Office on top of a gay porno theater on Ninth Avenue that they ran the porno Working for these people that had all these art theaters and an office at 1501īroadway where all the actors and agents were, and then they had this other “At the early age of 17, 18, 19, 20, I was
Nicolaou says he can relate to The Deuce, the HBO show about the rise of New York’s porn industry,īecause he basically lived it. went after the adult theaters because it’s such a crime to jerk off?” “Clean up 42nd Street and let’s get big money going in. “For them, it’s all about money,” Nicolaou said of the Disneyfication of Times Square. Instead, the film presents Nicolaou, a Greek immigrant, as a Horacio Alger type who went from being a teenage projectionist at various adult and art-house cinemas to becoming an independent theater owner who had to contend with the tyranny of the multiplexes as well as Giuliani’s anti-porn crusade. The documentary: “I never told Abel or suggested to Abel what to show in his Nicolaou said he didn’t ask Ferrara to omit the Bijou from “If I closed it for a period of time I’d lose the lease, so I kind of continued what was there without promoting it in any way, just leaving the door open certain hours of the day and that’s it.” “I turned it into a gay place and nobody even knew it was there,” he said, going on to explain why the Bijou was never advertised and publicized only through word-of-mouth. Nicolaou said he worked there and eventually took it over from the owners. (You can find our oral history of Club 82 here, and our story about the Bijou here.) Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones briefly owned a club there in the early ’90s. By the 1970s, it was a music venue where David Bowie, Lou Reed, and the New York Dolls rocked out. “Elizabeth Taylor hung out and Errol Flynn used to hang out playing the piano with his penis,” Nicolaou said. In the ’50s and ’60s, it was “New York’s After-Dark Rendezvous,” a mafia-run club with spectacular drag revues. The history of the subterranean space at 82 East 4th Street is fascinating. “Basically, what you had there was a bar on the ground floor and there was a three-foot wall and you pushed it and went down into the club. But that’s just one of the options,” Nicolaou told us.
Bijou theater chicago closing upgrade#
“One of the options is to probably upgrade it the way it was years ago. The theater had no signage, much less a marquee you just had to know where to find the inconspicuous black door leading to the basement where an Eyes Wide Shut poster set the scene. The Bijou wasn’t a porn theater, but the VHS-era movies on the screen were basically just window dressing for casual hookups. He told us that after The Projectionist screens at Tribeca again on Friday and then at MoMA on May 6, he plans to renovate the musty lair. Nicolaou broke the news during a phone call earlier this week. That’s right: After years of flying under the radar, the Bijou, a last throwback to Manhattan’s bad old days, has left the building. Spot that was one of the East Village’s best-kept secrets until it closed a
Might be Nicolaou’s most intriguing theater, the Bijou, an underground cruising But the documentary somehow fails to mention what
Theaters: Cinema Village near Union Square, Cinemart in Forest Hills, and theĪlpine Cinemas in Bay Ridge. Of Nicolas Nicolaou, the owner of some of the city’s oldest and most beloved Scrappy love letter to New York’s independent cinemas, as seen through the eyes Projectionist, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on Sunday, is a
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