Peter Weller and Sam Elliott on the Forty Deuce under the Times Square Theatre marquee in James Glickenhaus' Shakedown.
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 flick that we think embodies the era of late-night celluloid consumption and present the theater at which it premiered.
American writer, director, and producer James Glickenhaus made action movies: eye-for-an-eye fables starring virtuous underdogs and righteous renegades—rogue cops, ex-Army officers, and cunning FBI agents settling scores with street scum, Mafiosi, and the international drug cartel. These low-cost, high-grossing blockbusters projected do-good Nationalism onto the silver screens and boob tubes of the 1980s, encouraging a generation of bleary-eyed Boy Scouts to stay strong, awake, and straight. From the boroughs of the Tri-State to the Middle East, across the Pacific from the Orient to just North of the Equator, Glickenhaus took his fellow Patriots to the brink of disaster and back, with aero-dynamo acrobatics, flame-throwin’ / squib-dischargin’ martial artistry, and explosions. Lots of explosions.
By his fifth feature—the bonafide grindhouse-masterwork Shakedown (1988)—Glickenhaus’ production and distribution company founded with partner Leonard Shapiro, Shapiro-Glickenhaus Entertainment, was full-throttle. Competing with the likes of Cannon and Empire International, SGE financed flicks by William Lustig, Frank Henenlotter, and J. Christian Ingvordsen, and exploited the matinee idolatry of tough-guys Dolph Lundgren, Bruce Campbell, and Billy Blanks—dominating suburban video stores and up-all-night basic cable channels for nearly a decade.
We had the pleasure of speaking with James about his love affair with New York and his life in showbiz on February 1, 2022; below is an edited version of our conversation… Enjoy!
—The Deuce Jockeys
James Glickenhaus in 1980, filming the Vietnam War sequence of The Exterminator in Indian Dunes, California.
NOTEBOOK: I’d like to begin with a little about your background. You were born in New York City in 1950, correct?
JAMES GLICKENHAUS: Yes, I was born at Columbia Presbyterian, but we lived in the East Village and Peter Cooper Village. And then we moved up to New Rochelle in Westchester County, where I grew up. I went to Fieldston, which was an ethical culture school in the Bronx. I was friends with Gil Scott-Heron. My parents were the first generation born in the United States. Both sides of my family left Russia during World War II and came to America: my mother's side to Minnesota, my father's side to the South Bronx. My father was born on Fox Street. Unfortunately, all my other relatives starved to death in Russia during the war. Ultimately, I went to three colleges: the University of California, then Antioch College. And then, when I met my wife, I transferred to Sarah Lawrence because I wanted to be near her while she was finishing first high school and then SUNY Purchase. I was a sculpture student at Sarah Lawrence, so New York City was always this shining beacon of artistic expression.
NOTEBOOK: I'm curious about your passion for movies while growing up in the New York area, and coming down into the city as a teen. What were your early movie-going experiences?
GLICKENHAUS: I loved film from a pretty young age; I started going to the movies when I was eight or nine. It was a kinder, gentler time: your mom could send you off in the morning with a dollar and a dime in your shoe, you could take the bus from New Rochelle to White Plains and spend all day at the Loews or the RKO Keith’s Theatre. I saw all kinds of great things, like the Alan Freed rock and roll movie Rock Around the Clock, or Chubby Checker in Don't Knock the Twist. You know, he would come and do a little concert between the double features. Some of the first films that I really liked were the Hammer Horror movies, and the Roger Corman/Vincent Price collaboration The Fall of the House of Usher. I liked Sergio Leone’s movies, like The Colossus of Rhodes.
The RKO Keith’s (née RKO White Plains) where Glickenhaus spent many youthful weekends. Opened in 1927 with Hula (starring Clara Bow), and located on Main Street, the 3,016-seat cinema closed in 1966 and was demolished in 1979.
When I was a teenager, I started going into the city—places like Cinema 1 & 2, the Waverly, and the Elgin on 8th Avenue at 18th Street. The Elgin was great. When my wife and I moved to 19th Street in 1972, we would leave our apartment with ski coats covering our pajamas, shuffle down to the Elgin and watch three movies in a row, sneaking in huge bags of fried chicken. We loved the Nouvelle Vague and European cinema—filmmakers like Truffaut and Fellini and Gillo Pontecorvo, who made Battle of Algiers. And there were cinematic events: we went to Cinema 2 and saw the uncut version of Bondarchuk’s War and Peace, which was seven hours long. They served champagne.
