Illustration by Jeff Cashvan
Movie-lovers!
Welcome back to The Deuce Notebook, a collaboration between Notebook and The Deuce Film Series, our monthly event at Nitehawk Williamsburg that excavates the facts and fantasies of cinema's most infamous block in the world: 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. For each screening, my co-hosts and I pick a title that we think embodies NYC movie going, and present the venue at which it premiered…
In November of 2013, we screened Amos Poe’s 1985 neon-blinding neo-noir Alphabet City, with Mr. Poe in attendance. Now, in honor of the recent Blu-ray re-release, distributed by Fun City Editions, we present a new conversation with the No Wave maverick about his early years living and working in New York City.
And… Fun City Editions invites Amos back to Nitehawk on November 3 to project Alphabet City on 35mm, with a Q&A following the film guest moderated by The Deuce’s Joe Berger. Thanks to Amos for taking the time to share some stories!
—The Deuce Jockeys
A still from Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964). Stare at this for eight hours and save yourself the price of admission.
“I got an apartment, like, an hour after getting here. I knew that the Village Voice came out on Wednesdays, and that's where you found an apartment. So, at six in the morning on a Wednesday, my wife and I drove our pickup into the city and went to Veselka on 2nd Avenue, with the Voice and a bunch of coins. After breakfast, I went to a public payphone and called up the first place listed—right around the corner on St. Mark’s between 2nd and 3rd. I woke up the super who said, 'Well, alright, when can you get here?' I replied, 'In five minutes.' We saw the place and took it immediately. It was $71 a month. We moved our stuff off the truck and right in. And then I saw in the Voice that Andy Warhol's Empire was screening at Anthology Film Archives, so I went to see it—the same day I moved here. It was, you know, an eight-hour screening, or whatever. And yes, I was there the whole eight hours, although I fell asleep like three or four times because I had driven the entire previous night. But that movie is great because you can fall asleep and not miss anything.”
That was in 1972, when Amos Poe was 22 years old. Poe was born in Israel in 1950; eight years later, his family emigrated to Queens, New York, by boat via Southampton, England. A teenage student of the 1960s photojournalism movement that documented the Vietnam War and Civil Rights protests, Poe found himself in Czechoslovakia in 1968, shooting stills of the Russian invasion, before ending up in Buffalo for the next few years. After that experience, though, he couldn’t return to photography. “There was no particular image that intrigued me enough to take its picture.”
One day, Poe went to an engineering student’s house, and on his table was a Super 8 camera he was taking apart and putting back together. Poe couldn't understand what it was. His friend said it was a movie camera and showed Amos how it worked.
“An atomic bomb went off in my head—like, wow, holy shit. The next morning, I drove nine hours to New York City, and went to Olden Camera on 32nd Street and exchanged my still cameras and lenses for a Nizo Super 8, a Eumig projector, a little plastic editing module, and two cartons of Super 8 film—one black and white and one color. I drove back to Buffalo and started making little experimental music videos. The first film I made was a collection of shorts for every song on The Beatles’ White Album. There was a bar across the street that had a film night, so I took these two 400 foot reels of Super 8, started the projector, and dropped the needle on the record. That was my first public screening of a film.”
He became obsessed, reading books about cinema and going to screenings as often as possible. He started working at the Circle Art, a repertory movie house in Buffalo. “Eventually, I became the programmer there, so if I was reading, like, Charlie Chaplin's autobiography, I would program all of Chaplin’s films in order. As I'm reading, I could actually see what he’s talking about; that was the only way you could have done that, pre-video.”
Also at this time, the State University of Buffalo’s media lab, a predecessor to its film department, began teaching three-credit courses which offered its participants 10,000 feet of 35mm film, plus processing.
