The Death Of The Deuce

Watching the first season of David Simon’s terrific HBO series The Deuce, set amid the seedy, crime-ridden Times Square of the 70s, made me incredibly nostalgic. Yes, I’m one of the few who genuinely miss the scary old 42^nd Street, filled with dilapidated movie palaces. Rudy Giuliani took a wrecking ball to all that and wiped out all the porn shops and peep-shows that permeated the Deuce. But what is it now? Big renovated multiplexes and theaters showing Disney cartoons shoehorned into Broadway musicals. What else is there in Times Square? Just a sea of banks, chain store pharmacies and Starbucks. Why do tourists come all the way to New York just to go to a Duane Reade? I liked it better when they were too afraid to even leave their hotel rooms.

I lived on Times Square. I spent many happy hours bouncing from one theater to another catching glorious exploitation double bills. And since a lot of the films didn’t advertise in local papers I’d hang out Thursday night after midnight to watch men on ladders changing the marquees and excitedly take notes on what sordid new movies were opening the following day.

People often asked if it was dangerous to see a movie on Times Square. I always followed the Five Commandments that a friend imparted to me:

1. Don’t sit under a balcony in case someone dumps a Coke or pukes on your head.
2. Don’t eat the hot dogs.
3. Never sit on the toilet seats.
4. Always sit on the aisle in case of gunfire.
5. And don’t accept popcorn from a strange man who positions the container directly over his lap.

Of course, I went on to disobey every one of those commandments except for one- I always sat on the aisle. In fact, one memorable Sunday I arrived mid-afternoon and the theater was packed. I had a hard time adjusting my eyes in the dark and cautiously made my way down front and lowered myself into what I thought was an empty seat. Unfortunately, there was a cat stretched out asleep (the managers let felines roam freely through the theaters to discourage rats). When I sat down the cat shrieked and so did I, to the delight of the audience nearby which roared with laughter.

I can count on one hand the times it got scary in any of those theaters. Once a man tried to set my hair on fire. I kept hearing this click behind me and smelling this acrid stench, and finally whirled around and saw a man with an upraised lighter. But the movie was pretty boring, and my long blonde hair must have been a temptation. He didn’t seem particularly malicious, so I just moved down a few rows. Another time, while watching Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde I heard someone cry out “Duck!” There was a short flurry of gun shots, the police swarmed in and suddenly it was over. I remember rising up from my seat and a woman sitting in front of me commented cheerily, “That was fun!” And you know what, it was. My friend Jim, who frequented those theaters even more than I, told me about a wild fist fight that broke out during Rambo 3. A man was literally hanging off the balcony as the audience scattered from their seats screaming. “That Stallone should come here,” an usher said to Jim, “he’d get his ass kicked.” But those incidents were few and far between.

True, the seedy denizens that populated those theaters were a real trip. A lot of them used the movies as their flophouse and every few minutes you could hear empty beer cans rolling down the raked floors. And the clouds of marijuana smoke drifted haze-like over your head (this was when you could smoke cigarettes in the theaters). Audiences there were quite vocal, yelling out comments at the screen. But, during Filipino women-in-prison movies like The Big Doll House or The Big Bird Cage, their wisecracks were always welcome. While watching The Boogens, a strangely enjoyable movie about slimy creatures coming up out of the ground at a mountain cabin, a 300-lb. man stood up, kept shaking his head, and addressed all of us in the audience as if we were his friends, “I don’t know why they make this shit to frighten folks so.” Then he sat back down and watched the rest of the movie. It was so odd. But at the time it made total sense.

I had favorites among the crumbling, peeling, movie theaters. I liked seeing movies at the New Amsterdam which had the biggest screen. I loved the Times Square, the Harris, and especially the Lyric. But I was always bummed when I was forced to see a rare offbeat movie playing at the Anco– which was at the far end of 42^nd Street closer to 8^th Ave. That theater was really skanky, had the worst sound, and also a visible hole at the bottom of the screen. A patron once told me the tear in the screen was caused by a woman who hurled her baby through it. I never really believed that, but it did make me laugh. I loved going to the Lyric on a Friday morning because this bedraggled woman would religiously show up lugging a shopping cart down the aisle filled with wet laundry. Woe to those sitting in the first two rows of the theater. She angrily would shoo them away and then methodically drape her wet clothes one by one over each seat. When she finished, she would plunk down, smoke a cigarette and drink a tall beer, and when the second movie began she would turn her clothes over. It was kind of hypnotic to watch her, and my friend and I dubbed her “the laundry lady of the Lyric.”