I remember many nights when we would go to 42nd Street… and the interesting thing about the Deuce was, you saw first-run movies but they always had a second feature and actually cost less. It was crazy—like, The Exterminator opened at the National on Broadway, but also around the corner on 42nd at the Lyric, as a double bill. So yeah, we always went up to the Deuce.
The Exterminator’s opening weekend ad from the Daily News, September 12, 1980. Despite its mixed reviews (Roger Ebert called the film “a small, unclean exercise in shame” and a “direct rip-off of Death Wish”), The Exterminator was a monster commercial success.
NOTEBOOK: I hear the influence that genre films had on you—Westerns, war films, horror movies—but what about the New American Cinema of the 70s? Were you drawn to that as well?
GLICKENHAUS: Yes, directors like Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma, movies like Taxi Driver and Hi, Mom!, Avildsen’s Joe. Movies that had a real darkness to them—Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces had heroes who were very complex. I mean, was De Niro really a hero in Taxi Driver? What about Jodie Foster’s character? Yes and no... those movies were messier. And all those guys began as true independents, their first movies were made with very little money.
You could study movies then, you could audit filmmaking classes… and there were people who encouraged you, people like Richard DiBona at General Camera and Ralph Friedman at Magno Sound. They would find ways of working with you to reduce your budget, and you could make your movie for virtually nothing. The first movie I made, The Astrologer, cost about $20,000.
Mark Buntzman (as Kajerste) and friends in The Astrologer, a.k.a. Suicide Cult. Even with an extremely small budget, Glickenhaus was able to shoot the film on 35mm Panavision.
NOTEBOOK: I re-watched that last night, it’s… wild. Who funded that film? And what was the catalyst for it?
GLICKENHAUS: I had done a really entrepreneurial thing: I saw that Comet Kohoutek was about to blaze across the sky, very bright, for the first time in thousands of years. So, I got the idea to make a deal with a cruise ship and go down to St. Thomas and St. Martin and stalk the comet. We brought the head of astronomy from Columbia University, Lloyd Motz, onboard, and some others, to give lectures and what-not. That made a little bit of money, and I used that money to make The Astrologer.
NOTEBOOK: Wow! And did The Astrologer screen anywhere? I read that it mainly played at drive-ins in the South.
GLICKENHAUS: Here's what happened: there were independent distributors during those days, like American International and Dimension Pictures, but none of them were interested in acquiring it. So, I basically four-walled the movie. I would go down to, say, San Antonio, take out a certain number of TV ads, make a deal with the theater, and show the film. At that time, people like Scorsese or De Niro weren’t traveling down to San Antonio, so if I went down there, I could get a lot of press, I could do a lecture at a film school… And if you cut a trailer with just the action sequences, you’d get people out on a Friday night—because people went to drive-ins for double bills—and the film would play for a few weeks. I found that by being a distributor, I could break even and make a little money. So I took the film all around the country and watched it with audiences, and I realized that the only part of The Astrologer they liked was the action. So then I set out to write an action movie with no dialogue, which became The Exterminator.
NOTEBOOK: It sounds to me that you were, from the get-go and at a very young age—26, 27 years old—extremely business-savvy. You raised your own funds, you produced the film, you distributed it…
GLICKENHAUS: Yes, I was, and at a time when you could actually compete. I mean, The Exterminator eventually went to number one at the box office, both in England and the United States! Independent filmmakers had a lot of freedom back then; after The Astrologer, I took the remainder of my money, raised some more, and put it all into The Exterminator. When it was finished, I showed it to a few of the majors and independents, and took it to Cannes—that was very successful. After only one screening, I made back the entire budget with just the advance against foreign box office distribution. And we made a deal with Avco Embassy for the U.S. theatrical rights.
Robert Ginty goes on a one-man warpath in The Exterminator, single-handedly cleaning up the filth in NYC’s gutters.
NOTEBOOK: What was the budget for The Exterminator?
GLICKENHAUS: The budget kept going up and up because the film looked so good, you know? The budget was at 1.8 million dollars, but then the investors, who were looking at the assemblies, felt it was worth doing a really bang-up Vietnam sequence. So we spent another $200,000 on that scene. We used some special effects guys who went on to do some huge things.
NOTEBOOK: It’s one of my favorite New York movies because of those incredible locations that, of course, are no longer there—the Meatpacking District, all the stuff in South Williamsburg. So, what was it that excited you about New York in the 70s that you wanted to reflect on screen? What inspired The Exterminator?
