What follows is a rather long reminiscence about film viewing in the
1960s and 1970s, which will not be of interest to everyone. And Dan,
since you apparently were connected with film societies at Harvard a
little after I was there, I'd be fascinated to read a similar account
from you.

There have been a few references to New York City screening facilities
in the 1970s so I thought I'd put a few facts on the record for people
who have no idea what is being referenced. I grew up in Manhattan in the
early 60s, with many trips back while I lived in Cambridge,
Massachusetts from 1964-71, and then lived in Manhattan again until
1976, when I moved to Chicago.

Howard and Roger, Howard Mandelbaum and Roger McNiven, were two young
men who lived together and showed films in their apartment(s). When I
first heard about them around 1971 they lived in a small apartment in
the Lower East Side. The rooms were small so the only way they could
show things was with the projector in the entrance hall and the screen
in the kitchen. This gave them a certain amount of "throw" for a larger
than postage-stamp-sized image, but the throw wasn't that long, and it
was hard to let people in once the projector was set up. This all
resonated with me because it's still the case that when looking for an
apartment I look for some combination of rooms that will give me a
decent throw, often a hallway leading to the "living room." Howie and
Roger later moved to a "nicer" apartment in Greenwich Village, on 13th
Street I believe, and then to a loft in the East 20s that had a really
nice throw. There may be a residence I'm forgetting. For a while too
they tried running a 16mm theater off of Times Square. Their first
series was Westerns. It didn't do well and they closed it.

Their taste was largely the Sarris list. They showed 16mm prints. As I
think someone mentioned, they also had three auteurist friends who ran a
film society at the University of Connecticut, and there was a lot of
shuffling prints back and forth. This was all familiar to me from the
film society I ran with friends at MIT and our connections via friends
to the two film societies at the time at Harvard and the one at Yale.
The main way I learned to view films was by having access to 16mm prints
and looking at them multiple times within a few days, often to try to
write program notes. Anyway, Howie and Roger's was a great place to see
obscure things such as 1940s Anthony Mann films, early Cukor, Walsh, et
cetera, that would never get shown in the few places that showed older
movies back then. And it was at that Times Square space that I first
discovered McCarey, having been dubious based my first few, in a
superbly programmed double bill of "Make Way for Tomorrow" and "An
Affair to Remember." There were very few people there; Roger had known
that I hadn't liked McCarey; the theater was at this point clearly
failing. When I came in, Roger's face lit up, and he said, "I'm so glad
you came," and added that this program was his best argument for McCarey
- which it sure was; I was astounded.

At least in their apartment, they charged $1 I believe, I think $1 per
movie (most were double bills) to help defray the rental costs, since
they mostly rented the prints from distributors (though I think some
were shared with the University of Connecticut guys), and the audience
was a mix of genuine auteurists and sometimes-annoying film buff types.
I'll never forget the time when after an early Cukor, literally just
after it had ended, a guy stood up, faced the rest of us (this was in
the Lower East Side kitchen which was very cramped and I don't think
could have seated more than 8 or so), and said, quite loudly, "Does
anyone remember the line about the banana?" (As I recall, no one did.)

And Bill, a.k.a. hotlove, I'd guess the regulars at Howie and Roger's
were maybe a quarter or a third gay. You just didn't know. Maybe one of
them heard you asking Howie, "Why aren't there more gay cinephiles," and
decided he didn't want to get into *that* kind of discussion.

Eventually, Roger and Howie split up. Howie is still going strong and
runs a business selling movie photographs called Photofest. Roger
decided to enroll in NYU Cinema Studies where he suddenly discovered an
interest in avant-garde film that I found a bit unconvincing. He wanted
to become a film professor. Unfortunately, he died of HIV/AIDS.

I went to "Joe's Place" twice. This was more of an older film buff's
place, a kind of grungier version of the long-runningTheodore Huff
Society: both attracted the kind of people who "love old movies," have
fetishes for particular actresses, et cetera. Once I saw a faded print
of Stahl's "Oh What a Beautiful Doll," unseeable otherwise, which didn't
seem too good, but the print was so bad that I can't be sure. The other
time I saw Borzage's "The Big Fisherman." They only showed 16mm. I'd
seen the Borzage once before in a beautiful 35mm studio print, but
except for one scene (the Sermon on the Mount, which is tremendous, and
*very* Borzagean) had thought it not so great, which is why I was
willing to endure another try in 16mm. And "endure" is the word. The
whole floor seemed to be wet -- because the toilet had overflowed! As if
that wasn't bad enough, when the film came on the 16mm anamorphic print
was being projected not fully unsqueezed. (Anamorphic prints: the image
is horizontally squeezed on the film strip by a factor of 2:1 so that a
wide 'Scope image can be fit onto a frame that's close to square. They
require a special projection lens with a cylindrically curved (rather
than spherically curved) element to unsqueeze them.) I was pretty
shocked, and complained. They were quite proud, on the other hand, that
they had found a rare lens that only unsqueezed by a ratio of 1.5:1, in
order to fit the image on their less-than-'Scope screen! I didn't ever
go back.

