8th Street Playhouse
52 W. 8th Street,
New York,
NY
10011
52 W. 8th Street,
New York,
NY
10011
16 people
favorited this theater
The loss of this theater is one of the saddest movie theater tales. A neighborhood house, in the 1970’s the theater began playing offbeat independent and revival films. It originated the seven nights a week midnight show policy.
“Rocky Horror Picture Show” may have premiered at the nearby Waverly Theatre, but this is where it became world famous playing 15 years every Friday and Saturday night. The 3-D festival in the 1980’s saw lines of hundreds of people for every show. I remember “The House of Wax” being held over for weeks. They ran 3-D prints of movies that had not been seen in the original format since the 1950’s like “Kiss Me Kate” and “Bwana Devil”.
There were also horror festivals, Judy Garland tributes and a summer of virtually every film New Line Cinema ever produced. When the owner passed away, the theater was taken over for awhile by City Cinemas who booked first run movies there. When the Village East opened, City Cinemas pulled out of the 8th Street Playhouse and also the Quad Cinema. The death came at the end when United Artists took over and totally mismanaged going revival and second run and then closing it during the middle of a festival.
It sat closed and falling apart until it was converted to a video store. When its marquee was torn down Greenwich Village lost one of its true landmarks.
Contributed by
RobertR
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Recent comments (view all 101 comments)
Seamus, apparently you don’t remember Richard O'Brien being lead into the Ladies Room by a group of Magentas. There was a “snow storm” gonig on in there.
Went walking around this part of the village back in November of last year and snapped a couple of shots of the 8th Street Playhouse site and the horrific alteration of the adjacent Electric Lady Studios entrance:
Store For Rent
Electric Lady Bland
Wonder if the place was ever rented out. Also wonder if the auditorium still sits behind the store front?
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Is that photo supposed to show the auditiorium of the 8th St. Playhouse? Surely not!
Wrong listing, iatse311. The 8th Street Playhouse featured a streamlined decor without a proscenium and with all the seats on one level. Googling the work of photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, it appears that the photo might be of the Playhouse in Great Neck? But I can’t really support that definitively. You may try posting there to see if it jogs any memories.
Yes, that is the Playhouse Theatre in Great Neck (Nassau County, Long Island). I compared the photo to one published in The New York Times on July 11, 1982, as part of an article about the Playhouse being converted into a performing arts center. The NYT photo shows a bare stage being used for a rehearsal, but the surrounding decor is exactly the same.
Fifty years ago today, John Cassavetes' improvisational “Shadows,” shot in B&W 16mm with a hand-held camera, moved exclusively to Rugoff’s 8th Street Playhouse after a surprisingly successful Broadway premiere engagement of four weeks at the Embassy 46th Street.
No telling what that bland facade used to be. But the Film Guild Cinema interior, by modernist architect/designer Frederick Kiesler in the 1920s, was amazing. A photo is here: http://www.kiesler.org/cms/index.php?lang=3&idcat=36
Saw 15 chapters of a Batman serial there in one day in the 1960’s. J Carroll Nash played a Japanese villian.
The theatre first opened as the Film Guild Cinema on the night of February 1st, 1929, according to a report in the next day’s New York Times. The revered American writer-activist Theodore Dreiser was among the notables attending. The opening feature was the Soviet/Ukraine-made “Two Days,” with support from shorts including Charlie Chaplin’s 1916 two-reeler “One A.M.” and experimental amateur films from America and the Soviet Union. The NYT noted that “The theatre itself offers several interesting points of conjecture, including the darkened planes of the side walls, which will be employed in the future as part of the screen. By flashing pictorial matter on the side walls, the management hopes to create in the audience more of an illusion of three dimensions than the flat-screen can hope to give. But nothing of this sort was tried last night.” Management was by the Film Arts Guild, which had been holding screenings at rented venues before building its own cinema at 52-54 West Eighth Street.