“I went out to the Amherst campus and they had an Oxberry machine, an optical printer that’s primarily used for animation: you film something frame by frame. You can also put another film there, and film that frame by frame. They had recently screened Citizen Kane and still had the print just sitting there, so, what I did over the next three months—like a compulsive crazy guy—I went in there and I reshot every frame of Citizen Kane, but I zoomed way in on a different part of the image. It was the entire movie, with the complete soundtrack, but, you know, extreme close-ups of each frame. There’s a shot of Charles Foster Kane’s mouth and mustache—I went in so close, it was just, like, some hairs on a lip. We made a print and had a screening—for six people. It was called Amos Poe’s Citizen Kane, and it was very confusing and very thrilling. I did it just for the fanatical idea of re-doing a masterpiece, but I learned a lot about composition and camera work, examining every moment of Welles’ first film. That juiced me up and I realized that if I wanted to really do something with film, I couldn't do it in Buffalo. Instinct and gravity pulled me to New York City.”
Citizen Kane, reframed in the style of Amos Poe.
Like many of his contemporaries, Poe’s career in NYC began in the adult film industry:
“The first job I got was working as an editor at a porn studio on Seventh Avenue and 18th Street called The Fuck Factory. It was an entire townhouse: the basement was storage, the ground floor was the offices. The second floor was editing and props, then the third and fourth floors were the studios where they filmed everything. It was run by a heavyset, cigar-chomping Jewish guy named Irv, and Mabel, his ‘girl Friday’ who was like, CRAZY. I had never edited 16mm at that point, but told Irv I could, because the pay was really good, $175 a week. I worked there for about three and a half months, two months as an editor on a four-plate Steenbeck, and then as a cameraman for a $50 per week bump. But it was so sleazy and horrible that I couldn't take it emotionally. It was the worst of the worst. I did see one of my films once, though. I had a friend who was working as the DJ of a strip joint on Eighth Avenue and 45th Street: the strippers would give him the tapes they wanted to dance to, and he would put them on the PA. One night, he was ill and asked if I could fill in for him. I did—and next door was a theater screening porno shorts. I went in there and saw one of the films that I'd actually shot.”
The Capri, on the corner of W.46th Street and 8th Avenue… perhaps where Amos Poe saw his pornographic work projected?
Poe worked for the next two years as a film inspector and shipper for “this new company called New Line Cinema on University Place and 13th.” Meanwhile, he was going to the movies every day, determined to see every film ever made.
“What really came through for me was that there were three kinds of films: there were bad films, there were good films, and there were films that inspired me to make films. I was always in search of that third kind… like, if I saw Faces, I would say, ‘Oh my God, that's not only good, I could do that!’ Like, I couldn't do Titanic, right? No fucking way. I don't even understand how that's made. But Breathless? I could do that.”
Poe hyper-frequented New York's movie houses like the Carnegie Hall and St. Mark's Cinemas, the uptown Film Forum and Millennium Film Workshop on East 4th Street. It was at Millennium’s Friday night open-screens where Poe showed the experimental shorts he was consistently making throughout 1972-74, to the artists and musicians he met there—all of whom were heavily influenced by celluloid iconoclasts like Stan Brakhage, Ed Emshwiller, and Jack Smith.
A calendar from the Millennium Film Workshop’s 1975 season, with short films by Poe.
Not yet attuned to the East Village’s burgeoning punk scene, Poe made a friend named Richard Hell at Cinemabilia, a movie ephemera shop on 13th Street where Hell worked, owned by Richard Ork—the manager of Hell’s band, Television. It was Richard that turned Amos on to CBGB. When he needed an assistant at New Line, Poe hired Ivan Král, who later became the guitarist for the Patti Smith Group and Poe’s co-director on The Blank Generation (1976). “I knew I wanted to make my first feature film while I was 26 years old because Orson Welles made Citizen Kane when he was 26… and I had to, like, follow that model. So I knew I wanted to do that.”