GLICKENHAUS: The Exterminator happened after I read a New York Times article about a Black drug dealer who killed a white undercover cop in self-defense—he supposedly didn't identify himself as a police officer. I thought, yeah right, that's complete bullshit. But then I started to think about it: Wait a minute, what if it isn't complete bullshit? What if it's true? That idea eventually became Shakedown…
But it made me realize just how lawless the city had become, how violent it was. New York City was the Wild West. And I thought a lot about vigilantism. So, I wanted to write a classic story of a reluctant hero entering hell. Coincidentally, one night I was actually mugged on the way home from my office with a handwritten script of The Exterminator in my briefcase. I was jumped by three guys with knives; I told them to fuck off and I ran. It was a crazy time.
The ridiculously over-the-top finale to Shakedown (a.k.a. Blue Jean Cop), that Universal Pictures insisted on. Glickenhaus was ultimately not happy with the visual effects used to portray Sam Elliot flying over Manhattan, gripping the landing gear of a commercial jet.
But it was also a very, very visually exciting time. Not to sound like an old curmudgeon, but back then people really did their own stunts, there were no huge special effects like there are today, no CGI—you just had to do those things. So, I would walk through the city and say, “Well, what if we did this, what if we shot that?” I think, in all my films, I tried to really use New York City and its iconic monuments—the Statue of Liberty, Coney Island, the Twin Towers…
I remember, on Shakedown, sitting in a director’s chair at three in the morning on the Deuce and thinking, “Holy shit. We've closed 42nd Street between Broadway and Eighth, for six hours!” I don't think anybody ever did that again.
Sam Elliot in Shakedown, atop a tipped-over bus in front of the New Amsterdam’s Art Deco marquee, promoting itself as an all-XXX venue (the theater never went adult). This scene, shot over two nights, is Glickenhaus’ paramount cinematic moment.
NOTEBOOK: Yeah, that sequence is so amazing—and so important, in my opinion. At the time you filmed Shakedown, the New Amsterdam had been shuttered for a while: there’s the tracking shot early in the film when Sam Elliott and Peter Weller exit the Lyric and we can see behind them and across the street that the New Amsterdam is closed, there's nothing on the marquee. Then, later on in the film, you took it over and created this glorious S&M palace. That is so exciting to me, that you were able to get in there and document the building at that unique time in its past, but also re-imagine its history.
GLICKENHAUS: Yes, we created that porn shop inside the real lobby. Then, of course, we filmed in the upstairs of the New Amsterdam, where Sam Elliot jumps out the window over the theater’s famous clock.
Further west, 42nd Street had become so skeevy, SROs [single room occupancy housing] and massage parlors where you could rent a room for an hour and do whatever you wanted. It was all so real—I mean, when we scouted for The Exterminator, we found an actual whorehouse that had just been raided and shut down, for the scene with the state senator from New Jersey.
And there were these sad little details: In one room, there was a dirty toothbrush on a shelf—you know, someone tried to maintain a little dignity in the middle of all that craziness. But I was very energized by Times Square and the Deuce, by New York.
An actual Times Square brothel, used in The Exterminator as the “chicken shack” where a pedo-pimp and john meet their fiery deaths.
NOTEBOOK: Your films are such miraculous documents of that era—it was only a few years later when the movie theaters along 42nd Street would be closed for good. Disney signed its 99-year lease on the New Amsterdam in 1993, the Harem doesn't exist anymore, many of the block’s buildings were razed, the Anco and Rialto are completely gone.
I'm not old enough to have seen your films on the Deuce, of course, but these were movies we rented on VHS after Little League practice on a Saturday night, in 1989, 1990. What really struck me rewatching all your films this time around is the storytelling, and how the moral center of every hero is so grounded: they are noble, honorable men. They're not the antiheroes of Scorsese or Ferrara, their vigilantism doesn’t turn purposelessly sadistic or fetishized. I love the story that became Shakedown, and that moment in the film when Richard Brooks is testifying, he’s so brutally honest: Yeah, I am a drug dealer, I sell drugs. But I didn't kill this person in cold blood. It seems like you wrote protagonists who were rooted in a very simple, good-versus-evil moralism.
GLICKENHAUS: Yeah, I think that's right. The other idea in the films is that karma does exist, in the sense of, "what goes around, comes around.” Like in Slaughter of the Innocents, I mean, if you abuse children, they might turn into monsters. And that doesn't pardon Dahmer or Bundy or John Wayne Gacy, or other horrible people—it’s not an excuse. But you can't molest children and think that it won't come home to roost someday. So, you know, even the serial killer in Innocents can be empathized with, but he had to be put down.
