Primal Screens

Photo: George Freston/Getty Images

The floors were sticky. The seats were worn down to the springs. The smell was a combination of buttered popcorn and bodily fluids. In the back row, someone might be in a heated argument with a fellow patron—or getting a $5 hand job. Sometimes, a rat would scurry past your leg. Onscreen, any number of sordid acts, seedy pleasures or splatterrific gore played to a crowd that expected extremities at every turn; should the features not deliver the kind of to-the-limit thrills the customers demanded, no one in the audience would be shy about loudly—and profanely—speaking his or her mind.

This was grindhouse: run-down, all-night Times Square movie theaters known for showing double and triple bills of cinema’s less reputable output—imported kung fu flicks, soft-core Eurosleaze, women-in-prison dramas, Mondo shockumentaries and any number of other genres known for lurid allure.

For years, the films that played at these fleapits were dismissed by the mainstream; now they’re being glorified in Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse, a $53 million postmodern homage to the low-budget opus. But what happened to the cut-rate places that specialized in such gutbucket fare? And besides the obvious appeal of trading in artistic pretensions for primal urges, why do fans still fawn over yesterday’s B pictures with such rabid dedication?

Jerry Ohlinger's Movie Material Store

Named after their tendency to show cheapie epics that their makers “ground” out in quick succession, the grindhouses first popped up throughout America after the Great Depression. Times Square’s red-light district during the ’70s and early ’80s, however, was the place that allowed this alternative film industry to flourish into a subculture. The constant influx of tawdry movies gave a mixture of hustlers, junkies, sleaze merchants and cheap-thrill seekers an additional reason (besides scoring dope and trolling for tricks) to hang out on “the Forty-Deuce” for hours on end.

“There were all these great theaters there, like the Amsterdam and the Victory,” David F. Friedman enthuses over the phone from his home in Anniston, Alabama. The 83-year-old filmmaker is considered the godfather of great trash cinema, having produced such seminal films as Blood Feast (1963) and Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (1975). “It had the kind of carnival atmosphere that fed into our ethos: Exploit the subject, exploit the cast and exploit the audience. It was the perfect place for equal-opportunity exploitation!”

Jerry Ohlinger's Movie Material Store

The folks who flocked to the Rialto and the Liberty had no problem being on the receiving end of such consensual debasement; they were all too happy to contribute to the anything-goes attitude of, say, The Gore Gore Girls. “Watching a movie there became a spectator sport,” says Luc Sante, an essayist who’s written extensively about New York’s grittier aspects. “People usually talked back to the screen, and everyone in the audience was rooting for the villain. I remember going to see Dario Argento’s Suspiria at the Cinerama, and the audience hated it. They didn’t think there was enough blood in it. But it was on a double bill with something called Eyeball, which was absolutely horrific and brutal. Naturally, that went over big-time.”

Patrons also found that whatever was showing on the screen was sometimes upstaged by what was going on at the end of the aisle. “They were open 24 hours, so members of the audience could be doing drugs, having sex or both at once,” says author Michelle Clifford via e-mail. With her husband, former projectionist and zine publisher Bill Landis, Clifford cowrote Sleazoid Express, an invaluable history of the Forty-Deuce’s movie-house row. “Forget about the ladies’ room—it was like an art installation entitled Whore Riot, complete with love-hate jailhouse graffiti written in nail polish, lipstick or dried blood.”

The scummy environments and nonstop parade of intense imagery coalesced into a bona fide outsider community for those who could hack it. “The urban escapist in me felt that these id-driven films mirrored the collective unconscious of the audience,” Landis says. “Back then, you had to seek out perversion. You didn’t have it dropped into your living room through reality TV.”

Like punk rock, exploitation cinema provided the backdrop for a community of misfits who bonded through a love of danger and the termite art that everyone else ignored. Regular attendees viewed these throwaway films with genuine affection, and the hard-core aficionados took it upon themselves to become encyclopedic scholars on various exploitation genres. The scene, however, also attracted some truly predatory elements of society, especially once porno took over the strip. By the mid-’80s, the crack and AIDS epidemics had taken a very human toll, and the region’s transformation into the no-man’s-land that Friedman dubbed “Slime Square” was the breaking point for the city’s health board. Raids shut many of the grindhouses down, and Mayor Ed Koch’s deals with developers during the late ’80s paved the way for today’s homogenized, family-friendly atmosphere.

The neighborhood needed cleaning up—who wants to be constantly accosted by hookers?—but the corporate stores that took the place of these theaters are the antithesis of midtown Gotham’s gutter magnetism. New York lost a culture that combined the short, sharp shock of No Wave and the out-there aesthetic of underground filmmaking. “The Deuce was certainly shitty,” Sante admits. “But every metropolitan area needs a danger zone…a place where you feel like you’re taking your life into your own hands. There’s a thrill in walking on the wild side, and that’s what Times Square was.”

Rose McGowan in Grindhouse

As for the movies so closely associated with the Deuce theaters, there’s hope that Grindhouse, out April 6, may spark a renewed appreciation for trash cinema. The flick includes two movies in one—Tarantino’s entry, Death Proof, follows a maniac driver (Kurt Russell) out for chick blood. Rodriguez’s Planet Terror stars Rose McGowan as a badass with a machine gun leg, battling a zombie nation.

The filmmakers have replicated the look of those old double features, down to the worn-out prints with missing reels and spliced-in trailers, but the irony is that they’ve spent a lot of money to make the film look cheap, and that when their “exploitation” film plays on 42nd Street, it’ll be at either a Regal or AMC Cineplex. “It’s like Beatlemania,” Clifford says. “You’re being sold an experience that doesn’t exist anymore.”

Yet sex and violence and nostalgia sell, of course. And since your average filmgoer has been weaned on the kind of outrageousness that was the Deuce’s stock-in-trade, what was once a small group of cinephile extremists is now most everybody. If the movie ends up inspiring someone to seek out true “blue” exploitation, then grindhouse’s grungy legacy will indeed live on.

More in Grindhouse NYC:

• Download a Google Earth map of our Grindhouse NYC tour. You must first download Google Earth. Get it for free from google.com.
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• Grime scenes: Who says NYC is all cleaned up? Grab your shiv and a flask of Wild Turkey—it’s a 24-hour tour through grindhouse New York.
• Primal screens: Sex! Violence! Hard-core drugs! And that’s just offscreen. A look back at the golden days of New York’s grindhouse culture.
• Now slaying: Where to find hookers, killers and a dominatrix—on film.
• Great exploitations: The top five NYC-based grindhouse flicks, from Sleazoid Express author Bill Landis.
• Fleshback: From dildos to Disney—what the hottest grindhouses are now.
• House of whacks: Yes, you can still see XXX on the big screen. Can, not should.
• Shooting from the hip: Grindhouse siren Rose McGowan says yes to bullets, no to barbecue.
• Gotham grindhouse: When Tarantino and Rodriguez held a competition to create original grindhouse trailers, only one (of 20) finalists hailed from New York. Meet the horror-addled auteurs behind this masterpiece.