RKO Madison Theatre

“Beyond The Door” was released in 1975. I saw it the summer of that year in a theater in Manhattan. I think it was also playing at the Ridgewood Theater then.

I sometimes eat lunch at a restaurant called “Spaghetti Western” on Reade St. near Bway near where I work in lower Manhattan. It used to
be Joe Maxwell’s Bar, the bar for the old Fordham U. which once stood at 290 Bway. My best friend lived there as a kid until he was seven. His dad was the superintendent of the old Fordham U.

Interesting sub-genre : “Spaghetti horror” as opposed to “Spaghetti Western”. I can think of a few examples.

Thank you, Don Novack ! I’ve wanted to know that ever since I started posting on thie board ! The twin bill horror flick you mention may have been the double feature that Robert R keeps mentioning : “Squirm” and “Tentacles”.

Perhaps now we will go from famine to feast on this topic, and extensive debate will now break out as to the date of the RKO Madison’s “last picture show” !

Interesting that it apparently closed in 1956, the year the adjacent IND subway took over from the BMT Fulton St. elevated. The nearest station on both lines would have been Van Siclen (at Pitkin Avenue) on both the Fulton el and the IND subway

I don’t know. I will ask my dad about it. I see it on my Cinema Tour listing. Perhaps Jackie Gleason appeared there as well as at the Halsey Theater, a block away.

Perhaps Gleason named his Honeymooners character Ralph Kramden, after nearby Ralph Avenue.

Lostmemory, you’re welcome. Maybe you or I should start pages on those theaters, and hope that others may fill in the blanks.

RobertR : Please tell me, on what dates did you see “Squirm” and “Tentacles” at the RKO Madison ? As I recall, “Squirm” came out in July 1976. I remember the ads on TV : a guy telling a girl, “It’s too late ! They’re dead !” and a girl in a shower looking up at a shower head clogged with night crawlers and screaming her lungs out.

As I had posted previously, I remember the RKO Madison showing a re-release of “The Exorcist”, along with “The Yakuza”, in August 1976.

I don’t recall the large metal Coca Cola signs.

I also remember a small record store in spring 1976 at the eastern end of the RKO Madison’s Myrtle Avenue facade, right where the building abutted on Woolworth’s. Album covers I remember in the record store’s window were : “Nice ‘N Nasty”, The SalSoul Orchestra, with that barely, teasingly, bare-assed dark-haired girl smirking over her shoulder, and Redd Foxx, “You Gotta Wash Your Ass”. I was going to buy the Stones album “Black And Blue” there, but got it in midtown Manhattan instead. I remember debating carfare vs. a higher retail price with my mom at the time.

RobertR, I don’t know about the independent reopening the Madison, because I still don’t know the last day that the RKO Madison Theater showed movies. I feel I should know this, because I lived near it, and walked by it all the time then, but I don’t know, and it bugs me. The last two films I saw there were “Taxi Driver” in May 1976 and “Lipstick” in either June or July of 1976. For those two films, the screen seemed the same size it had always been.

lostmemory : Both the Imperial and the Echo Theater are on the Cinema Tour listing that I printed out for myself last April. The cross street for the Echo is Moore St. northwest of Flushing Avenue, and northwest of the part of Bushwick Avenue that is mostly residential. To my knowledge, my family has had no experience of this theater. I asked my father if he remembered it, and he said no.

The Imperial was at Irving and DeKalb Avenues. The older of my two uncles saw the Lugosi “Dracula” there either 1931 or 1932. About a dozen years later, when he returned home from the Signal Corps in Africa during WW II, the Imperial had become a Robert Hall store, so my uncle went there to buy some needed civilian clothes.

R143, please take my word for it ! The RKo Madison Theater was a beautiful showhouse in its day. I was very saddened in April 1979 to peer through a sidewalk board peephole at its charred, gutted interior, and remember how beautiful it once was, and all the enjoyable times I had had inside it. I saw only movies there, but my parents saw live shows there before I was born. What a place. You are quite right.

BTW, are you also R143 on the SubTalk and SubChat message boards ?

The sky is blue because it is the blue wavelength of light that is most readily diffracted by either the gas molecules or the dust particles in the Earth’s atmosphere, during most of the day.

Chickens can’t fly because they don’t need to. That’s the way God made ‘em.

Two Montauk theaters … why not ? Remember the two Brooklyn Casino Theaters. Are you sure you’re the last to know of the two Montauk Theaters ?

In any true science, or search for knowledge, each answer leads to ten new questions.

Are you in that bad a condition, or just joking ? The latter, I hope !

Thanks, I like it too. I checked my Cinema Tour listing of Brooklyn, and did not see a Novelty Theater.