8th Street Playhouse
52 W. 8th Street,
New York,
NY
10011
52 W. 8th Street,
New York,
NY
10011
24 people
favorited this theater
Showing 51 - 75 of 111 comments
Oh well. I used to love attending the summer rock and roll film festivals here. Man, they really cranked the sound up at those – and usually obtained awesome prints. I remember a screening of the “Grateful Dead Movie” here that blew my socks off. I thought Phil Lesh’s bass notes would lift me right out of my seat. Many memorable screenings of “Rocky Horror Picture Show” are also fondly remembered – I recall they used to screen Tim Curry’s music “video” for his minor hit “I Do the Rock” before “Rocky Horror” in the early ‘80’s.
Most memorable feature of the theater itself had to be those neon zig-zags on the side walls near the screen recess. They’d be lit up until showtime. Was there a small stage in front of the screen – perhaps a foot (or less) up from the auditorium floor? Sometimed the memory plays tricks!
Sorry, I don’t remember that pizzeria.
There’s nothing moot about sharing good stories about a long lost theater, Laura of 8th St…. Welcome and thanks for the unique perspective! Do you remember the name of the pizzeria that was across the street and down at cellar level a few steps below 8th Street?
I worked for the 8th Street Playhouse, part of the Cinema 5 chain, while I was at NYU, 1976-78. My friend used to call me the mayor of 8th Street because after working there so long I knew every shoe salesman and pizza chef on the block. There were some great movies there at the time, including “Network†and “Carrie.†After my ticket-selling shift ended I would go in and catch the last hour. I even remember John Waters making a personal appearance with “Desperate Living†in 1977. Ah the good old days!
And what a cast of characters I worked with! There was the theater manager, Miss King, a chain-smoking astrologist who did my chart for free. She hung out in the lobby during the busy periods, then dragged herself upstairs after the movie began. (She had to move slowly because she was old and her lungs were shot.) There was Guy, another NYU student who wrote a wistful poem about her, imagining her solitary life on Charles Street; he went on to work in theater. There was Anthony, a Little Italy throwback who filled in as ticket-taker and generally cleaned up. Jerome worked the concession stand, and was always sneaking into the theater to grab popcorn and soda cups off the floor—he only had to account for missing cups, so if he could refill them, he could pocket the second (or third…) sale. Try not to think about that as you reminisce about your time there! I especially liked the ticket-taker, whose name I think was James. When he and Jerome weren’t in the closet getting high, we had great conversations.
There was an attempt to unionize Cinema 5 while I worked there and Rugoff, who owned the chain, called meetings and told us how much he cared about all of us—as long as we voted against the union. There was tons of politicking but in the end the union was rejected. By the way, RKO Century Warner acquired Cinema 5 from Pacific Theatres in 1985, and in 1986 RKO Century Warner was bought out by Cineplex Odeon. I guess it’s all moot now since the theater is sadly deceased.
I saw “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” here.
All the co owners of the Playhouse sold it to Steve Hirsch and he reigned until his passing (AIDS) in the early 90’s.
Does anyone know what happened to the Owner/Managers … I believe their names were Mark & Steve ?
The art was further east on 8th St. near University Place. It was later renamed Movieland 8th St. when operated by B.S.Moss/UA – it is now serving some function for NYU, I believe.
Didn’t the 8th Street Playhouse become the Art Cinema, or were they two separate theaters ?
I like that logo, which I think was developed when they had their 3-D festival.
This ultra low-budget NY indie had its premiere at the 8th Street on January 31st, 1986. Despite the prominent placement of then-current punk stars The Ramones and Scandal in the ad, the film’s soundtrack and some of its sub-plot actually had more to do with Doo-Wop music than punk rock.
I miss those old Playhouse days! If you know any former 8th St Staff, or NY Rocky Horror performers or regulars, please have them them stop by our website and share some memories. (www.rockyhorror.cc) aka The NYC RHPS Survivors/Supporters Society. We are also seeking members of former casts like the New Yorker theatre, Midway (Queens), Marboro Theatre (Brooklyn), Amboy Twin (Staten Island) We are also seeking cast members and crew from the diffrent theaters our cast went to after the Playhouse Closed. The latest Rocky Horror cast can be found at www.nycrhps.org (yup there’s still some Playhouse faces in the cast. What do you expect from time warpers?)
TLA should use the auditorium as a theater if it is still intact. For many years they had a theater in Phila on Chestnut street along with the video store.
Not to stray too far off topic (after all I seem to be a member of the Off Topic Bilge Brigade), but here is a link to a site that has photos of the Electric Lady Studios entrance prior to the renovations and then after. It looks like the destruction of the old entrance took place some time in 1997.
http://www.univibes.com/OutANDAbout/el_studio.html
Electric Lady Studios is still there, dave-bronx. They completely remodeled the entrance to the studios in the late ‘90’s – to much derision from local preservationists. If you look at Ken’s photo, the two gated window fronts just to the right of the No Standing sign are for Electric Lady Studios. The old facade had a tall rectangular recess to the right of the 8th Street Playhouse marquee from which a curved brick wall protruded slightly onto the sidewalk. The curved wall was designed to look like the shoulder of a guitar, as if a giant guitar were embedded in the facade of the building and half buried in the sidewalk. As you walked into the small vestibule the wall created, there was even a round window on the inside of the wall designed to approximate the sound hole on an acoustic guitar. Now, the entrance looks like any old plain and boring storefront. I’m sure if you dug around the internet, you’d find an article about the whole remodeling – and perhaps even a before/after photo. This would have been several years after the Playhouse closed… maybe '96 or '97.