The movies that played there on 42^nd street ran the gamut from kung-fu, to action to horror, not to mention the few showing porn. But I remember discovering great directors whose careers began by cutting their teeth on genre movies. Jonathan Demme’s wonderful, witty, women’s prison film Caged Heat; David Cronenberg’s body horror movies They Came From Within and Rabid; Larry Cohen’s bizarre, fascinating God Told Me To; Brian De Palma’s fabulously twisted Sisters. Of course, I was always so oblivious of the racial makeup of those around me, but seeing Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song in an inner city theater was revelatory. It was thrilling to be there. The audience was so vividly aware this wasn’t some white director attempting to describe the “black experience.” This was raw, and angry and exciting. The Blaxploitation movies like those Pam Grier movies- Coffy, Sheba Baby and Foxy Brown– were giant hits on the Deuce. Shaft, Super Fly, Dolemite and many others played repeatedly and were always received with wild enthusiasm. Seeing those films now, you can never understand how they connected with, and were appreciated by, audiences who always felt under-represented on screen

A Forty-Second Street audience could also close a movie as fast as a New York Times theater critic could shut down a Broadway show. When Seeds Of Evil opened (an oddball movie starring Joe Dallesandro as a supernatural gardener who eventually turns into a tree) it was hated by the crowd that paid to see it. The first day it played, the screen was pelted with so many beer bottles that by nightfall a Sonny Chiba kung-fu movie was there in its place.

When the R-rated version of a slasher movie (The Prowler starring Farley Granger) opened, it was mistakenly shipped to 42^nd St. minus the gore (which had been heavily promoted in the trailers that played for weeks beforehand). There was such a ruckus from the audience that the very next day the uncut version was playing to a now-satisfied bloodthirsty crowd.

My favorite times were when movie-house managers started altering the titles on the marquees to suck in moviegoers. I can’t tell you how many times I ended up seeing the same film (particularly Italian thrillers) under a different title. Once I saw Psycho Boy And His Killer Dog Blood advertised in huge letters above the Liberty theater. But when I got up to the poster I realized it was only that 1975 science fiction movie with Don Johnson: A Boy And His Dog. Prizzi’s Killer! showed up one week, which on inspection was John Huston’s Prizzi’s Honor. What’s next, I wondered, Gone With The Bloody Wind?

I spent one Christmas day on 42^nd Street watching a “shockumentary” double-bill Savage Man Savage Beast and Faces Of Death (mere excuses to show actual footage of animals being slaughtered and other gruesome aspects of man’s inhumanity to man). I was sitting there in a practically empty theater- with about a dozen other ghouls in attendance- when a nagging feeling that I was going straight to hell overwhelmed me. Suddenly a dozen or more police rushed into the theater, guns drawn, and surrounded a Chinese man sitting a few rows back. They yanked him to his feet, handcuffed him behind his back and bustled him right out the door. It took about a minute and left the rest of us “holiday revelers” audibly wondering what the hell that was all about. But thanks to the cries of a gazelle getting ripped in half, our attention was redirected to the silver screen. Fifteen minutes later the same Asian gentleman, visibly rattled, re-entered the theater and announced to the audience: “They got the wrong guy! They scared the living shit out of me!” to which one smartass cracked, “It’s not a wonderful life.”

I loved the smell of those cavernous old movie palaces. I liked to go there for the first showing- usually at 10 in the morning. There was always a blurry-eyed line of people clutching their deli coffees. When you entered the theater all the lights were on and you’d get hit with the pungent odor of disinfectant that to me smelt like a bouquet of roses. You could choose your seat without fear of sitting on a cat, or getting a spring up your ass. And while other patrons found their “stations”, flipping on their monster radios or snapping open fresh beers, you had time to look around at the rundown grandeur of these architectural wonders.

If those walls could talk. What performers sang on these stages now left to wandering cats left to roam the theater in search of rats? How many movies unspooled themselves across the worn-out screens entertaining and inspiring the likes of a Martin Scorsese? How many spilled Cokes and pieces of popcorn ground into the floor had left a coating so sticky and thick that you trudged around the theater as if in a dream, never quite being able to move fast enough because of the flypaper-like surface beneath you? I loved standing in the lobby staring at the posters of coming attractions offering the most incongruous double-bills of all time. “Come Out And See A Movie” stated the large billboard over Times Square. Now that these theaters are gone, where can you bring the whole family to see The Little Mermaid and Doctor Butcher M.D, all on the same bill?

I still get a pang in my heart as the 8^th Ave. bus passes by 42^nd Street, my head filled with memories of my years frequenting those crumbling grindhouses. Perhaps one more potent recollection was seeing Parasite– a 3D science fiction movie starring Demi Moore. It was crowded when I got there, the usher handed me my “glasses” and I went down front and sat, of course, on the aisle. But first I just had to turn around and marvel at the motley crew behind me wearing those stupid red & green glasses- the winos, the madmen, pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers and other assorted broken souls. It took my breath away and filled me with a dumbstruck exhilaration and reassuring sense of community I’ve never experienced before or since. I awkwardly adjusted the cardboard glasses over my own glasses, turned back to the screen, and as the monster leaped out at me, I joined in with the rest of the crowd and screamed my damn fool head off.