On a bathwater-warm night in Portland, Oregon, several hundred people waited outside Cinema 21 to see a six-year-old film that was widely available on DVD. Nearly everyone here had seen the film at least once, and some had seen it twenty times. It was around 10 P.M.; showtime was not for another hour. I walked up and down the line, gravitating toward anyone who seemed particularly displaced or puzzled. One young woman was staring fixedly into space, her grinning boyfriend beside her. When I asked what had brought her out, she thumbed toward the boyfriend. "It's so poorly made," he said, exultantly.

A large, shaggy kid in a black leather jacket walked by with a handheld camera – an aspiring journalist, it turned out. He wanted to document the Portland premiere; he hoped that, as soon as tomorrow night, his movie would be up on YouTube, where it would join many other, similarly homegrown opening-night chronicles. "This is amazing!" the aspiring journalist said, as people recounted for him their favorite lines from the film: "Leave your stupid comments in your pocket!" "I feel like I'm sitting on an atomic bomb wait for it to go off!" "You are tearing me apart, Lisa!"

A man wearing a tuxedo-print T-shirt and in the obvious employ of the theater began to work the line, dispensing rubber-banded bouquets of plastic spoons. Soon, all along the line, the spoons were clicking like castanets in the hands of the impatient crowd. By 11:15 I was in my seat. The film itself, meanwhile, was in no danger of starting. After a while, the young man in the tuxedo-print T-shirt bounded to the front of the theater and climbed onto the stage. He introduced himself as Ian and urged us to keep in mind while watching the film that its director, one Tommy Wiseau, had submitted it for consideration to the Academy Awards in 2003. Ian reminded us about the spoons he had handed out and specified when we were supposed to throw them at the screen. "Don't blow your wad on spoons all at once...