RKO Madison Theatre
54-30 Myrtle Avenue,
Ridgewood,
NY
11385
54-30 Myrtle Avenue,
Ridgewood,
NY
11385
21 people
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Showing 801 - 825 of 1,251 comments
I don’t know about in-car heaters at the Sunrise Drive-In. My parents and I only saw one feature there in summer 1970 (no heaters needed) : “The Out Of Towners” and “Rosemary’s Baby”. Re: the latter film, and Mia Farrow’s breasts, my Dad said something about “lung warts”.
Russ Myer films, eager, young, warm bodies, passion pit locale = plenty of body heat and steam, plus a good workout of the seat cushions and springs.
Thanks, RobertR, now I know when “Night of the Living Dead” played at the RKO Madison. I would have thought December 1968, not 1969. I vaguely remember Dionne Warwick in “Slaves”, and vividly remember Russ Meyers' “Vixen”. Your Walter Reade comment is interesting, in that I remember reading that the Walter Reade Organization was the original distributor of “Night of the Living Dead”, and would not subscribe or submit to the then-new G M R X movie rating system.
Interesting that Loew’s Gates was still showing movies in December 1969. I wonder when it stopped showing films ? I suppose that should be a standard item of info for all these now-closed movie theaters.
Interesting that “Slaves” and “Night of the Living Dead” were on the same bill, and that both were loaded with black-white racial issues and connotations, although “Slaves” was blaxploitation and “NOTLD” is generally agreed not to be.
The Reade Organization released “Slaves” the god awful film debut of Dionne Warwick. In December 1969 Continental Releasing paired it with Night of the Living Dead and it opened on the RKO track across town. Notice it’s not playing any Walter Reade Theatres :)
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Perhaps there was smoke damage from the fire. The interior could have been painted at that time.
Wow, thanks for that info!! I will have to check that out next time I am in the area!!
Perhaps on your next visit to the RKO Madison theatre you could take some photos Smore. If that is permissible with management of course.
If anyone lives in Ridgewood and is interested, the upstairs of the RKO, or rather “Liberty Department Store” now has been open to the public. Its a furniture showcase up there but the one time I was there recently, you could see through the doors where they bring stuff in from and the walls are a greenish paint color, or appeared to be, and its just interesting to look around and picture what it looked like before. :–)
The House That Dripped Blood is another British horror movie fella’s. Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing together again. This isn’t as good a movie as the Frankenstein or Dracula movies with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing but still worth watching.
Thanks Al… It was either the Boulevard or the Elmwood, and I’m leaning towards the Boulevard since I have early memories of going to that theater often as a child. I don’t quite remember the Elmwood until I was much older. We lived on 41st Ave in Elmhurst just off Junction Boulevard about 2 blocks from Roosevelt Ave. The Boulevard is definitely a very good bet. That theater along with the Lefrak and the Fair loomed large in my very earliest moviegoing. Thanks a bunch, Al… I really think that’s the place!
Ed, I’m afraid I don’t know how to do that but here is the line-up.
TEH HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD STARTS MAY 12, 1971
Manhattan
(while continuing at) RKO 59th St. TWINS
RKO 23RD ST.
RKO COLISUEM
NEW AMSTERDAM
ROOSEVELT 145TH ST.
Brooklyn
RKO ALBEE
RKO DYKER
RKO KENMORE
RKO MADISON
GEORGETOWN TWIN 2
KINGSWAY
Queens
RKO ALDEN
RKO KEITHS
BOULEVARD
ELMWOOD
Bronx
RKO FORDHAM
WHITESTONE DRIVE-IN
Perhaps we need a film about THE MOVIE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD.
THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD was, for some reason unknown to me, the secondary feature to the just-released THE REINCARNATION OF PETER PROUD at the RKO Madison in July 1975. Apart from that, I see very little relation between the two films.
Thanks, Al. I suppose there may have been various 2nd features booked by individual nabes througout the run and therefore not advertised. If you’re ever able to post an image of that ad, I’d love to see the theaters listed for Queens and try to figure out where I saw this. Unfortunately, my Dad is no longer alive for me to ask him. I don’t remember him taking me into Manhattan for this, and it sounds like something we’d just run to a local house to see.
Ed, THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD went wide around on May 11, 1971 including the the RKO Madison. There is no mention of a second feature.
Haha. Actually, it’s so nice to see all of those old theaters in print. I see the RKO Bushwick, RKO Keith’s Richmond Hill, RKO Flushing, and all the other RKOs all were showing it.
1966 also saw opera
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Alalvarez makes a great point I remember when City Cinemas was playing the lowest of the Warner Brothers films in Cinema 1 & 2 because they had a deal to open their films.
Dracula: Prince of Darkness featuring Christopher Lee and Barbara Shelley. Very cool movie. British horror movies were some of the best ever made. I have looked at the newspaperarchive.com website. Each search I tried returned me to the Norwalk Reflector newspaper. Perhaps the free search only returns results from the Norwalk Reflector newspaper. A month to month subscription is about $10. I am very skeptical of this service.