I should also say that when I lived in New York my viewing of 16mm
prints continued. I had a few collector friends who were generous, and
accumulated a small collection myself, mostly sold off now. One could
often purchase used 16mm prints of great films for $100 or less. A close
friend worked for a 16mm distributor in a suburb and could borrow things
to take home. And NYU professor William K. Everson had a huge collection
that he was incredibly generous in loaning. Occasionally I was able to
loan things to him, which made me feel better about my borrowings.
Having a 16mm print, being able to view it two or three times, was a
great way to "learn." And for me, the difference between a good 16mm and
a good 35mm, especially for a non-'Scope film, was just not that great,
whereas the difference between films on TV with commercials and poor
resolution and 16mm was huge. Remember this was before videocassettes. I
still think TV can't match the unique quality of projected light. A
friend at the time who was just discovering Fuller and others used to
say with amazement that I could just "order up" films to show him by a
director he was interested in. Being able to see multiple great films by
a great director multiple times is my own best argument for auteurism,
with the unconvinced urged to subject their own candidates for "auteurs"
not on my list to the same treatment to see if the work really holds up.

There were "classier" venues too: for a while, the New Yorker theater;
always, the Museum of Modern Art; for a while, the long-since-closed
"New York Cultural Center" had a film program run by my friend Marty
Rubin, where I first discovered the greatness of cartoon auteurs in a
superb series programmed by Greg Ford. All it took, really, was the
right ten Chuck Jones cartoons seen in one sitting, ending, of course,
with the sublime "Duck Amuck." For avant-garde film, there was whatever
venue Jonas Mekas was running at the time, and he was soon joined by
both Millennium Film Workshop and the Collective for Living Cinema, the
latter now closed.

But no account such as this would be complete without mention of 42nd
Street. On a single block of 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenue,
just adjacent to Times Square, there were ten movie theaters. They had
been "legit" theaters, presenting live theater, originally. They almost
all showed older Hollywood movies. Admission was very cheap, less than
$1 I think, and they attracted a collection of alcoholics, the homeless,
the mentally unbalanced, and other marginal types. They also served, for
budding auteurists, as our cinematheque. There are even scenes in an
early Sonbert film, "The Tenth Legion," showing Warren's friends the
filmmakers Nick Dorsky and Jerry Heiler outside those theaters in the
late 1960s. This is where I first saw "Red River," coming to New York
for it when I was living in Cambridge (my friend Robert used to say I
was the only person in history to have flown into New York for a film on
42nd Street; I never wanted to tell him that on that particular occasion
I had taken the bus). The same theater where I saw "Red River," the
Times Square Theater, showed mostly Westerns; "Rio Bravo" was in their
regular repertoire. I first saw "The Searchers" there at the last show
of the night (it had been preceded by Tashlin's "The Disorderly
Orderly," my first Tashlin!), starting at 1 AM, and it was one of the
first auteurist masterpieces I'd ever seen. This would have been in
1964, and an important part of that viewing was my sense that this was a
film that *nobody* outside a few American cultists took seriously, yet
it was so obviously great that the way I saw it and the place I saw it
in seemed an important commentary on official film culture at the time.

When the last show of the night ended in one of those theaters, almost
immediately attendants would go noisily up and down the aisles yelling
"show's over" or something, banging on the chairs, in order to wake up
those who used it as a place to sleep. This was not a good thing to have
happen at the end of "The Searchers," but it contributed to the sense of
only being able to see a masterpiece in a "bad" venue.

These theaters were pretty grungy. You did not want to try to use the
men's room if you could avoid it. You could sometimes hear a woman yell
something like, "Take your fingers out of there." A friend of mine saw a
guy piss on the seat in front of him without getting up. Another friend
heard the greatest line of all: "You're sorry? You're sorry? You piss on
my girlfriend and all you can say is you're sorry???" They often sold
refreshments during the movie, with people walking up and down the
aisles calling out "ice cream" or whatever. Some theaters had a policy
of not turning the lights all the way down, presumably for security
reasons, but I think sex sometimes happened anyway, though I never saw
that. And the audience could be noisy: they totally *loved* the rape
scene in "Play Dirty," but loved it even more when a gunshot put a stop
to it, to their credit. Projection was less than perfect, to put it
charitably. But these were 35mm prints of great films. When I came to
New York I usually took a walk down both sides of the street on arrival
(especially if arriving by bus, because the bus station was adjacent) to
both see what was playing and what was coming from the posters in their
tiny lobbies.

Other cities had similar but smaller scenes. I remember a theater in
Boston called the "Publix." And Chicago, before I moved here, had
something called the "Clark," where local auteurists could see many many
films.

Then around 1973 I heard for the first time in a 42nd Street theater a
discussion behind me about Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller between some
guys around my age, mid-20s. Then I knew that auteurism was reaching
critical mass. And oddly, I was annoyed: "my" scene was being invaded,
or something.

What's amazing is that the city later used the police power of the state
to seize the land under "eminent domain" to "clean it up" and offer
"culture" such as Disney crap. Real estate interests, and the New York
Times, whose building is nearby, had long campaigned to "clean up" Times
Square. But the street had infinitely more real culture then than it
does now. And I prefer the life of the former street too, with its mix
of junkies, transvestites, prostitutes, transvestite prostitutes,
crooked street gamblers, runaways, and undifferentiated homeless types
of all ages and races, a scene that on a lively night was infinitely
more interesting and more disturbing than the most elaborate of
Fellini's concoctions, to the tourist-friendly environment of today.

- Fred