MUBI Podcast

The Elgin and EL TOPO plunge NYC into "Midnite Madness"

July 07, 2022 Rico Gagliano, Alejandro Jodorowsky, J. Hoberman, Amy Nicholson, Chuck Zlatkin, Steve Gould Season 2 Episode 2
MUBI Podcast
The Elgin and EL TOPO plunge NYC into "Midnite Madness"
Show Notes Transcript

In 1970, a scruffy repertory theater — led by the visionary Ben Barenholtz — quietly placed a print ad in the Village Voice, advertising midnight screenings of a Spanish-language western they claimed was "too heavy to be shown any other way."  The movie was Alejandro Jodorowsky's EL TOPO, and it'd kick off the "Midnite Movie" craze that changed moviegoing.

Hear the history of the Elgin Theater and its legendary, weed-soaked screenings of  EL TOPO, featuring commentary from ex-Voice critic J Hoberman, Amy Nicholson of the podcast "Unspooled," ex-Elgin programmers Chuck Zlatkin and Steve Gould...and Jodorowsky himself.

The second season of the MUBI Podcast titled “Only in Theaters” tells surprising stories of individual cinemas that had huge impacts on film history, and in some cases, history in general.

To stream some of the films we've covered on the podcast, check out the collection Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Availability of films varies depending on your country.

MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor. A place to discover and watch beautiful, interesting, incredible films. A new hand-picked film arrives on MUBI, every single day. Cinema from across the world. From iconic directors, to emerging auteurs. All carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.

And with MUBI GO, members in select countries can get a hand-picked cinema ticket every single week, to see the best new films in real cinemas. To learn more, visit mubi.com/go