Those Dracula flicks went on and on didn’t he? The old Count had more lives than a cat! And what great pains each film (at least in the original cycle of films set in the 19th Century) took to pick up from the point of Dracula’s demise in the previous film and play out his elaborate resurrection! While in Florida, I caught the first of those films to try and bring Dracula into modern times. Called “Dracula AD 1972”, it had Christopher Lee swinging with hippie occult-worshipping chicks in Mod London and saw it on a double bill at the Tropicaire Drive In. Some years later, they finally released the last of those Lee/Dracula films here in the states… another modern-set film titled “Satanic Rites of Dracula” that I caught on the bottom of a triple bill on 42nd Street under the title “Count Dracula and His Vampire Bride” in 1980 or ‘81, I think. I’m almost positive that was at the Liberty Theater.
High brow … “Dracula: Prince of Darkness”, showing a dead man strung up by his heels, his throat slit, so he could bleed out into the dust that became … Dracula ! once again. I saw the sequel, “Dracula Has Risen From The Grave”, at the Madison in early 1969.
I saw “The House That Dripped Blood” at the RKO Madison on a double bill with “The Reincarnation Of Peter Proud” in July 1975.
I know nothing about Newspaper Archive, but it reads worthwhile.
Lost… I knew you were high brow. At the risk of veering off topic for a second, I recall my father taking me to see a double feature of the 1970 British horror-anthology “The House That Dripped Blood” which played on a double feature with the ‘66 Christopher Lee epic you mentioned, “Dracula: Prince of Darkness”. I can’t for the life of me remember where I saw the film, but I believe “House” was released here in the Spring of 1971. My family moved to Miami for a year towards the end of that summer and I’m pretty sure we saw the film while still in NYC. And me at the tender age of 6 and ½! Was that irresponsible of my dad? Ha… I never considered it. Those two flicks had some fairly gruesome scenes in them, despite the one being rated only PG and the other originally released here pre-MPAA ratings, but I don’t think it ruined me (no snickering). Anyway, if RobertR is out there listening, please post if you come across any ads for that twin bill, as I know you share a lot of 1970’s clippings with the group.
Also… I have to ask if any one is familiar with an online service called Newspaper Archive (at newspaperarchive.com). They claim to allow subscribers to view, download and print images of newspapers going back to 1759. They claim to have the largest such database available online and for a price that seems too good to be true, when you compare it to a service like Proquest. I’m tempted, but I don’t want to get bagged here. Anyone?
Gents, I think these things were block-booked for the whole RKO ciruit whether there was specific appeal or not. As late as the eighties Cineplex Odeon was pressured into runs of films such as SUPERMAN, TERMS OF ENDEARMENT and TOP GUN which played to empty screens at the Kenmore among others.
Then the opposite started to happen. Slasher movies and BOYZ ‘N THE HOOD on the upper east side.
It’s a little numbers game the industry plays to justify the ad spend and appear politically enlightened.
It still happens. THE DUKES OF HAZARD at the Magic Johnson Harlem 9. Ouch!
THE LOST CITY anywhere outside Miami and New Jersey. BOYNTON BEACH CLUB anywhere outside Boynton Beach.
Makes sense, RobertR. You and mike are right about the appeal of such a movie today. It would play in Manhattan and maybe Brooklyn Heights and then the Kew Gardens Cinemas and a select couple of theaters in Nassau and Suffolk. I’m not sure I’d draw the line along racial borders, so much as I would along much more arcane and harder to define economic and cultural borders. There was a version of Othello starring Laurence Fishburn released in the ‘90’s that did not get much play beyond the isle of Manhattan. It seems that these days, the only Shakespeare that translates across demographics is that in which swords and paternal clans are replaced by guns and modern day gangs (be it “West Side Story” or Baz Luhrman’s “Romeo and Juliet”). Come to think of it, there was also a modern day version of Othello with a high school setting called “O” not too long ago that was a minor success, relative to its small budget.
That’s an interesting thought, Bway, that the Madison may have been too fancy a theater for Ridgewood, even when both the Madison and Ridgewood itself were new. My family and I always liked it, though, and went there frequently.
The “Othello” factor would be intellect and education, not first and foremost affluence, although the two tend to go hand in hand. There were, and still are, college and college-bound students living in Ridgewood such as we once were.
Here’s an RKO-Madison-specific example : My high school-educated parents saw the film “Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf ?” at the RKO Madison in early 1967, and only partly understood it, partly because the stars Liz and Dick were mumbling toward the end. The play it was based on only began to mean something to me when I studied it as a senior in h.s. in 1972-73, then I learned it by heart. I would have studied it in a drama course in college if I hadn’t dropped the course.
I subsequently saw the film on TV and heard the original cast recording on LP, and now have the film on VHS.
The Othello featuring Sir Laurence Olivier and Maggie Smith was the best version ever released. Not to sound racist fella’s but Othello would not draw a large black audience in 1966. Many white people would shy away from this movie also.
In that it’s true. Ridgewood was always a working class neighborhood, even when it was new. It probably never housed the more affluent types that would have liked that sort of show, and especially not in the 60’s.
Ridgewood has always been a stable, viable, working class area, so perhaps the Madison itself may have even been “too fancy” of a theater for the area, even when it was new!