The Lost Movie Theaters of Southeastern Brooklyn and Rockaway Beach
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THE LOST MOVIE THEATERS OF SOUTHEASTERN BROOKLYN AND ROCKAWAY BEACH THE LOST MOVIE THEATERS OF SOUTHEASTERN BROOKLYN AND ROCKAWAY BEACH Richard Grayson Art Pants Company –New York Copyright © 2010 by Richard Grayson. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Art Pants Company 87 Fifth Avenue New York, New York 10003 ISBN # First Edition 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS “The Lost Movie Theaters of Southeastern Brooklyn and Rockaway Beach” originally appeared in the online magazine Eyeshot (April 2004). “Melissa and the Good Legislator” originally appeared in the online magazine Apogee (March 2006). “Branch Libraries of Southeastern Brooklyn” originally appeared in the online magazine Fiction Warehouse (August 2004) and was named a finalist in the Million Writers Award for Best Online Story of the year. “Seven Men Who Made Me Happy” originally appeared in the online magazine Mississippi Review (July 2004). “Three Scenes from My Life (With Special Guest Star Truman Capote)” originally appeared in the online magazine Me Three (January 2005). All of these stories were first reprinted in the story collection And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street (Dumbo Books, 2006). THE LOST MOVIE THEATERS OF SOUTHEASTERN BROOKLYN AND ROCKAWAY BEACH THE LOST MOVIE THEATERS OF SOUTHEASTERN BROOKLYN AND ROCKAWAY BEACH The Rugby On Utica Avenue near Church Avenue, just blocks from our first apartment, the Rugby was the theater of my early childhood. When I was three, my mother took me to see my first film here. That weekday matinee of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers left me with one memory: a row of giant men so happy that they couldn’t stop dancing. My brother and I would spend Saturday mornings lining up under the Rugby’s marquee with its unique saw-toothed top. During the scene in West Side Story where Rita Moreno slowly put on her stockings, Marc turned to me and said, “That’s sexy.” He was about seven. By the time I was in college, the Rugby was showing porn films – a sure sign of impending death for one of “the nabes,” what my family called neighborhood theaters. One Saturday night, when neither of us had a date and we had nothing better to do, Elise and I decided to see a triple-X feature at the Rugby. It had been her first movie theater too, the one where she’d watched Elvis movies like Blue Hawaii. The only thing from that night I can remember is the entire screen being filled with a black man’s penis becoming erect and Elise turning to me and saying, “This is the most disgusting movie I’ve ever seen.” I nodded. In place of the Rugby are several stores in the bustling shopping district of this Haitian neighborhood. The Granada and The Carroll These were in opposite directions from The Rugby: the Carroll north on Utica in Crown Heights, the Granada west on Church in Flatbush. It was always a treat when Grandma Ethel and I would take the short bus ride to these theaters. We saw Auntie Mame for the second time at the Granada, months after she and Grandpa Herb had taken me to see it in Manhattan for Radio City’s Christmas show. The day we saw Tammy and the Doctor at the Carroll, I found the first issue of Green Lantern at the used comic-book store next door afterwards. The Carroll long ago became a liquor store, and the Granada a Pentecostal church. The Brook and The Marine The closest movie theaters to the house we moved to when I was seven, these may have been an early experiment in twinning. Although they had separate entrances – the Marine on Flatbush Avenue, the Brook on Flatlands Avenue – the theaters were connected in the back. They were part of the Century chain, which ran many theaters in 1960s Brooklyn. Starting in fourth grade, Eugene and I would go to Saturday morning double features at the Brook and the Marine. By junior high we had graduated from the children’s section, patrolled by severe- looking matrons wielding flashlights, to the loge, where we watched what we thought were risqué comedies featuring some combination of Doris Day, Rock Hudson, Gina Lollobrigida, and Cary Grant – with Tony Randall and Thelma Ritter in supporting roles. The second feature always seemed to be a forgettable thriller with a love story between a dark-haired Spanish woman and a character named Ramon. When I was 18, I went to the Brook by myself on a school night to see my first X-rated movie, the exhilarating Midnight Cowboy. Also