In 1976, Poe achieved his goal. After filming his friends’ bands Talking Heads, Blondie, and The Ramones in silent 16mm, then spending an amphetamine-infused 24 hours in the Maysles editing studio, Amos Poe and Ivan Král unleashed The Blank Generation: a succession of staccato shards of manic punk classics, 55-minutes as frenetic and slapdash as the genre itself. The Blank Generation features astonishing performances from the scene’s most formidable aggressors, including a remarkable version of “Psycho Killer,” slightly uptempo, with mellifluously clean vocals by a pre-Sire-signed David Byrne, and ecstatic footage of gender-twister Jayne County singing “Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?” by The Barbarians. Irrefutably changing the course of the downtown art-rock world and affirming it as a force to be reckoned with, Poe and Král inspired the talents orbiting around them to create their own work. Hence, “No wave,” and the emergence of filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch, Scott and Beth B, James Nares, Becky Johnston, and Charlie Ahearn, who all simmered then soared off the Bowery during the last half of the 1970s. Heralding these artists in his pivotal Village Voice article “No Wavelength: The Para-Punk Underground” (May 21, 1979), J. Hoberman asserted that the “new underground's technically pragmatic films enact libidinal fantasies, parody mass cultural forms, glorify a marginal lifestyle, and exhibit varying degrees of social content.” Vive la révolution radicale.
Richard Hell and Television, at CBGB.
Amos Poe’s second feature and first narrative film, Unmade Beds (1976), is an homage to Godard’s pioneering debut Breathless (1959) and stars the dashing Alain Delon-doppelgänger Duncan Hannah as Rico, a photographer suffocating under the weight of his existential ennui. An alluring Debbie Harry appears early on to sing deadpan into the camera; actress and soon-to-be gallerist Patti Astor plays a character named “Jeanne Moreau.” The film directly references Jules Dassin (“There are 8 million stories in the Naked City, but I can’t even remember one of them…”) and emulates early Jean-Pierre Melville with its high-contrast black and white pans across the cityscape from the rooftops of the Garment District. Rico fantasizes the Big Apple as the City of Lights (calling the Washington Square Arch the Arc de triomphe) and endlessly daydreams in romantic gangster-speak. Unmade Beds is Poe’s gutsy, brash confession of the obsessional cinephilic whirlpool he’d been swept up by.
Amos Poe and Duncan Hannah on the set of Unmade Beds.
Unmade Beds had a depressing first screening with an audience of only twelve people at CCNY on 42nd Street. Eventually, however, co-owners of the Bleecker Street Cinema Jackie Raynal and Sid Geffen championed the movie and screened it repeatedly. Poe submitted the film to the 1977 Cannes Film Festival. Rejected there, the same programmers booked Unmade Beds for the Deauville American Film Festival, where it screened in September on a double feature with The Blank Generation for 80 ticket holders, including a few of Poe’s heroes: Truffaut, Godard, Varda, Demy, and Lelouch.
“I was so nervous and so scared, thinking, ‘Oh my god, these guys will fucking roast me…’ I could see Lelouch sitting all the way in the back—and I could tell he hated it. He was the first one to run out… There was a TV crew there, and this journalist shoved a microphone in his face and said, ‘What do you think of this new American punk cinema?’ Lelouch, with rude, angry gestures, said things like, ‘It's trash! It's awful! It's horrible! Amateur!’ Jacques Demy, God bless him, saw me watching Lelouch being interviewed, and, feeling bad for me, stepped in. Demy said to the journalist, ‘Oh, no, I don't agree at all! I think this is what cinema is all about! I think it’s about the spirit of cinema, not the money of cinema… If you can tell me exactly how much a film should cost before it's considered a movie, a real film, I will agree with you. But if you say it's a million, and I only have 999,000, does that mean I can't make a film? No!’”
Any press is good press, as the saying goes, because the next night, 400 hipsters lined up to see the double bill—this time, at the Palace:
“When Eric [Mitchell] and Patti [Astor] and I approached the theater, there was a huge crowd and we couldn't understand what it was for. As we followed the line, we went, ‘Wait a minute, is this our film?! What the fuck??!’ These people knew about it—they'd watched that interview on television. So, in actuality, that did for us what we could never have done for ourselves, because by fighting over it on the news, Unmade Beds became a sort of cause célèbre.”