Heads up. This episode includes explicit language descriptions of drug use. And one thing you might not be into: spoilers. Picture this, New York City November of last year. The perfect kind of crisp, sunny autumn afternoon you usually only find on movie posters for romcoms. And I'm standing beneath a sleek theater marquee in the Chelsea neighborhood, talking to a gray haired sage of a guy named Steven Gould. This theater was the last cinema built in New York City before World War Two. There was a moratorium. So this opened in December 1941. And it might be apocryphal, but rumor has it that the builders and the principles were getting crazy. They were in a meeting and they said, "Listen, I got to get home. My wife wants dinner, blah blah blah, What the hell is the name of this theater?" And one guy looked at his watch and it was an Elgin watch. And he says, "Here. That's the name Elgin."- It feels apocryphal, but let's keep it.- Yeah. Steven knows all about the Elgin Theater because in the seventies, he helped program the movies that screen there. Today, the place is a polished art deco dance theater called the Joyce. Stylish West Side types streaming all around us for a matinee performance. But Steve will tell you, it wasn't always like this. We were the poor kids on the block. The structure out here that we're under is the marquee, and it still is the dimensions of our marquee. But since we didn't have as much money, it was more beat up. And standing alone was a little kiosk. That was our box office. And it was about the size of maybe a large phone booth or something. Our cashiers freezing their ass off out here in the winter or sweating in the summer. You know, it was I don't know. There were sometimes where I thought it was a little like... There's a Peter Sellers movie called The Greatest Little Show on Earth. And he had this little dumpy theater, and the big chain opened a few blocks away and he started saying, "Well, you don't have to pay me. If you got something, you can bring it in. You know, so people were bringing in like chickens or sandwiches for him. And he was taking that because he just wanted to keep the place going.<i>Look at it.</i><i>You mean to tell me my uncle actually charged people to go in there?</i><i>- That people actually paid?- Yes! Some...</i> That movie's actually called The Smallest Show on Earth. But the Elgin made up for its small time, looks with a big screen, big sound and big ideas. And in the early seventies, one of those ideas turned the sidewalk under that beat up marquee into the place to be in New York. And changed how and especially when the world watches movies. I am Rico Gagliano, and from the streaming service MUBI welcome back to the MUBI podcast. MUBI's the best place outside of theater, to see beautiful, hand-picked cinema. On this show, we tell you the stories behind beautiful cinema. This is season two. We're calling it Only in Theaters. Every episode, we bring you the tale of a movie-house that made history. And the Elgin was definitely one of those. If you've ever gone to a late night screening of a cult film, you have this theater to thank, along with the maker of a movie called El Topo. Myself, I am not normal. I cannot make a normal scene because I am an artist. That is El Topo's director Alejandro Jodorowsky and I talked to him and many others about how the Elgin created a place and especially a time for proudly weird movies like his and their proudly weird audiences. So ticket, please. Enjoy the show. The story of the Elgin's rise begins in 1970. Which is a little surprising, 'cause that's also a time when movie theater attendance was falling right off a cliff. So I think 46, 1946, 100 million people went to the movies every week. That's what people did. And then in early 1970s, it was down to something like 17 million. You met Louis Menand in our last episode. He's a staff writer at The New Yorker. So there was a huge drop. Also... I have to say, in the UK, very similar. They had huge movie attendance in the forties. It really dropped off in the sixties. And nobody's ever actually been able to explain quite why people stopped going to the movies. I mean, one theory is baby boom, that people stayed home with their kids. Obviously, television was a factor, but it started before there was television. It started in the late 1940s. Well, Amy Nicholson has a theory. This is a time when American movies have been stale for most of your life. Like if you're 20 years old in 1970. Movies have been pretty boring. Amy writes about film for Variety and The New York Times. She also co-hosts the movie podcast Unspooled. And you should know her tastes tend towards the crazy. Yeah, my