at the Brook, I had the embarrassing experience of seeing What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?, a film by Candid Camera’s Allan Funt, with my parents. Linda made the same mistake with her mother. We hadn’t expected so much nudity. The last time I went to the Marine, Stephen and I cut a college class to see a revival of The Sound of Music. I liked it better ten years before, when I’d seen it the first time with Eugene – also at the Marine. The Brook and the Marine now house an insurance company and other offices. The Seaview This was a small cinema in a strip shopping center in Canarsie, opening when Eugene and I were old enough to use the word cinema. We saw The Umbrellas of Cherbourg here, and Dr. Zhivago. At fifteen, we were blown away by Blow-Up but confused by the mimes playing tennis without a ball at the end. It definitely was not Rock Hudson and Doris Day. A couple of years later, I went alone to the Seaview to see Wild in the Streets, falling in love with the utter coolness of Christopher Jones as the rock star who becomes President when teens are allowed to vote. When I got home, I recounted the plot to my ten-year-old twin step-cousins, Alice and Bonnie, who stood open-mouthed as I described how Jones put everyone over 30 in concentration camps – even his mother, Shelley Winters, screaming as they led her away, “But I’m the biggest mother of them all!” The Seaview is now just another store in a strip mall, and my twin step-cousins stopped talking to each other after Alice married Bonnie’s ex-husband. The Elm Like the Midwood, the Avalon, and the Avenue U, the Elm was near a stop of the Brighton line elevated tracks at East 16th Street. Another one of the Century’s chain, it was a small art house and always played the same pictures as the Astor in Flatbush. Here’s where I saw a lot of foreign films like Séance on a Wet Afternoon and Persona. I usually went alone, but I saw John Cassavetes’ Faces with a girl from group therapy after our session was over. On Christmas Eve in 1969, my mother, brothers and cousins were in Florida for the holidays, and Dad and I had stayed behind because his mother, Grandma Sylvia, was having cancer surgery at New York Hospital. When Grandpa Nat called to say that everything was going to be all right, we went out in a snowstorm to see Putney Swope at the Elm. The director was credited as “Robert Downey (a prince).” A few days later I was in swim trunks at the pool at the Carillon Hotel in Miami Beach when I saw Ronnie Dyson, a cute black actor my own age who’d been in the movie. Trying to be cool, I went over to him and said, “So is Robert Downey really a prince?” “Yeah, sure,” he said, and walked away, leaving me feeling like an idiot. For the first half of 1970 I would recite the lines from this movie that Downey made the actors repeat until they sounded inane, lines like “Putney say the Bormann Six girl is got to have soul” and “How many syllables, Mario?” The Elm is now a bank. The Nostrand In Marine Park, on Nostrand Avenue near Kings Highway, this was where my father dropped Marc and me off one Sunday afternoon to see Dr. No, the first James Bond movie. In 1971, they ran classic movies here, a different one every day. Rona and I saw Greta Garbo in Anna Karenina at the Nostrand on a horrible afternoon when we were breaking up. We had a big argument after the movie and she took the bus home instead of riding in my car. I think at this time she was already secretly seeing my friend Richie H. The Nostrand became a porn theater before it closed. The College A small Art Deco movie house that seated only about 700, this was on Flatbush Avenue near Brooklyn College. A raised section in the back served as a kind of faux-balcony. The College was where I saw the only movie I’ve ever walked out of in the middle: True Grit. I left not because of John Wayne’s performance, but because I felt as if I were going to throw up. I once went to a movie here with a bunch of gay friends from college: Stephen, Joe, Frank, and a couple of other guys. Mark M. was supposed to join us, but he canceled at the last minute, calling me to say he thought he was catching a cold. When I reported this, Stephen exclaimed, “What a pansy!” – which I thought was funny because Mark was straight. The movie was awful, but we enjoyed chatting and making fun of it until a guy in front of us looked back and said, “Will you please shut up?” “No,” Stephen said, “we came here to talk and you’ll just have to live with it.” The guy stood up and challenged Stephen to a fight outside.