When I stroll down the gaudy, Disney-fied 42nd Street with The Lion King marquee, McDonald's, Madame Tussaud's, Ripley's Believe It Or Not, herds of un-mugged tourists milling about ... my heart sinks. And I recall with fondness the old Boulevard Of Broken Dreams, when 42nd Street was a cesspool of broken-down movie palaces that offered such titillating fare as Crippled Masters, Black Emmanuelle in Africa, Shocking Asia, Die, Sister, Die!, Shogun Assassin, and Trap Them and Kill Them. Sure, the theaters were seedy and reeked of disinfectant and marijuana fumes, and the audiences may have been derelicts, drunks, stoners, thieves, pimps, prostitutes and other questionable society castoffs, but they were my kind of people.
In those days, exploitation movies could turn a profit at these inner-city scratch houses and drive-ins across the country. And amidst the crap, you might catch fiercely original talent rising out of the swill -- films like Sisters (Brian De Palma), Rabid (David Cronenberg), The Demon or God Told Me To (Larry Cohen), Penitentiary (Jamaa Fanaka) or Caged Heat (Jonathan Demme). Some of the most subversive voices cut their teeth on exploitation. One witnesses young French directors today channeling 1970 American horror films and creating dark, disturbing and fascinating fare that causes controversy at festivals like Cannes, Sundance and Toronto. Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo's Inside, Xavier Gens' Frontier(s), Pascal Laugier's Martyrs -- all films that would have gone over like gangbusters with 42nd Street audiences -- now go directly to DVD. There just aren't the theaters or money to market this kind of film anymore beyond straight-to-DVD. And while it is more pleasant to sit watching these films on your flat screen Plasma TVs without the sounds of drunks shouting or beer bottles rolling under your feet, I do miss the communal spirit that movie theaters were and still are at times.
As scary as those theaters may have appeared, I never got hassled or feared for my life. Once someone tried to set my hair on fire with a lighter during Invasion of the Blood Farmers, but I just moved a few rows down -- seemed plausible to me that the perpetrator was probably bored and that my long blonde hair was an inviting target. Another time I was trying to find my seat in the darkened theater when I sat on a live cat (one of many left to roam by theater managers in hopes they would kill the rats) and screamed like a girl, which made the audience howl with laughter. But these were not indiscriminate audiences. I was there for the one-day premiere of Seeds of Evil (aka: The Gardener) -- a weird, painfully talky movie shot in Puerto Rico and starring Joe Dallesandro as a supernatural gardener (who eventually turns into a tree) -- when the audience hated the movie so much and threw so many beer cans and bottles at the screen, that by afternoon the manager had changed the movie to a Sonny Chiba action film. Now, can Ben Brantley from the New York Times close a Broadway play that he dislikes faster than that? I ask you.
And when audiences loved a movie, they responded so enthusiastically that it practically raised the roof. During the finale of Sleepaway Camp, a routine slasher film with a startling end in which the teenage girl-killer reveals she is a boy (with a full-frontal penis shot), I thought the seats would get torn out of the floor. True, you could devise parties at home and try to recreate that communal experience -- invite a lot of people over, get them stoned and drunk, and then force them to watch Jack Hill's deliriously cracked Switchblade Sisters (about a tough girl gang called the "Dagger Debs") -- if you really wanted to. But as I wander down the sparkling, family-friendly 42nd Street of today, I think back to one of my favorite dank movie palaces, where this elderly woman would show up every Friday and march down the aisle with a shopping cart filled with wet laundry. She would kick anyone out of the first two rows and carefully lay out her laundry -- one item per seat -- and then sit down to smoke cigarettes and watch the film. After the intermission, during the second feature (probably Dr. Butcher M.D.), she would methodically turn over each bit of clothing for proper drying. I dubbed her the "Laundry Lady Of The Lyric" and was amazed every week by her near-mystical arrival. Now, is there any way to replicate that kind of experience in your apartment? I think not.
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