Grindhouse Babylon:  an interview with Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford of Sleazoid Express

For serious students of cinematic sleaze, Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford need no introduction. Landis is the creator of the legendary Sleazoid Express, the first magazine to cover exploitation movies with any sense of objectivity, as well as the free-floating maelstrom known as New York City's Times Square and 42nd Street. Landis wrote about the Deuce from an embedded position as both a patron as well as manager and projectionist at some of its adult theaters theaters, and encountered some of its most notorious figures, including directors Andy Milligan and Phil Prince, tormented adults-only performer George Payne and many shadowy characters. Landis' prose--a mix of Lester Bangs' free-form rap and Hubert Selby's street poetry--made him a much-sought-after chronicler of this twilight world in highbrow pubs like Film Comment and the Village Voice.

Michelle Clifford joined Bill in NYC by way of Florida in the Eighties. They married, and she encouraged him to revive SE in 1999 after a long drought. She co-authored some of his strongest recent features for the Voice (including their latest, an exploration of the internet prescription drug trade), and launched her own magazine, Metasex, which examines the sex industry with heart, coal-black humor and unflinching honesty--a rarity for this subject. The latest issue, #4, features a dissection of '70s porn stud turned walking geek show Jamie Gillis that, while essential reading, is not for the faint-hearted.

Landis and Clifford broke into book stores late last year with Sleazoid Express: A Mind-Twisting Tour Through the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square (Fireside Books), an overview of their 20-plus years in risking their necks in the Deuce's grimiest "scumatoriums." But for these writers' work at its most raw, readers are directed to the revitalized Sleazoid and Metasex, which continue to capture the joys and dangers of discovering forbidden pleasures-cinematic and otherwise--with an unparalleled mix of streetwise savvy and stunning prose. To paraphrase Steve Earle, Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford are the best damn exploitation film writers--the best film writers, period--today, and I'll stand on Tim Lucas' coffee table in my Tortured Females T-shirt while saying it.
Following is part of an e-mail interview with Bill and Michelle on the Times Square and 42nd Street they prowled during the early days of SE.

Can you summarize the appeal of Times Square during the time when you were covering it? What was the vibe on the street and in the theaters and stores like?

Bill Landis: It was a sea of neon, with the theater marquees almost forming umbrellas over the pedestrians.  It would be so crowded people could barely fit on the sidewalk.  You could see any kind of movie - hardcore porn, which gave the red light notoriety; Jess Franco's Barbed Wire Dolls; old Bob Cresse sexploitation movies like Hot Spur; Don't Answer the Phone; milestones of violence like The Streetfighter, which were in different states of edit--you didn't know whether scenes were missing to appease MPAA idiots or if they wound up in a "violent clips" reel of a mischievous projectionist.  [You could see] adult films [at Chelly] Wilson's theaters, which had Greek names like the Eros or the Venus, or at the Avon chain that included the Doll and the Bryant.  And bookstores that sold everything from S&M classics like Serena in Girls Behind Bars to John Holmes dipping his member in a wine glass and then offering it to a Chinese girl to those coded "Color Climax" loops that had Scandinavian gals in sexual congress with animals.

Michelle Clifford: The Deuce was the first place I set foot in New York, and my initial reaction as I stepped out of the Port Authority and onto 42nd Street was that it looked like a tiny playschool village, dinky-sized compared to all these films I had seen depicting it.  I thought immediately, "Bill, this isn't the 'big time' you think it is--all you folks are myopic from being here so long!" 

BL: She had just turned 20 at the time, and has always been very pragmatic.

Was there a sense of community among the people who lived and worked there?

BL: Definitely. Almost a gang mentality.  If you were part of the Avon crew, you saw each other daily, looked out for each other, helped out with various scams and other moneymaking activities that went on there. No one was expected to live on the "$25 a day" token salary--you had to learn ways of making the area profitable to survive.