I guess the Electric Lady recording studios (where Hendrix recorded) is gone – when I worked here the entrance was next door to the theatre, but the facility itself was in the basement under the theatre…
A photograph I took of the 8th Street Playhouse in May 2006:
http://flickr.com/photos/kencta/216865155/
The auditorium remains pretty well intact within the building in its current use as a TLA video store and orininal film posters and calendars from its movie theatre days adorn the walls of the former foyer lobby area.
You shouldn’t be selling your product by posting to every theater you can think of. I reported this to the site owners and I hope they do something about it.
I’m posting nice movie material that are also mostly for sale.
http://s110.photobucket.com/albums/n94/irajoel/
you can also view my entire inventory at
www.cinemagebooks.com
I have over 5,000 items including many books in non-film such as
gay and lesbian, African American, posters, graphic design, fiction, poetry and much more.
Correction: Lewis Wilson was the Batman and Douglas Croft was Robin in the 1943 chapter serial. (Robert Lowery starred in the ‘49 Columbia serial, along with nimble Johnny Duncan.) Shirley Patterson portrayed Bruce Wayne’s love interest Linda Page, and Charles (Flash Gordon’s Ming the Merciless) Middleton played Colton, a uranium miner. The DVD is currently available, but some wartime racial slurs against the Japanese may have been edited, as Columbia is now owned by Sony.
Although I passed by the 8th St. Playhouse many times in my Greenwich Village days of the 1960s, I had occasion to enjoy a novel event there only once, and that story deserves a bit of background.
Brooklyn’s Peerless Theater under the old el on Myrtle Ave. was really good at booking those old Columbia and Republic serials for us kids and our Saturday matinees. In 1953, an entire decade after it had made its wartime debut, was the very first “Batman” serial with Robert Lowery (the Batman), Lewis Croft (Robin) and J. Carroll Naish (the evil but campy Prince Tito Daka of the empire of Japan – Boo! Hiss!) I’d caught most of the 15 chapters, so when Batman got slugged and placed in a wooden box in Chapter 14, I knew I couldn’t wait to find out how he got out before being eaten by MoJo MoJo and Sako Sako (Daka’s pet alligators) in the concluding episode.
At high noon the following Saturday, I was headed out the door with my 20 cents admission in hand when I was collared by my mom. Where was I going? To see the conclusion of the Batman serial. “You’re not going anywhere. Go look in the bathroom mirror.” OK, so I had some spots on my face. Big deal. Mom said, “I’m not going to be responsible for infecting 400 neighborhood kids because of your chicken pox.”
And not one of my pals would ever reveal the ending to me!
Flash forward 13 years. The TV Batman show is all the rage in ‘66, so the wizard programmers at 8th St. Playhouse decide to do their version of a tie-in and booked the original 1943 print for one weekend only, all 420 minutes of it, complete with recaps and coming attractions. I was dizzy. I took a date who endured my revelry in finding out how it finally ended after all that time. I knew! I was more than pleased! But I only got a handshake instead of a kiss from my date, never to go beyond this one-and-only trip to a great Greenwich Village icon.
I started to keep track of the movies I saw in ‘93 and '92 was the year where I became a serious cineaste. I’ve been going back to the library to try to see some of the stuff I caught that year. I looked up the Chabrol films and they actually screened in Dec. '91. I do remember that the first two retros the theatre ran when it switched to a rep/revival house were Kurosawa and Bergman, which took place before Chabrol, which must have been the third series. It probably switched to retros, then, in late November/Dec. 1991 and didn’t last a year.
In 1979 the 8th St. Playhouse was the New York home of John Carpenter’s “Halloween” for a long exclusive run. My parents actually made the trip in from New Jersey to see it, and they hadn’t done that since the old days of a movie & stage show for 99 cents at Radio City.
In 1950 I was an usher(ette) at the Playhouse for a short time. I was issued a scratchy beige uniform with maroon trim, and a flashlight. There I was introduced to “Tweety”, having to listen to his song all too many times. In the evenings there would be a break, when the manager turned up in black tie, and coffee would be served to the moviegoers (in real cups and saucers) — little old ladies in shoulder capes and hats were particularly happy for this ritual. I don’t remember if this was every evening, or only on weekends, or maybe at a film opening, but it gave a feeling of being at a live theater.
I was shocked to find, upon returning to NY a few years back, that it has become a video shop. Some old posters were there, but even so, it had to be put on our list of gone-forever-should-have-lived-on places.
MarkNYLA: update your profile! ie: LA/NY theatre-related stuff
-MerylNYLA