Hi there, Will here. One of my very favorite books about movies is called Slezoid Express,

a mind-twisting tour through the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square by Bill Landis and Michelle

Clifford. Published in 2002, it took a retrospective look at the Grindhouse movie theaters on

New York's 42nd Street during the 70s and 80s.

Theaters that would play Mondo movies, sexploitation, Italian Cannibal Films, Kung Fu,

the films of Andy Milligan and Herschel Gordon Lewis, and sundry other disreputable works.

I discovered the book when I was 16, and in addition to helping introduce me and many others

to all kinds of strange and exotic movies, it helped canonize the grindhouse milieu in the

popular consciousness. Each chapter was structured as a tour of a different long-closed

42nd Street movie theater, with locations like the Rialto, the Apollo, the New Amsterdam,

and the Globe described in vivid detail. I'd like to read you a bit of the book's final chapter,

Lost at the Roxy, which describes the most dangerous of the theaters covered in the book.

The Roxy Theater had several incarnations, but all of them were pretty foul.

Located on the south side of the street next to the Sina Twins,

it was originally one of the Deuce's grungiest, most pungent-smelling, and most dangerous

adult houses.

Sharing management with the landmark Scumatorium Show World,

the Roxy spent the 1970s through the mid-1980s showing third-run hardcore porn,

hosting live sex shows, and serving as an open stomping ground for quickie prostitution.

It attracted the worst, most desperate people on the deuce.

You didn't even stand near the theater unless you wanted a drug addict streetwalker propositioning you as her pimp slash live show partner hung over

your shoulder. In the early to mid-1980s, rare deuce favorites that had been gone for years

...