favorite type of movie is an ambitious failure. You know, a movie that really just shoots for it. Does everything, takes chances, is like pushing the boundaries of what cinema can do. And if they win, that's amazing. Amazing. But if they fail, my heart still goes out to them. And in 1970, she says, there were a lot of young people like her and not a lot of boundary pushing movies for them to see. At least not out of Hollywood. So, I mean, the major studios have been spending all of their time trying to compete with television. And their idea of how to do that is like big movies, four quadrant epics, musicals, you know, The Sound of Music and My Fair Lady, and Cleopatra. And you're feeling, you know, in your bones that things are going to be majorly shaken up. That we're poised for a shakeup. You know, if you were at the Oscars in March 1969, the movie that wins best picture is Oliver. You know, just the big old musical, Oliver. One year later, April 1970, the winner of this picture is the X-rated film Midnight Cowboy. Like, that is the most radical shift that has ever happened. And it's happening right in this moment. Well, the hero of our story sensed that shift and was going to capitalize on it. The Polish born manager of the Elgin Theater, a guy who's sadly no longer with us, name of Ben Barenholtz. I love that Ben Barenholtz himself was like the guy at the center of this because he's just a man of amazing taste, in my opinion. He survived the Nazi occupation when he was a boy. He comes to America in 1947. And he just has somehow amazing taste in the surreal and the absurd. Well he was tall, I guess dark haired, a thin mustache. That's Chuck Zlatkin. He'd eventually program movies at the Elgin, along with Steve Gould. But he started there as an usher, and his boss, Barenholtz, made an immediate impression. Intense eyes and always smoking cigarettes. Eventually he started using a cigarette holder which added to his image. And then after a while he stopped smoking cigarettes and just chewing on the cigarette holder. But he was enigmatic, I would say was hard to sometimes figure out what he was thinking about, what was on his mind. Well, clearly he spent a decent amount of time thinking about programing and marketing. The Elgin kept a tight budget. Vincent Canby of the New York Times once wrote the theater wouldn't spring for apostrophes for the marquee. But it did have a rep for deftly appealing to a lot of different audiences. It was a repertory theater, a revival theater, underground theater with classic films, foreign language films. And we found this huge CinemaScope screen that we were able to get into the theater. So we did a whole big CinemaScope film festival! But I think maybe the most poignant thing is that we decided at one point that we would charge senior citizens $0.25 at any time. So the seniors, they would be like making scarves and giving it to the staff. And of course, now I'm a senior citizen. Where can I find a theater that I can see a movie for $0.25? Please, somebody tell me that! Still, Barenholtz was pretty sure the new breed of young hipsters paying more than a quarter were his target demo. He started searching for a movie he could get as an exclusive that would blow the counterculture's collective mind. One day... it arrived. From exactly the kind of character you'd expect. Well, I am not sure if I was born one day. I am not sure who I am. But my ego is a long time in this moment, I am a cine-maker. But in another moment, I was a mime, I was a painter, I was a musician, I was a poet. I know only my name. Alejandro Jodorowsky Prullansky. Alejandro Jodorowsky is known for saying unusual things. But his CV checks out. He was born in Chile, where, as a teen, he started a marionette theater. Went to Paris, where he joined the troupe of mime superstar Marcel Marceau. Then it was off to Mexico to launch an experimental theater company, where he did everything. In this company of theater I started making music, costume, writing, directing actors. Ten years preparing me to make movies because my passion went to making movies. When I have all the techniques which I learned in ten years, I started the picture Fando and Lis. Right off the bat Fando and Lis established Jodorowsky's favorite tropes: mystical vision quests, psycho-sexuality, surreal symbolism, satire of authority, and religion, epic imagery, lots of blood. It was based on an avant garde play or... loosely based on it. I didn't shoot the theater play I shoot the ideas I have around the theater play. And I make this picture to create the greatest scandal in Mexico. There's no audio of the actual riot that broke out at the first screening of Fando and Lis.