Poe next made two mini-masterpieces, projects that, despite major production limitations, fulfilled his urgent desire to create daring, conceptual cinema. The Foreigner (1978) plays like a hipster travelogue of the city: an alienated Eric Mitchell slinks through [a distinctly paranoid] Manhattan, seen through a vertiginous dutch angle on the Twin Towers and an ominous sci-fi shot of the UN; a grossly distorted Empire State Building hovers above a fire escape, the broad sandy desert of the pre-Battery Park landfill upon the Hudson dwarves two distant figures. Poe made The Foreigner with zero sound mix; hard audio cuts between soundtrack and dialogue result in a jagged non-blend of music-meets-words, a sensually disorienting experience for its viewer. “There are always problems on a set,” said Poe “But a problem has a solution. It’s not going to stop you from doing something—it will force you to be more creative.”
Debbie Harry in The Foreigner.
Similarly problematic, Poe lost his lead actor John Lurie in the midst of shooting Subway Riders (1981). But, in his Buñuel-inspired “Eureka!” moment, Poe doubled the main character à la That Obscure Object of Desire and re-cast himself of all people, which transformed a murder mystery about fixation and lust into a two-paneled, reflexive fever dream. Subway Riders is Poe’s first color feature; filmed under extremely low light, the hues are saturated and grainy, reminiscent of Nan Goldin’s portraits from the same era. The film’s cacophonous score clangs Lurie’s squelching saxophone against dissonant noise guitar and neighing horses.
These films are brazen post-noirs, sludgy urban dystopias about hard-drinking flatfoots, rat-fink informers, smacked-up streetwalkers, and mobster muscle men… criminals and lowlifes with names like “Max Menace” and “Lili Harlow” and “Pinky Marbles,” who speak in sparse and cryptic beat-verse. In Subway Riders, poet Emilio Cubeiro steps out of the darkness and serenades Cookie Mueller with dense, decadent prose (“No life anywhere, only zombies…”); Susan Tyrrell, in her best performance ever, works up her spoon and syringe and chants a strung-out mantra, “I hate cooking… I hate cooking…”
It’s Amos Poe’s New York: a soundstage for his ensemble of stylish renegades and defiant dilettantes. As Glenn O’Brien, host of TV Party (the iconic public access variety show of the-impossibly-cool, many episodes of which Poe directed), comments in Céline Danhier’s documentary Blank City, “the Lower East Side was like a film studio: there was no money and no one was running it, but there was the talent pool of personalities.”
Producer Andrew Braunsberg (who worked with Roman Polanski on Macbeth and The Tenant, Paul Morrissey on Blood for Dracula and Flesh for Frankenstein, and Hal Ashby on Being There) wanted to work with Poe after relocating to New York from Los Angeles, where he had “burnt a few bridges.” It was Andrew that brought Amos (by way of Morrissey) the seductive title Alphabet City—but he offered no story or concept to go with it. Coincidentally, Poe’s friend and producer Roberta Friedman had just read a treatment called “Alphabet City” by a writer named Gregory Heller; both Braunsberg and Poe saw its potential and hired Heller to write his man-on-the-run story of redemption in NYC’s drug war-torn Lower Waaay East Side. Although Heller quickly began taking his script into what Poe described as a “Fassbinder-esque psycho-sexual territory,” the director was able to reign it in and bring it closer to the Battle of Algiers-like fable of good vs. evil that he had in mind.
The title card for Poe’s Alphabet City, which was shot the last couple of months in 1983.