MC: The live show couples were some of Bill's favorite people--Carlos and Carmen, Alex and Carrie (Carrie later dumped Alex and formed a group marriage with Carlos and Carmen), David and Loni, who were faux bikers and two Methadone addicts from Long Island and one of the rare white teams. Mrs. Wilson's theaters employed a lot of Dominicans, some easygoing, and some, like one Weepin' Willie, would do any shift and flash a picture of his family in Santo Domingo for sympathy, while he was one of the biggest ratfink scumbags around.

How dangerous could it be?

BL: Quite, especially if you didn't know your way around and still dangerous if you worked there.  Once at Blackjack Books, where some of the live show gals did double shifts--there was a revolving stage and a partition would go up once a guy dropped a quarter in.  Some innocuous-looking Chinese guy sliced up one of the girls near her privates.  And then there were massive amounts of pickpocketing and toilet muggings, but those were the kind of things tourists entered at their own risk. 
I recall Stella, who was Avon's day-to-day boss, snickering about a mugged Japanese tourist, saying, "what the hell was he looking for in the toilet, anyway (ha, ha)."  At the Avon Chain, the ladies' room was locked and was for staff members only.  Closing time at the Eros was about 5am, the worst time, after the bars closed! There was this old lady named Mae who used to live in Hell's Kitchen. She worked there forever, and she was beaten and pistol-whipped when she was cleaning out the last flotsam from the theater because she was so old and looked so vulnerable.

What's the biggest myth about Times Square and 42nd Street?

MC: That you could voyeuristically enjoy or have human contact with anything you wanted sexually.  All myths have a basis in reality, and this one more so than others.

Each theater had its own personality, as you explain in the book and the magazine--which was the safest/best, and which was the most dangerous/worst?

MC: For grindhouses, our favorite was the Liberty.  Best Eurosleaze, comfortable; we went on our first date there to see Mountainside Motel Massacre and Women for Sale.  The Cinerama, which was off the Deuce on 47th and Broadway had been twinned, but if you went into the Cinerama II it was back to the glory days--a huge screen and a coliseum shape for the seating.  Among grindhouses, the Anco was the worst and most dangerous, right opposite the Port Authority bus terminal.  The Roxy, when it turned into a miniplex, had great exploitation movies but still retained its patina of menace--it was a 24 hour place, the plastic seats didn't entirely discourage crashers, and it was formerly a live show theater that had on premise hooking.  Avon's Doll Theater was fun, a quiet metronome that you wouldn't know was a floating sex party with the right crowd there.  Bill used to be day manager at the Doll and wrote some of the early Sleazoids he mailed me as he was sitting in the cashbox there.  The Doll had a great choice of double bills, say a relatively new Avon movie like Prisoner of Pleasure would be double billed with a tried and true favorite like Johnny Wadd.  Out of all the adult theaters, the 24-hour all-male Night Shift, a.k.a. the Omega, a.k.a. the Moulin Rouge, was a health hazard and a magnet for all manner of tenderloin crime.  The worst of the lot.


Did you ever see celebrities or other "famous" people prowling Times Square? 

BL: Dom Deluise turned up late at night around the Venus.  He was a known quantity at the Venus and Eros.  He was complaining that the male dancers were too nelly for his taste at the Eros.  But Bill asked him for an autograph and he was gregarious enough to give one and was friendly to the staff.  Neil Sedaka turned up at the Eros but when the lights came on, he got embarrassed and quietly left.  And when he was on Broadway, Mr. Death in Venice himself, Dirk Bogarde, used to glide through the Night Shift.  And lots of local porn stars, of course, like Jamie Gillis checking out his marquees or bringing a girl with him into the Doll so he could use the girl as sharkbait to have a threesome with a minority guy there.  One night he and a girlfriend blew the whole staff.  Fortunately, I missed this impromptu performance, as I was day manager and this occurred at night.  There were rumors that Rod Stewart and Robert De Niro turned up at the "dime a dance" place above the Doll at the Satin Ballroom--but that De Niro just wanted to engage in conversation with one of the girls for quite some time and didn't approach her sexually.  A couple of times Al Goldstein wandered into the Night Shift.  You didn't know if it was a "spot check" to rate the place or a personal thing with him. Also, good ol' Ken Anger, tripping his brains out at the Night Shift Theater.  He was on so much acid that he didn't even recognize me until he ambled over to the "cashbox" and I blared out, "HI KEN, HOWYA DOIN'!" About a week after the Danceteria incident, too (see Landis' bio, Anger).  "Research for the Kinsey Institute," my ass.


