What’s on tonight?

Every movie playing in four West Coast cities, each on one calm, beautiful page. No ads in your face and no app to download, just the answer!

The Build

It started with a simple annoyance. Finding a movie in Portland meant checking Fandango for the multiplexes and then six different theater websites for everything good. So I built PDX Movies, one page with every showing in the city, from the 1912 Avalon to the IMAX at Lloyd Center.

Under the hood it reads each independent theater's own ticketing system directly. That's GraphQL feeds, RSS, event calendars and schedule pages, one by one, and they fill in the long tail around a single aggregator. That's how the site catches the things big listings miss: 35mm prints, one-night-only screenings, sold-out shows and double features. If a feed breaks, the site keeps the last good copy, so a beloved theater never vanishes overnight.

Then the format grew into a family. I built Seattle Movies, SF Showtimes and LA Showtimes in quick succession. They share one codebase, and each one is tuned to its city: local neighborhoods instead of zip codes, a palette all its own, a weather note when the weather matters (Seattle gray, LA heat) and a short sourced history of every independent house. I designed and directed the whole thing and built it with Claude as my engineering partner. Four cities shipped in six days.

The Significance

The design idea was "secretly incredible": quiet on the surface, rich underneath. The front page reads like a film society program. There's a dateline, a can't-miss pick of the week (usually something on film at an independent) and the indies shown as photo cards with their founding year. The multiplexes are folded neatly below. Tap any showtime and you see when the movie lets out, the trailer, and buttons to add it to your calendar or share it.

The series also makes a quiet argument about what local cinema is worth. In a feed built for ticket sales, a repertory house and a megaplex look identical. Here, the old single-screens come first and get their stories told. Together the four sites now cover 200 theaters, 96 of them independent, and more than 36,000 showtimes a week.

The Response

It caught on fast! PDX Movies went live on a Thursday, and the r/Portland post the next day drew a strong response right away. That made Seattle the obvious next stop, then San Francisco, then Los Angeles. Each city launched because the last one landed, all four within a week, and readers were signing up for the weekly email before the first issue had even gone out.

The replies became the roadmap. Portland asked for the Avalon and Studio One, so they went in. Seattle asked for genre tags, rating filters and distance from a zip code, and they shipped to every city. The Bay Area asked for the East Bay, and it was covered within the day. Readers called the illustrated skyline footers awful, so they came out! Someone asked how to chip in, so every site now has a way to become a supporter.

My wife's verdict on the first version was that it looked like Fandango. That stung because she was right, and it pushed the redesign that gave each city its own personality. That loop is my favorite part of the project: launch, listen, ship the fix while the thread is still warm.