Vincent Spano plays 19-year-old “Alphabet Johnny,” a.k.a. Chunga: a tough guy turned family man who, in one rainy night, shifts his allegiance from Overlord Gino to the ladies in his life—mom, sis, girlfriend, daughter. Refusing to torch his childhood tenement for his scumbag boss, Johnny convinces mom (Zohra Lampert) and sis (a spunky Jami Gertz) to pack up and ship out… but before he bails, he needs to collect on a few IOUs around town. Johnny makes a pickup at a smoky “shooting gallery,” settles the score with the head honcho of the Tropicana discotheque, checks in with his dope-sick, dipping lieutenant Lippy (beat-boxing Michael Winslow, of Police Academy notoriety), and urges his idealist lover to vacate the safety of her sprawling SoHo loft. Every errand becomes a hair-raising cat-and-mouse between noble Johnny and the murderous hooligans on his tail. It helps that he drives a Pontiac Firebird Trans Am.
Braunsberg brought the project to hot-to-trot investors Thomas Coleman and Michael Rosenblatt and their Atlantic Releasing Corporation. By 1984, the M.O. for Atlantic was to produce and distribute “million-dollar B-movies” that could open wide across suburbia and potentially rake in more than they cost: 80s bonker-pics like Valley Girl, Night of the Comet, Teen Wolf, and The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. The green light was flipped (unbeknownst to Poe) when Nile Rodgers was brought into the mix. Co-founder and guitarist of disco giants Chic, and the celebrated producer of recent mega-watt albums Let’s Dance (David Bowie), KooKoo (Debbie Harry), and single "Original Sin" (INXS), Rodgers was the obvious choice to score an urban adventure primarily marketed to teenyboppers in the Midwest. Poe heard of Rodgers being brought on board before even he got confirmation that the film was a go, which mildly pissed him off—“I wanted to choose the composer myself,” he remarked. But years later, Poe decided that Rodgers’ score was perfect when he re-heard the film’s stand out track “Lady Luck” (performed by Maura Moynihan), now widely known as the outtake from Like a Virgin that Madonna turned down (Rodgers was working nights writing the Alphabet City score while spending his days recording the Material Girl’s stratospheric sophomore scorcher).
Nile Rodgers and Madonna at a Duran Duran concert, around the time they were recording her second album.
Poe wanted to have his cake and eat it too: he aspired to make another art flick on someone else’s dime. But this one cost considerably more than his three previous pictures (respectively: $3k, $5k, $15k), so many creative decisions were, understandably, made for him. Poe and cinematographer Oliver Wood originally discussed shooting in black and white, an idea that was quickly rejected by their benefactors, who preferred the look to be in line with MTV’s high-end gloss. “We knew it was either we do it in color or don't do it at all,” said Poe. “So I said okay, let's go completely 180 degrees, let's not make this realistic whatsoever. Let's make this a candy-colored fantasy, like Rio de Janeiro or something.” Ultimately, Alphabet City’s look is a mix of German Expressionism and mainstream 1980s super-kitsch: Murnau meets Bananarama, perhaps. With Wood at the lens, Poe was able to experiment and expand his moviemaking expertise:
“Oliver and I had a great relationship in terms of talking through what I wanted to do—he took a lot of chances because I really wanted to try to use as long lenses as possible. And he said, ‘You know, the longer the lens, the more light you need, and the depth of field will be very, very narrow.’ One night, the AC [assistant camera] said to me, ‘Amos, do you want his eyes in focus or his nose?’ And I was like, oh fuck. In fact, the AC almost got fired after the first dailies, because so much was out of focus. And it wasn't his fault—it was mine. You can't have it both ways: long lenses with no light AND focus.
“So this was big: I mean, I was shooting in my neighborhood, where I'd shot for years on Super 8 and 16, but now I was shooting 35mm, I had a crew. I remember the production manager saying to me, ‘Okay, tomorrow you're going to interview script supervisors, alright Amos?’ I had no idea what a fucking script supervisor did! At the time, I was friends with Scorsese and Coppola. I called Marty and said, ‘Marty, what’s a script supervisor? What do they do? What am I looking for?’ And he goes, ‘Oh great! A script supervisor is like your best friend on the set, because, by the time you're ready, you can’t even remember the fucking script!’ And then Francis says, ‘Oh, a script supervisor is like your wife: she tells you what to do, and then you don't do it.’ Okay, so I'm looking for a best friend and a wife.