Things started to take a downward turn in the '80s with the emergence of AIDS and crack. What was the reaction to these two threats from the people in TS? 

BL: A lot of people first were into "base" which is different from crack--that was the whole procedure with the petri dish and cooking up the coke that way, but, still, a lot of the live show teams were seriously addicted to it and could go through an eight ball (1/8 ounce--about $300 worth) a night.

It's widely assumed that the Dominican gang boss Yago invented crack and was selling it to Jerseyites crossing the George Washington Bridge in Washington Heights. He called it "baseballs".  But the real source of the crack invasion of Times Square was just south of the Port Authority, in the no-man's land between the bus terminal and Lincoln Tunnel in the West 30s around 9th Avenue.  People would flock there like lemmings every night.  Then the dealing got so ubiquitous even greaseburger stands like Westernburger got known as crack spots.  AIDS?  You'd be surprised how either the need for the IV or especially the crack made them not consider this fatal consequence.  The IV people seemed positively careful about not sharing needles when they became aware of AIDS while the crack people would just do anything for that next high, which would last a few minutes and then just give them one track minds for more that would last for hours.  And crack completely shut off their immune system for 24 hours, leaving them prone to any kind of infection, including HIV.  The original crack people, more than the old junkies, were the first to die off.

When did you begin to notice the changes from the old TS to its current situation?

MC: The theaters started closing.  The grindhouses, which technically were landmarks from the Minsky's Burlesque days and should have been restored and kept up, were allowed to rot, defaced by government sponsored sarcastic "artwork" festooned across marquees that once proudly hawked everything from Blood Feast to Love Camp 7.

BL: Mayor Dinkins, who we otherwise liked--he had a tolerant attitude of "turn the other cheek" about vice--let the grindhouses rot.  It was Giuliani, who later was lauded for his despicable "go to work the next day" attitude after 9-11, who really beat the place into the ground. Another lie Guiliani perpetrated was the so called "60/40" rule - that video stores had to sell 60% "normal" movies over adult movies.  What you had was some Arabs or Pakis who put a few dusty covers of Rambo in the window and inside it was all current crappy hardcore shot-on-video rubbish.

What happened to the Deuce regulars?

MC: Some continued to hang on at some of the last bars that long term habitués frequented; some of the sex performers fell on hard times; some of the girls got various conditions like hep-C but continue to work as outcalls; some unlucky men and women died from a combination of sex and drug induced diseases.  But you'd be surprised--one woman we ran into has had HIV for quite some time--she's a total junkie and she's on Methadone but she just keeps on chugging, so maybe it's actually just turning into a chronic condition for people now, like syph.  Some dropped out of the scene altogether and got married. 

BL: I wish the best to the live show performers; life being what it is, some of them may be grandfathers by now. Some sex performers, in a Grapes of Wrath way, moved to San Francisco where the work seemed to be.  Like Jamie Gillis, who Michelle first interviewed way back in 1986.  Michelle also interviewed Harry Reems a year later before he "reformed," and what a wreck.  Some of these people she got to know after the fact like Lasse Braun, who contributed to Metasex (#3, "Sado-Masochism: Personal Reminiscences").

Is a sense of nostalgia for the old TS misguided?

BL: Not at all.  It was New York's red light district, its Piccadilly Circus.

Was it really a place to be missed?

MC: Absolutely.

BL: The old Times Square lives on in our magazines Sleazoid Express and Metasex.  Sleazoid is mostly about the exploitation movie end of it; Metasex is an look at the sex business that thrived there Michelle doesn't sugar coat.  Check us out online at: Sleazoid Express and Metasex.

-Paul "Slave to the grind(house)" Gaita