But I imagine it sounding something like this:

What about the movie set the audience off? Probably lots of stuff. Oh, too violent. There was nudity. J. Hoberman was a film critic for the Village Voice, starting in the seventies. He also co-wrote the book Midnight Movies. I mean, you know, Mexico was kind of traumatized in the late sixties. I don't know if you're aware of, you know, they had the Olympics there at the same time they, like, shot hundreds of students. Yeah. So things were very tense there. And, you know, it was Catholic and repressive and... and this movie could be seen as anti-clerical. I mean, there were a lot of things that they could object to. The Mexican government quickly banned the film from being shown. And in the U.S., it was just... a flop. When I made Fando and Lis a company in America buy the picture, cut the picture, and make another picture. And was awful! Fando and Lis in the United States was awful! Was not my picture. Was for me a big, a big failure. So for his second film, Jodorowsky figured he'd try and play nice. Because I was searching something commercial, something they know, I said"Well, I will make a cowboy picture, and then they will understand my picture." That is the way that El Topo was born a cowboy picture. You thought, here's how audiences will understand me.- I'll make a Western.- Yes, yes. And, but myself, I am not normal. I cannot make a normal scene because I am an artist. I am not a business man. And then I make an artistical picture. And the cowboy was not a normal cowboy. There was a lot of things in El Topo who are not normal. That is for sure. El Topo is a mystical quest. This guy rides out into the desert, you know, looking kind of like a Spaghetti Western villain or something. All in black rides out into the desert with his young son behind him on the horse. The hero, played by Jodorowsky, by the way, tells his naked son to bury a teddy bear and a picture of his mother in the sand. And then they ride off into a series of ever stranger and bloodier adventures. He picks up a woman. She gives him this task to defeat the four masters of the desert. Who are all very strange. He does that. And then somehow there's a second part of the movie where this town has grown up, it's completely corrupt. He's very different. He's kind of like a monk. And this town is so awful. He goes and he entertains with his... He has a companion, a woman who is a dwarf. And the town is so brutal, they humiliate them, you know, by making them have sex. In public, as I recall. And then he just, this town's awful, he just wreaks vengence on this town just slaughters them all. Yeah, sometimes movies lose their impact over time. El Topo... is still eye popping, over-the-top violent and kind of addictively baffling. And then it somehow, and then the cycle begins again or something like that. Yeah, it's not. I mean, like, I can hear you struggling with the plot because it's not really about the plot. No, it's not about the plot. You know, there's this thing you learn about in cinema studies called the Cinema of Attractions, which is basically, you know, like the narrative is not as important as certain discrete elements of the movie. I mean, stars would be the most important, but action scenes, special effects, all these other things. That's true of El Topo. Nobody would be following the story anyway. They would be, you know, it would be like the trip. It was a trip. Whatever it was. Jodorowsky desperately needed to sell major studios on El Topo. He says it'd cost $1,000,000 to make and he owed his investors big time. And then we take the plane and we come to United States, to sell El Topo because if not we go to the jail. And then we start to go to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Century-Fox, etc. And they say, "Fantastic, but we need to show to our commercial sections." And then the commercial guys see the feature, they say "It's incredible, but we don't know how to show that.""We cannot show that because we know we don't know how." And then I went to another company the same thing, another company and the same thing. Finally, a music producer named Alan Douglas arranged a screening at the Museum of Modern Art. Some in the audience walked out. Ben Barenholtz was there. He didn't. And the thing is that, you know, Ben Barenholtz saw it and immediately knew that this movie would be something. Like, I have to program this movie. He said that the first time he saw El Topo, he felt like he had seen a movie that felt like the present, you know, that finally felt like the future. That half the audience walked out was kind of a point of pride. He was like,"This is the movie of its time, you know, we're in a moment of change, and if everybody likes this change, then it's not even genuine change." It was violent, it was mystical. It had all kinds of outlandish characters. It was a lot like a Spaghetti Western, which, those were extremely popular, except it was a kind of a head movie. I mean, you know, I can just imagine, you know, like Ben looking at it and going like "The hippes will love this shit," you know, it's like, it's all in there. Chuck Zlatkin says there were just two challenges: marketing the movie to a counterculture that didn't like being marketed to and hiding the movie from critics. Some of whom Barenholtz was pretty sure wouldn't love this shit. And that's when the decision was made by Ben to present it at midnight, because he felt that it was a really special film and that he wanted to introduce it to the audiences that it would appeal to, primarily younger people. And you wanted to keep it away from having a regular opening where critics would come and maybe kill the film. And, you know, a very smart showman, he took out an ad,