In Slaughter of the Innocents, Zitto Kazann plays Mordecai Booth, a serial killer with Biblically apocalyptic visions, whose life’s work—building an Ark harboring pairs of taxidermized wildlife and mummified children—is revealed in the film’s astonishing finale. Glickenhaus cast his 10-year-old son, Jesse, opposite Scott Glenn. The movie was straight-to-video, released on December 2, 1993.
I wanted the violence to be icky because violence is icky. I guess the person who sort of led me down that road was Sam Peckinpah. If you look at Sam’s stories—I mean, who else in the world would make a film where the heroes were Prussian Nazis [Cross of Iron]?!
NOTEBOOK: A lot of your heroes are Vietnam vets who come back to a very different United States. They have to contend with the evil side of American capitalism in the 1970s and 80s.
GLICKENHAUS: And they were treated horribly. America has often treated its veterans horribly, from the Civil War, through the World Wars–even now, tragically. I was of the Vietnam era but went to college instead. You know, the not-so-little secret was that if you didn't want to go, you could find a way not to, and you could stay in school. Quite honestly, if you went down for your physical and just acted like a complete lunatic, they didn't take you, they didn't want you. So, unfortunately, a lot of men went to Vietnam who didn't realize they didn't have to go… and it was a slaughter of the innocents.
NOTEBOOK: Sure. And I think it's a great tragedy of that generation. Young men went to Vietnam, came back, and had two paths to choose from, or perhaps, their paths were chosen for them. That’s also what I really like about your stories—we're seeing vets who have a deep sense of justice and who take matters into their own hands, fighting for a greater good.
GLICKENHAUS: Sure, that is definitely a part of it.
In McBain, Christopher Walken (along with T. G. Waites, Jay Patterson, Michael Ironside, Steve James) avenges the murder of his freedom-fighting ex-Army buddy. Consequently, they overthrow the drug trafficking Presidente of Colombia and lead its revolutionaries to the liberation of their people.
NOTEBOOK: Another thing I find interesting about your career is that it began exclusively with theatrical distribution—celluloid in movie houses—but very soon, you were able to capitalize on the home video and cable television markets.
GLICKENHAUS: That really was a big change. When I made The Exterminator, you made all your money from theaters, video wasn't even thought about. In a lot of the foreign deals I made, I didn't even sell those companies the video rights, which became a big mistake for them. Warner Bros. bought a couple of foreign territories and neglected to buy video. Then The Exterminator went to number one on video for many years, all over the world. It went from Beta to VHS to laserdiscs to DVDs, and then, of course, to streaming. Now, I think it's fair to say that companies like Netflix dictate the business. I mean, it's a strange thing when Marty Scorsese makes a $150 million movie, and it’s released on Netflix.
But that was the beginning of video, and no one really knew what it was. I remember when I talked to Avco, they said, “Oh, there's this thing, where collectors get videotapes, but we don't really know how to license it.” Eventually, they saw how valuable it was. So, a lot of the money that I made on The Exterminator was made by making strong video deals. Also, the other thing: I owned the film. Avco hadn’t financed it, they hadn’t put up a single penny. So I was able to get a percentage of the box office gross. Then Avco financed my next feature, The Soldier.
Avco Embassy’s VHS release of The Soldier, one of those “narratives that exalt the most outrageous kind of unmonitored, strong-arm behavior to make the world safe for democracy,” according to Vincent Canby in the New York Times. The title was a huge seller for the company’s new home video division.
NOTEBOOK: Leonard Shapiro was the head of distribution at Avco at the time, and a few years later you formed Shapiro-Glickenhaus Entertainment together and made Shakedown, the company’s first film. SGE went on to produce about a dozen features—B-classics like Red Scorpion, Maniac Cop, and Frankenhooker—and distribute several dozen more. What was the impetus for starting SGE?
GLICKENHAUS: The impetus was to work with people who I thought were interesting directors, to enable them to make movies. I enjoyed working with Frank Henenlotter, he's still a friend.
But, you know, filmmaking has a very dark side to it. You are ensconced with an artificial family for a short period of time, you go through a lot of emotions together, and you see a lot of terrible things happen. You see marriages just blow apart, you see people do really stupid stuff. The number of poor people that I knew who eventually died, driving home drunk or high or just asleep at the wheel—I mean, yeah, they're very well paid, but the stress is unbelievable. By the time I got to know Sam [Peckinpah], he was very troubled, he was a complete alcoholic. I met him at a party in Mexico where he literally had to be tied to a chair so he wouldn’t fall over. And actors… actors can turn into fucking nightmares. People like Klaus Kinski—fierce talents, but completely troubled people.
