From the Bookshelves: 'Sleazoid Express'

Second in a series of random, rambling explorations of my library.

I first visited New York City back in 1987, when Times Square was several years past "Taxi Driver" but a few years away from its current Disneyfied state. Meaning, of course, that I and my fellow midwestern college students were fascinated by all the sleaze on display.

We arrived via bus at the New York Port Authority of all places, meaning that we were dumped out right on the legendary Deuce, with most of the most notorious theaters still in operation. The days of marathon showings of kung fu epics and other R-rated obscurities were over, though, and the surviving theaters were paying their bills with -- what else? -- apparently endless screenings of plain ol' porn. My buddies and I were pleased as punch to gawk at the outsides of the theaters and pose under the marquees, but we didn't dare go inside. We were young, after all, and we wanted to live to be at least a little bit older.


Author Bill Landis, on the other hand, did go into those theaters -- hell, he practically lived inside them for years, working the counters, watching the movies and writing about it all in his self-published 'zine, "Sleazoid Express." Landis died in 2008, but before he did, he and his wife Michelle Clifford compiled his writings in the 2002 book "Sleazoid Express: A Mind-Twisting Tour Through the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square." I picked it up at a now-defunct Borders 10 years ago, and it's remained one of my favorite film books since then.

That's because Landis does more than simply catalog the movies that played in the pre-porn era theaters of Times Square. He structures the entire book like a travelogue of the Deuce, focusing on a theater or two in each chapter and writing about the movies that were likely to play on those screens. I'm suspicious that it broke down quite so neatly, with "race hate" (Landis' term for blaxploitation) films in one location, horror films in another and foreign oddities in a third, but I'm not complaining. It gives what could be a rambling book a solid framework and lets decades-late readers (like me) pretend they're strolling along the scum-encrusted streets of Times Square at its sleaziest.

And even with that setup, "Sleazoid Express" is a pretty rambling book, but in the best sense of the word. Landis writes about the theaters, the owners, the movies, the workers, the audience, the directors, the producers and the actors all at the same time -- sometimes, it seems, in a single sentence. It shouldn't work, but somehow it does, conveying the excitement, the uncertainty and even a bit of the danger that being a moviegoer in 1970s New York entailed. He's a very evocative writer, making you feel not only what watching a movie like, say, "Fight For Your Life" felt like back then, but what it felt like to watch it in a crumbling theater, with the crowd getting rowdier with every frame of film that spooled through the projector. It almost makes you wish for a time machine, a movie schedule and a box of popcorn. Well, almost.

As a bonus, "Sleazoid Express" acts as a handy viewer's guide for exploitation cinema. Surprisingly, virtually all the movies Landis writes about -- even obscure oddities like "Goodbye Uncle Tom," "The Candy Snatchers" and "Last House on Dead End Street" have become available on DVD since the book was published. Admittedly, it's not the same as seeing them on the big screen on the Deuce, but it's as close as we're going to get these days.

And judging by Landis' book, it's safer. A lot safer.