“The Alphabet City shoot was the first time I really felt like a director… The night that hit me, we were shooting a street scene and somebody said, ‘Amos, the frame looks sort of empty, don’t you want like, an extra or something?’ I was like, ‘No! We don’t need extras, empty streets are the best!’ But the guy kept coming to me and, like an idiot, I said to him, sarcastically, ‘Ok, I want to have some old guy walking a chicken on a leash.’ And, like 10 minutes later, there's an old guy walking a chicken on a leash! So, yeah, I realized you have to be really careful when you're a director because people take whatever you say seriously—you’re going to get what you want.”
Unless, of course, you run out of money. The proposed budget given to Foreman and Rosenblatt hovered around $980,000, but towards the end of the shoot, the actual figure ballooned by another $300k. The gents at Atlantic flipped out, flew to New York, and demanded that Poe cut his last three shoot days, preventing him from filming the original ending.
“The real ending was Spano and Vernon riding out of the building on their motorcycle, onto the street. And there's this whole bunch of Mafia guys surrounding them, a group on one end of the block and the other—they’re going to kill them and the baby. And then, all the people from the neighborhood come out on their fire escapes with shotguns. It’s this tense, Western climax—the townspeople versus the bad guys, right? And the bad guys are frozen in place and drive away. Hugely expensive, for sure. It was to be the centerpiece of the entire film, the scene that tells you that the people of Alphabet City are gonna rise up against these criminals. But that never happened.”
From The Daily News, Friday, May 4, 1984.
Alphabet City opened on May 4, 1984, all over the Tri-State area: in Manhattan, on five screens north of 14th Street, and at the Essex, on the corner of Grand—the southernmost border of the neighborhood in which the film is set. (On the Deuce, it played at the Harris.) Alphabet City’s Greenwich Village run took place at another of Poe’s regular haunts, the 450-seat 8th Street Playhouse, at 52 West 8th Street, just east of 6th Avenue. Opened in 1929 as Film Guild Cinema, it was, according to Ross Wetzsteon in his book Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village, The American Bohemia, 1910-1960, America’s “first theater devoted exclusively to films.” Film Guild changed its name to 8th Street Playhouse in 1930 and operated as a foreign, arthouse, and repertory cinema for the next 62 years. Mark Hofherr and Steve Hirsch took over in May of 1978, and the Playhouse became the most outrageously beloved rep theater in the city, screening a progressive and provocative roster of classics, Bs, grinders, and “Sleaze Festivals.” (Hirsch chose to pull his summer-of-1983 run of Michael Findlay’s infuriating shocker Snuff after the Women Against Pornography caused a stink.) The Playhouse also screened midnight movies every night—most significantly, The Rocky Horror Picture Show on Fridays and Saturdays for 11 straight years, starring the Rocky Horror Players performing their “Floorshow.” (The Players and the Playhouse are featured in Alan Parker’s Fame when Barry Miller takes Maureen Teefy downtown to witness the spectacular mayhem.) The 8th Street Playhouse shared its building with the legendary Electric Lady Studios—incidentally, where Nile Rodgers and Chic recorded their seminal, self-titled disco-fantasia debut. Tragically, the Playhouse’s Steve Hirsch died in 1986 due to complications from AIDS; he struggled with heroin addiction the last several years of his life.
An 8th Street Playhouse flyer from 1983.