Produced by Golden Harvest, and released in the States by Warner Bros. on August 23, 1985, The Protector is Glickenhaus’ Hong Kong-set chop-socky cat-and-mouse, starring Danny Aiello and Jackie Chan. Chan’s erratic schedule—continuously flying to Japan to promote his burgeoning career as a pop singer—resulted in frustrating “night-for-day” shoots.
NOTEBOOK: It doesn't sound like a sustainable life—regardless of whether you're an actor, a crew guy, or even a director or producer. It's a very difficult business to maintain any sort of consistency.
GLICKENHAUS: That's true. I think knowing when to hang up your cleats is the most important thing in life. I mean, I came to know Muhammad Ali—I met him on a plane, I was wearing an Exterminator jacket on the weekend that it opened in L.A., and he stopped me and said, “I just saw that, it was fantastic!” We stayed in touch. But it was very sad to see him go on boxing way longer than he should have. So I think that there comes a time when you really have to decide who you are, what you are, and what you're trying to do. And to go on indefinitely, just because you can… that doesn’t interest me.
NOTEBOOK: When did you finally decide to leave the movie business for good? Timemaster was your final film and the last produced by SGE. So, did you wrap it all up then?
GLICKENHAUS: Yes. I wrapped up SGE because that was becoming a very hard business. I could have moved to L.A. and just directed Hollywood films. I was asked by Steven Seagal to make his first movie. I was offered a lot of pretty big films at the time. The studios were making these giant $100 million mega films with tremendous amounts of CGI and stuff, but I was more of a storyteller.
And another thing happened. I mean, after 20 years of making movies, the stupid cliches came true: It's a lot more fun dragging coked-up actresses out of Winnebagos when you’re in your 20s. As Dino De Laurentiis said, “By the time can get into all the parties, you won't want to go.” I think my last year in the film business, I spent 260 days in hotels. It was just…. enough.
You know, in retrospect, did it take too much of my time, money, and energy? It did. Would I do it all again? Sure. I made my movies the way I wanted to. And when it was time to do something else, I did something else. I mean, I could have closed SGE, moved to L.A., and directed studio films for a while. But I didn't want to live in L.A. I wanted to stay here. I love New York.
Timemaster, his final film and another direct-to-video release (December 27, 1995), stars Pat Morita, a young Michelle Williams, and Glickenhaus’ children, Jesse and Veronica.
NOTEBOOK: It sounds like your priorities shifted as well.
GLICKENHAUS: Yes, and my kids had a lot to do with it. Both my daughter and my son were in Timemaster, but they were getting to the age when they’d be going to middle school, high school. And I just didn't want my kids growing up in Hollywood. I thought, you know, a showbiz family—that would be a disaster. My daughter [Veronica Leeds] is now one of the top female ultra-marathoners in the world. My son Jesse was a teacher and is now working with me on our car company [Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus].
NOTEBOOK: We can wrap up in just a moment, but… how’s the racing car business?
GLICKENHAUS: I had always loved cars, so when I made money from films, I gave half to my dad to invest in Wall Street, and I bought some cars from the other half. And then I realized that my passion was not just collecting cars, but being involved in designing and building and racing, and it sort of morphed from there.
It's been going for about 10 years now. We're a small company, we sell about 200 or 300 cars a year and can be profitable and continue racing. My son really wanted to get involved and he is now running the nuts and bolts of the company. I'm absolutely involved in the day-to-day, but I’ve become more of an advisor. I mean, to be honest with you, at 71, I certainly wouldn't be unhappy sitting in Barbados, drinking umbrella cocktails, and racing occasionally—but it’s been really great.
The garage that SGE built. James Glickenhaus with his amazing collection of rare, valuable race cars.
NOTEBOOK: Well, this was wonderful, thank you. As I said, we have a monthly film series in Williamsburg, and I'd love to have you come down one night if that interests you. So my last question is: if we were to screen one of your movies, which one would you want us to show? Which film do you want to take another look at with an audience, and sit down and talk to me about?
GLICKENHAUS: I think The Exterminator is the most relevant to the era. And I really like Shakedown. But, that said, I think Slaughter of the Innocents is an interesting movie. I like them all, and I’m proud that my films still have a market—that people still want to come out and see them and talk about them.
—Interview conducted and edited by Joseph A. Berger
The Shapiro-Glickenhaus Entertainment logo, known all-too-well by the teenage boys (and some of the more discriminating girls) who grew up in the 1980s.
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.