little ad in The Village Voice:

"Coming soon, El Topo at midnight. Too heavy to be shown any other way." And that's it. Was there a graphic or anything? No, no! Nothing. Turns out that was plenty. The Elgin gives birth to midnight madness. Coming up in just a minute, stay with us. MUBI is a curated streaming service showing exceptional films from around the globe, all of them hand-picked by real people who really know movies. And with a new film debuting on the platform every single day, there's always something new to discover. So on this season of the podcast, you may have noticed we're talking about history making experiences that were only possible in movie theaters. Hopefully it inspires you to love and support your local cinema that much more. And we got a new thing going that can help you do exactly that. It is called MUBI Go and when you sign up you get a free movie ticket every week to see a hand-selected film in theaters. Previous picks include award winning films like Drive My Car, The Lost Daughter, Cha-Cha Real Smooth, and the Power of the Dog. MUBI Go is now available in the UK, New York and Los Angeles, and it is coming to more U.S. cities soon. To learn more, check out MUBI.com/go Also, one more thing. After you finished listening, you can stream some of the films we have featured on the podcast this season. All you got to do is subscribe to MUBI.com and look for the collection called "Featured on the MUBI Podcast." That is on the Now Showing page. You can also find all the links we have mentioned in the show notes of this episode. Speaking of which. Back to it. So it's December 1970, Ben Barenholtz' little ad has just hit the Village Voice announcing the Elgin's midnight screenings of El Topo and New York's counterculture is already pretty sure this might be a movie for them. Because, according to J Hoberman, by 1970 a lot of cool stuff happened at midnight. Oh, there were plenty of midnight screenings. I mean, midnight screenings go back a long way. And actually, there was a tradition, you know, in the whole underground scene of midnight movies and performances. You know who The Fugs are? Yeah, the Fugs, the counterculture band from New York. Yeha, I mean, they used to perform at midnight all the time. But if it was such a typical thing, what made this so special? Well, he was going to, it was going to get a theatrical run at midnight. It wasn't just a one time thing, like a special show at midnight. It was going to be continuous. And I think that, you know, when I say that it was not unusual, I mean that it was not unusual in the context of underground, experimental films or, you know, performances. But this was, you know, like a commercial movie house that showed some far out stuff. Meaning that maybe this kind of brought that tradition into the mainstream. Completely established that tradition, completely. It was the first, but it was a blockbuster. It was the first midnight blockbuster. And Chuck Zlatkin says that was clear right from opening night. Okay, so it was like, it was, the theater was packed. I think it was standing room only. Maybe it was like 600 people in there. And, you know, the film started. In seconds there was silence. And then when things, various things happen the audience would respond. You could just, you could just feel it. You talk about those thrilling moments when something really works. Well, this really worked. And when the film ended, the audience exploded. It was like the lobby was filled with people talking about the movie. So in the terminology of the times, it blew people's minds. And it was obviously that they were going to go out and tell people to come see it. And they did. A lot of people. Standing with me outside the former Elgin Theater Steven Gould remembers what it was like to host a blockbuster on a block that wasn't really used to busting. I mean, this was a very Latinx area at the time. You know, we had guys with little carriages and a block of ice coming here, shaving and pouring sirup on it and stuff.- Selling shaved ice.- Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, all the guys sitting out playing dominoes. It was that kind of place. And I think some of the older locals looked at us, you know, a little "loco" for you know, midnight going to a movie and stuff, but definitely crowded. A lot of people, you know, bell-bottoms, beads, long hair, beards. And then I know I can honestly say I don't really remember that many families coming in to see El Topo.- I would hope not.- Yeah. I would hope you would turn away the little kids. Yeah. But any admissions the Elgin lost from the family audience they made up for with the celebrity audience. Robert Redford showed up. Abbie Hoffman. Know how years later, the discotheque Studio 54 became this crazy playground for coked up stars and hipsters? Well, El Topo screenings were like the scruffy, more cosmic dress rehearsal for that. With maybe slightly lower octane drugs. See, smoking then was allowed in the balcony in the theater, and so people could smoke in the balcony. That's the only thing we enforced. No smoking in the orchestra, smoke in the balcony. But we didn't enforce what you could smoke. People were coming to see it, at least, you know, high on marijuana, many of them more than that. And long before, you know, the Rocky Horror Show phenomenon took place, people were coming dressed in costumes for the people in El Topo. And we'd also play, you know, rock music before our El Topo began and it got to the point where people would get up on stage and dance to the music. It was such a scene, Jodorowsky says, it was even a little much for him. They smoked marijuana. Every time I went to the theater there was a lot of smoke of marijuana, and they was putting in my hand cigars of marijuana. I never smoked marijuana, I was a virgin like that! I'd say "Thank you", I'd put it in the garbage. In my life I never drink alcolhol neither. Can I make sure that I'm understanding this? You had never smoked marijuana, so you went to the theater and people were just putting joints in your hand and you- just, like, threw it away.