Also released that same day: John Hughes’ directorial debut Sixteen Candles and Cannon’s hip-hop schlock-bop Breakin’. One can affectionately imagine this a perfect triple feature for middle-American kids hitting the mall multiplex: three tales of adolescent angst (okay, of varying degrees) set to modern-pop soundtracks and starring rosy-cheeked, starry-eyed ingenues (Jami Gertz also appears in Sixteen Candles). The notices for Alphabet City were mixed, mostly in praise of the performances while critical of the movie’s glitz-glam look as incongruous with its gritty subject matter. In his New York Times review (May 5, 1984), Lawrence Van Gelder writes, “Though the inspiration for Alphabet City may be rooted in fact, the execution is decidedly lyrical. The director, Amos Poe, misses no opportunity to refract headlights, savor reflections on wetted streets, bathe interiors in smoke, candlelight, and colored light, suffuse exteriors with fog, underline the ominous with thunderclaps and aim his camera from odd angles. The effect is to draw attention to a technique that is, at best, derivative, and to romanticize characters and settings to the point that they chafe against the bounds of credibility.” Regardless of its detractors and modest box office gross ($7 million, less than a third of what Sixteen Candles pocketed), Alphabet City had already scored a cool coup when Poe’s friend over at CBS/Fox Home Video, Leon Falk, offered (after surreptitiously seeing a late-stage cut, well before the theatrical release) to acquire it for a highly publicized $1.6 million… substantially more than the film’s final price tag. The money-men, Coleman and Rosenblatt, were satisfied.
Fun City’s beautiful special edition slipcover designed by we Buy Your Kids
Over a quarter-century later, the new Blu-ray distributor Fun City Editions made its debut with Amos Poe’s Alphabet City in a 2K restoration, plus all the bells and whistles the modern home video market demands—including Poe’s friend and former Strand co-worker Lucy Sante, the esteemed NYC historian and writer of Low Life, participating on the commentary track. When asked about his feelings on his fifth feature getting a re-release with relative fanfare, Poe paused—the first noticeable break in our vibrant, robust conversation.
“It's hard for me to see it for what it is, you know? Like, is it dated? Or is it a good portrait of what those times were like? Cause when I see it, I just kind of flip back to those three weeks of shooting and everything that transpired. It's also the last time you could have shot in Alphabet City on location and captured that look, because gentrification happened so soon after, like literally months after. So, I think as a portrait of that part of town at that time, it’s probably as sound as I've ever seen.”
The Lower East Side in the 1980s was rife with derelict buildings, abandoned lots, and worthless property value.
Lydia Lunch decries, in her defiant, audacious prologue to Thurston Moore and Byron Coley’s gorgeous photography book No Wave: Post-Punk Underground New York, 1976-1980, “I wasn’t expecting the toilets at CBGB to be the bookends to Duchamp’s urinal, but then again, maybe 1977 had more in common with 1917 than anyone at the time could have imagined. The anti-art invasion of Dada in Switzerland and the surrealist pranksters who shadowed them had a blast pissing all over everybody’s expectations. The anti-everything of No Wave was a collective caterwaul that defied categorization, defiled the audience, despised convention, shit in the face of history, and then split.”
The godfather, it seems, of this prescient pop culture re-invention—that consequently influenced the Cinema of Transgression and the American indie renaissance of the 1980s and 90s—was Amos Poe. In Blank City, Pattis Astor puts it quite simply: “You really have to give him the credit for starting the next independent film movement after Andy Warhol.”
Poe speaks fondly about that time, with a kind of incredulous pride:
“What I really wanted to do—because I had already met so many people downtown—was start another Nouvelle Vague, our own New Wave. So my emphasis wasn't so much on a particular film, because I knew it would get lost. The culture is so big in America, nobody would see a little 16mm film that purports to be Breathless. But, I thought that if I could make this film and finish it and get it out there, other people would start making films too. And if five or 10 others were making these kinds of films in the same neighborhood, then the culture would have to pay attention, somehow. So that was my ambition. When I look back on it, I realize it was that folly of youth… You know, like, ‘Who the fuck do you think you are? How can you think that way??’ Only when you're 26, I guess.”
—Interview edited and additional text by Joseph A. Berger
Amos Poe and a 16mm Bolex.
The Deuce Film Series is a monthly, 35mm presentation created by "Joe Zieg" Berger and co-hosted with "Tour Guide Andy" McCarthy and 'Maestro Jeff’ Cashvan. Produced by Max Cavanaugh for Nitehawk Cinema Williamsburg, The Deuce was founded in November 2012.