‘The Empire Strikes Back’ played for a record-setting 61 weeks at Seattle’s UA 150 40 years ago. Were you there?

Time for a quick trip down Moviehouse Memory Lane! Pictured here is the UA 150, a vast, domed cineplex that occupied the corner of Sixth Avenue and Lenora Street in Seattle’s Denny Triangle neighborhood from 1969 until its demolition in 2002 (it had closed, in disrepair, a few years earlier). Longtime Seattleites might remember its curved screen, its waterfall curtain and its record-setting run of “The Empire Strikes Back.”

The second “Star Wars” film to be released in theaters celebrates its 40th anniversary this month, and it played at the UA 150 for more than a year: 61 weeks, to be exact — the film’s longest booking anywhere. Its studio, Lucasfilm, ran an ad in The Seattle Times in May 1981, celebrating the movie’s first birthday at the theater.

Were you, perhaps, in that line for “The Empire Strikes Back” during that year? Do you remember the UA 150 and its second screen, the UA 70? I wasn’t in that “Star Wars” line, but I do remember being a dazzled teenager watching “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” — starring a very young Meryl Streep, whose dual performance seemed all the more magic on that enormous screen — there in 1981. As we wonder when we’ll next see a movie in a theater, take a moment to share a memory from “The Empire Strikes Back” or any movie you might have seen at the old UA.