- Yes. Yes, I you don't criticize that. Everyone do what he want. But it was not my world. Jodorowsky might not have cared much for the weed, but he definitely appreciated the movie's notoriety. Soon, the Elgin and El Topo weren't just the talk of the cool kids. One day I take the taxi, a normal taxi who bring me to Elgin Theater. And when they say"Elgin Theater" he say me"You will go see El Topo?" He know, the taxi driver know El Topo. Big happiness for my part. Big happiness. Because even the driver of taxi know the El Topo. And that's when movie critics took notice too. Many were enthralled.- But others...- I remember 'cause I was handling press at that time for the theater. Vincent Canby, this film reviewer for the New York Times, he wanted a special screening of El Topo for him, and I would say "I'm sorry, we don't do that, because the experience is seeing it at midnight with the audience and we're not having any screenings." And he was really taken aback."I'm from The New York Times! Do you know who I am?" I say, "Yes, I know who you are. Just come any midnight, no problem. And we'll make sure you have seat." Yeah, it's kind of like, yeah, we know who you are. In fact, we're showing this at midnight because, like, you're the enemy! So he eventually came and saw it. That's the amazing, months later, he had to break down and come see it. Do you remember the review? What did he write? I don't remember. I should have looked at it beforehand to tell that story. It's okay. Amy Nicholson looked it up. He thought that what made it a success was just that it was being played so late at night that if people walked out of the movie at 3 A.M. and didn't think it was that great, then they felt really dumb. Like, "What have I done with my life?" You know? So they're surrounded by other people who are all nodding and being like, "Yes, it's a masterpiece." And you're like,"Yeah, yeah, it's a masterpiece." Just because you're exhausted and you don't want to feel like an idiot or risk being like the uncool person who sides with the squares and says they don't get it. Oh, yeah. I mean, some of the critics seem to have just thought that this movie was like Emperor's New Hollywood. And to be fair, if you were a critic who felt like El Topo was a simple exploitation flick, or just the rantings of an oddball, Jodorowsky's interviews at the time might not have dispelled that idea. When he does give interviews, they're like pretty much insane and incomprehensible, and he's talking about religion and sex, and then he's talking about how the Holy Spirit touched him in a very, very private place. Like literally a private place that I don't want to say right here. He is saying that he wants to build a cathedral for a piece of cheese. He also infamously said a scene where his character sexually assaults his lover was a real assault. Something he now says was just like a lot of stuff he told the press at the time. An attention grabbing fiction. Regardless, it's obviously pretty shocking. But neither controversy nor critiques put a dent in El Topo's box office. The movie played every weekday at midnight, 1 A.M. on weekends, month after month. You know... In a sense, reviews were meaningless for that film. What mattered were people's response to it. And you know, the creator of the film put so much in there for people to see, so much symbolism for every different, you know, religious or belief or whatever. And people would come and... you know, it wasn't enough for them to see it once. Y'know, some people would have to come back and see it five and ten times. To the point that in some ways the screenings started to feel religious, too. I mean, the Village Voice at the time, who like really hyped up El Topo, they called it a comedy that becomes a cult of salvation. And they referred to going to go see El Topo at midnight as midnight mass. All of these kind of quasi religious, spiritual things, coming about at a point where like the hippie dippyness of the sixties has been segueing into the darker, really just after post-Manson, kind of"What are we all doing? What are we all believing in?" In other words, it's pretty clear midnight screenings at the Elgin didn't become a phenomenon just because of El Topo. Any more than a church is inspiring just because there's a Bible in it. They also caught on because it was a chance for people to come together again and again, at a special time and place to try and find meaning. And the final chapter of the El Topo story proves just how important the time and place really was. It started with a celebrity sighting. John Lennon and Yoko Ono came to see it. Actually a couple of times. Now, in my experience working at the Elgin, we're talking you know, this is now 1971, and in my experience there, I've seen a lot of people of note, a lot of celebrities, famous people, whatever, and they just deal with it. Somehow, when I saw John Lennon walk up to the box office, I had to remind myself to breathe. Yes, he was here or whatever. And then it was a question of letting them in for free or not. And I said, "I think they can afford to pay." So we sold them tickets and then they walked into the theater. And as they were walking in, John turned to Yoko and said,"Mummy, do I have time to get sweets?" And she looked and said, okay. And he went to the concession stand and got some candy and they went in to see the film. And what was the result? What happened? Well, they came back again and I think they actually ended up seeing it maybe three times. And then they said to Allen Klein, "Buy the film!" Be prepared to live the most wonderful experience of your life. Allen Klein was Lennon's business manager. For a while he also managed a little act you may have heard of called The Rolling Stones. J Hoberman says Klein's company bought the rights to El Topo, and... They pulled it right out of the Elgin. That was it. I mean, Allen Klein, you know, no more midnight screening. He wanted to reopen it on Broadway, you know, like give it a proper opening. The movie got this official trailer: Alejandro Jodorowsky's film classic El Topo. And a giant ad in Times Square, the width of an entire building. Which just shows, you know, like how totally he misunderstood, well, what the appeal was. You know, I mean, in a sense, you have something this is this private thing that people are enjoying, you know, that that they feel very cool about. You know, they're part of it. This sect, this, you know, cult or whatever. You know, it's not the same thing to, like, show it in the light of day, on Broadway! El Topo is more than spectacle. It is an experience for all of your life. And what happened to it? What happened to the movie,- Once it got pulled?