iconic Hollywood Theater to be America’s only airport cinema.

On a typical January morning at the Portland International Airport, a not so typical passenger unloaded at the departure drop-off area.

A team used a crane to transfer a 28-foot-long sign from a flatbed trailer to a set of wheels. Anyone who’s driven down Portland’s Sandy Boulevard would recognize it: it’s styled after the Hollywood Theatre marquee.

“I get goose bumps watching it roll in,” said Hollywood’s executive director, Doug Whyte, in front of the Delta ticketing booth as the team pushed the sign past the Portland Roasting Company kiosk. “Usually things come in through the causeway, but it’s too big, so we actually have to bring it in through the front door. And it has to go through TSA, so it should be an interesting day to say the least.”

Since taking over in 2011, Whyte has overseen the transformation of the nonprofit theater into one of the leading art house cinemas in the country. Then he read an article about an Imax theater at the Hong Kong airport and saw an opportunity to reach a bigger audience: some 18 million pairs of eyes a year.

“We approached the airport, and funny enough they had actually been thinking it would be cool to have a movie theater,” he said. “It was kismet. We worked it out so it could go under their public art program.”

Read the full story: http://www.opb.org/radio/article/hollywood-theatre-opens-at-pdx-airport/