Tell me if he's told you this one before:

It's around 1979 and Dan Long is working at a movie theater in North Seattle that specializes in screening 70 mm prints. Sitting in the projection booth with Long is Francis Ford Coppola. You see, Coppola is repping Roman Polanski's Tess in Polanski's absence and had come to this theater to do a test screening wherein two audiences would each see a different cut of the movie and score it accordingly.

Lining the walls of the projection booth are pictures of the theater's past marquees - ones they were particularly proud of. Coppola and Long have time to chitchat while waiting for the screenings to end. Tess is a crazy long movie, and they're showing it twice.

After awhile, an awkward silence falls between them, and Coppola rises to walk over to one of the pictures on the wall. Taking out a Sharpie, he draws dollar signs through the "S" on the marquee for Star Wars and proceeds to rant about chirping robots.

This kind of thing just seems to happen to Long.

"You can study movies?"

Long has been working in movie theaters his entire adult life. Can you think about that? Over 30 years, through several theaters opened and closed. His enthusiasm and love for movies hasn't waned.

But, to start at the beginning, the art of film appeared to Long as a lightbulb above his head suddenly illuminated. Going to Wilson High School in the early '70s, he had never really thought twice about movies. Sure, he'd go to the Blue Mouse, which, at the time, was called the Proctor, but everybody did that.

In high school, however, he noticed a film class was being offered.

"You can study movies? Really?" says Long, recalling his excitement. "I had probably seen Chaplin or something like that, but to suddenly realize that it wasn't just the few shorts you see once in awhile on TV, but he did features ... . So that kind of opened my eyes. And then, I had an older friend who introduced me to foreign film by taking me to Seattle to see Seven Samurai."

This was a pivotal moment for Long. His mind was effectively exploded, and the possibility of film and the extent to which it could go was revealed. After that, there was no turning back.

Magical Mystery Tour

At Tacome Community College there existed a half-assed film committee on campus, run by a person who couldn't care less about movies. He'd show bad movies to poorly attended audiences. When Long and his movie-loving cohorts tried to make suggestions to improve the show, the man running it quit and gave them the reins.

After Long canceled all of the movies scheduled to come in, a representative from the institutional distributor that provided the prints came to TCC to basically try and win their business back.

"She had a product reel on 16 mm of the films of next season, like, ‘Here's our next releases,'" Long says. "We're watching this and trying to be nice, you know. And one of them was Ice Castles, or something like that, where the young girl gets hit by a truck, and she was a championship skier, and now she's crippled or something."

As Long and his friends cringe, they look over and notice the representative is openly weeping at the film. The decision is made to not work with this company again.

Looking through the catalogue of films available, Long notices The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour, which hadn't aired in the United States due to scathing reviews in the U.K. Long decides to book it and charge a buck a head to see it, thinking that at least he wanted to see it.

"We thought we'd get, you know, maybe a hundred people," says Long. "We ended up getting, I don't know, a couple thousand people."

After that, Long and his friends were kind of the big men on campus. More on that later.

A Grand Entrance

Unfortunately, I have to skip over a lot of stories for the sake of space. I could tell you about Long's still-standing grudge against Bruce Campbell, or about how Prince was consistently rated uncool in the Landmark's newsletter, or about how Long won $10,000 on America's Funniest Videos with an entry called Jurassic Pork.

"His vault of anecdotes is phenomenal," says Peter Lynn, friend and former Grand co-worker of Long. "Next time you see him ask him about Steven Seagal, or about the 8 inches of film from Natural Born Killers, or about running the cans of Star Wars up and down 45th Street."

I'd like to include those stories, but the fact is you can ask him yourself if you find yourself at the Grand Cinema.

I first met Long in 2005. I was working at the Grand and deeply embroiled in its hysterical inner workings when Long took a job as a floor manager. He had recently returned from Minnesota, where he worked at the Landmark Cinemas for six years.

He charmed us all very quickly with his absurd quirks, his gently snobby taste in film, and his general expertise and willingness to school us on just about everything. He'd do things like bring in a viewfinder filled with 3D pictures he had taken. He'd bum an occasional cigarette from me and tell me the story of doctors and dentists and their terribly misguided plans to open a theater.

He cut through the fog of the Grand, which threatened to overtake me completely.

"Dan is one of my favorite people," says Sean Alexander, another friend and former Grand co-worker of Long's. "He knows a little something about everything and tells a really good story."

On that note, I have one more for you.

A Bunch of SAP's

Remember how Long and his friends were the big men on campus? Well, they noticed something strange during TCC's student body elections. Out of 5,000 students, only about 180 people had voted.

So, Long and his friends decided to form their own party and run for student office.

"This was kind of all born of the major Marx Brothers revival of the '70s," says Long. "They would go into an institution, like in Night at the Opera, and totally disrupt it."

Their name would be the Student Apathy Party, or SAP's. Their motto was Marxist: "It doesn't matter what you say. It makes no difference anyway. Whatever it is, I'm against it." They were the party of chaos. Long ran for president as "Generalissimo," threatening to rule over TCC with an iron fist.

TCC had a rule that you couldn't post signage on buildings with the exception of campaign posters. Those you could post anywhere. So, the SAP's bought giant rolls of paper and wrapped entire sides of buildings in posters that said "Vote SAP's. Or don't."

At debates, they'd carry signs that said "boo" or "hiss" or "liar" to hold up when their opponent was speaking. The people in charge at TCC were reportedly genuinely nervous these pranksters might actually win.

Well, they didn't. Not by a long shot. Long did, however, get some very unexpected support.

"TCC had an extension program at McNeil Island, which, at the time, was just a federal prison," says Long.

The Student Apathy Party actually received one vote from prison. In their concession speech they were asked what they were going to do next.

Long responded: "We're devoting all our energy to digging a tunnel to McNeil Island to free our brother in bondage."