- It bombed. It bombed. It didn't you know, it didn't didn't do any business. El Topo's run was over. But meanwhile, Ben Barenholtz, the Elgin and its midnight screenings were just getting started. I mean, after El Topo finishes its run, everything he programmes next is a banger. He programs Pink Flamingos, which is like, "Ta da!" look at John Waters, everything he could do. I mean, we have Hairspray because of his amazing taste. Ben deputized Chuck Zlatkin and Steve Gould as programmers. They brought in the reggae fueled Jamaican flick The Harder They Come. It played the midnight slot for years. Meanwhile, Ben focused on film distribution, and the hits kept coming. He saw Eraserhead. Halfway through Eraserhead, he already was like, "I'm going to buy this movie." And then he invited David Lynch to live with him while finishing the print and gave him money for food. He just knew what talent was going to be. All these movies were huge midnight sensations and not just at the Elgin. Because of this trend, he started and the fact that he proved there was an audience, he claims that within two years, every city in the country had a midnight movie going. And it was kind of him tipping over that domino. Alas, no theater can survive on midnight box office alone. The Elgin finally closed in the late 1970s. Following the last showing, we invited back everybody, whoever, you know, worked at the theater there, and we had a big party. Someone turned to me, it was, you know, March of 1977 and I said, "Well, I guess the sixties are finally over" Because the Elgin was closing. After the party, they put one last movie title on the marquee, Gone with the Wind. Except the Elgin wasn't gone. Four years later, it was reborn as the Joyce. And yeah, it's a dance theater now, so it's changed, but also stayed the same. It's that perfect autumn afternoon last November again. And I'm sitting inside the Joyce Theater, now in a balcony seat, along with Steven Gould, waiting for a swing dance performance to begin. I feel so at home in the balcony. All we need is a blunt and we're all set to go here! This is the first run of shows at the Joyce since New York's COVID lockdown. People eagerly head to their seats while I take in the sleek art deco lines of the place. The lush red velvet curtain and the cool exposed brick walls. Definitely not like it was back in the Elgin days. Well, the walls had plaster on them. And the plaster had paint on them. Some of the paint was peeling! Once in a while, some clanking of the old steam radiators. And on the roof of the theater we got about 20 children's wading pools and put them on pallets and we planted things up there. And there was one fall that we had such a bumper crop of tomatoes that when people were leaving the theater, they got a couple of tomatoes when they were going home. That's beautiful. It sounds like that theater had a different vibe than now. Well, I mean, people seem to be excited waiting to see the show. And that's something that's really wonderful when you come into a theater, the excitement saying, "Oh, I'm going to see this and see that." And, you know, obviously because I was 40 years in the business, movies meant the most to me. But it is so wonderful that this venue is still being used as a theater. And I know with COVID, people were freaked out and everything, but I am so happy to see the audience here. I can't see the smiles on their faces'cause we all have masks on, but I hope it's a smile. Good afternoon, everyone. May I have your attention, please? We are excited to welcome you back to the Joyce Theater. For everyone's safety... The audience is so psyched they drown out the pre-show announcement. It's a different kind of crowd than turned out for El Topo. No one's in costume and it's way earlier. But it's a crowd of people celebrating something they revere together. After a long lockdown the feeling at the Elgin, excuse me, the Joyce is still a kind of mass. And that's the MUBI podcast for this week. Follow us to make sure you get a front row seat for more deep dives into great movie theaters. Next week, the suburban Midwest theater that helped turn a box office disaster into one of the most beloved cult films of the 20th century. At the 95th week, Harold and Maud beat the record for longest running movie in Minnesota. Like in the history of the state? What held the record before that? It was The Sound of Music. So Harold and Maud beat The Sound of Music. Come on, how can you miss that? Meanwhile, this episode was hosted, written and cut by me, Rico Gagliano. Beth Schiff is our booking producer. Stephen Colón mastered and engineered. Martin Austwick composed, performed all the music. A million thanks to everyone at the Joyce Theater. The show is executive produced by me, along with Jon Barranchea, Efe Cakarel, Daniel Kasman and Michael Tacca for MUBI. If you're digging this show, please leave us a five star review wherever you listen, it will make it easier for others to find and fall in love with us. Also, if you've got questions, comments, if you want to share your favorite moviegoing memories with us or maybe you even saw El Topo at the Elgin back in the day, tell us about it. If you weren't too baked to remember the details. Our email is podcast@MUBI.com And of course to stream the best of cinema, including some of the films we talk about on this very podcast, simply head over to MUBI.com to start watching. Till next week, large popcorn no butter for me please.