E-Mail This Article to a Friend Inn crowd Plus, geekless in Seattle BY GERALD PEARY

"Most audiences think my works are ‘art films,’ " Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang acknowledged at the Harvard Film Archive a week ago Tuesday. "But I’m suspicious of that term because it means ‘films without good box office.’ "

Is there a paying audience out there for Tsai’s newest picture, Goodbye Dragon Inn, which he previewed at Harvard prior to its run at the Brattle Theatre this week, October 29 through November 4? "I’d like to poll you collectively," he told the HFA crowd at the end of the screening. "How many of you would go back to a theater and see it again? How many would recommend it to your friends?" Hands shot up everywhere, including those of many Taiwanese students. Tsai, a jovial presence, looked pleased. "And if you didn’t like the film, don’t tell anyone," he teased.

Goodbye Dragon Inn takes place in a crumbling movie palace in Taipei in which an odd assortment of people gather for this theater’s last picture show, a screening of Dragon Gate Inn, the 1966 martial-arts classic by the master filmmaker King Hu. "I was 11 when I saw the film," Tsai said. "I’d watched hundreds of Shaw Brothers genre works from Hong Kong before, but Dragon Inn was different. The music was very simple, often just a flute, and the characters were very real. They ate, they slept, they never flew around. But more, the actor Miao Tien, who plays the father in many of my films, is in Dragon Inn, playing a villain. He got famous with that role."

Tsai has Miao play a grandfather bringing his grandson to the film, giving Miao the opportunity, as an older man, to contemplate his 1966 image on the screen. "The real star of the film is the theater itself," Tsai explained. "Our art design was time, the aging process. Most people today are attracted to multiplexes and don’t like these old broken-down theaters with bad air conditioning, which are all around the world. When they stop attracting customers, they become a place for people marginalized by society. That’s the part that really moves me. It’s like this theater called to me to make this film."

SCI-FI FILM FANS might contemplate the 3000-mile trip to Seattle to visit the radiant new Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, which shares the spotlight with the Experience Music Project (home of Jimi Hendrix memorabilia) in the Frank Gehry Base of the Space Needle.

Even for Gehry, the building exterior is wacky World’s Fair 2080. It’s a perfect futurist façade for the snug Science Fiction Museum inside, which is crowded, behind glass, with all-age goodies: alien eggs and special-effects explosions for the kids; elegantly mounted E.T. and Star Trek and Blade Runner exhibits for the adults; and, for old-timers with a literary memory, mint copies of vintage classic novels (Bradbury, Sturgeon, etc.) and 1930s and ’40s pulp magazines.

For the last: I gloated over a signed first edition of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (1950) and an Astounding Stories anthology from 1934, in which writer John W. Campbell coined the term "cyberspace." Even better: I spotted a so-rare hardback copy of my favorite book in the whole world when I was a 13-year-old nerd, Clifford D. Simak’s City (1952), in which, in future eras, talking dogs take over the world from mankind. Geeks go wild! I know I did.

Can you imagine such a groovy affair being funded by moneyed Bostonians ever obsessed by Sargent, Thoreau, and the BSO? In Seattle, Microsoft megabucks paid for much of the Science Fiction Museum, and many of the coolest items have been borrowed from the private collection of Microsoft exec Paul Allen. Here are some items that I particularly dug. The plastic raincoat worn by Joanna Cassidy as a Nexus 6 Replicant in Blade Runner (1982), and the hairy costumes donned by Maurice Evans and Roddy McDowall in Planet of the Apes (1968). A sketch of Darth Vader by Ralph McQuarrie done several years before Star Wars (1977); also Vader’s Teutonic helmet from The Empire Strikes Back (1980). A hilariously tacky low-tech instrument panel from the backfiring disintegration machine in The Fly (1958) that transformed a too-curious scientist into a buzzing monstrosity. Storyboard drawings from The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) showing the horrific opening in which the protagonist is covered with atomic dust, and, later, when he discovers — more horror! — that he’s suddenly grown shorter than his midget girlfriend.

Oh and while you’re in Seattle, check out the Cinerama Theatre, which was built in 1963 for Cinerama films like 2001: A Space Odyssey. It now projects regular 35mm movies (I saw Collateral there — very effective!) on its curved, elongated screen.