So I am back on my Fox Theater research thing. I've gotten together a near-complete list of film showings from 1963-1970, which is great, but I was sitting around last night thinking that film listings - I mean, that's really barely even scratching the surface, in terms of really getting the nasty flavor of the time and place, so I decided to check the Star and News archives by address, and lo and behold - LOCAL COLOR.
Now, the Fox existed in the same building with a dive called the York Hotel, which seems to have been - by the mid-sixties, anyway - a genuine transient hotel, populated by assorted grifters, losers, and down-and-outers. In the same building, between the York Hotel and the Fox, there was a place called the Yorkside Hotel, which - as far as I have been able to determine - must have been a great place to pop in for quick meal with Marion County's finest hookers, thieves, and public masturbators.
To wit, from the Star of Saturday January 18, 1964.
& said Buick was jacked, by the way, while this masterpiece was being screened next door.
Things had only gotten better by the fall of 1966, according to this, from the News of Tuesday November 8 1966.
And as the bacon bandits disappeared into the night, one can't help but imagine them running past the Fox next door, where this was being screened:
Which, as it happened, was being screened just a month earlier in New York City, where a young band from California called the Doors had just arrived to play their first out-of-California gigs. As the story goes, the lead singer of said group, one James Douglas Morrison, saw the title of the film on a theater marquee while passing through Times Square in a cab, and incorporated the title into a song that appeared at their second LP, "Strange Days" in 1967.
So, this opened at the old Art theatre on Tuesday, September 12 1967.
So I watched this last night. "Copenhagen Girls" - ? Talk about selling the sizzle. Holy shit. I can only imagine the looks on the faces of Circle City porno connoisseurs expecting hot Danish action, and getting - instead - a couple of pendulous side-boobs poking out of hilariously gigantic bloomers in addition to "Viking Elvis (with Joseph Goebbels on hot lead guitar) meets the Danish Helen Shapiro," all to an incessant - and I mean - INCESSANT - soundtrack of Shadows-style Nordic instro-rock.
Actually, this is a bizarrely enjoyable film, more of a sort of a "Hard Day's Night" sort of thing detailing a group of young hookers living, Monkees-style, in a house with an oafish butler and an oily pimp who suddenly, toward the end of the film, waxes eloquent, ala a John Hughes "time to get serious" moment (the tragedy Larry Lester's butt cheeks, Cameron Frye's dad, etc etc etc) about the damnable hypocrisy of the middle class. Why - WHY - must prostitution remain illegal?
Anyway, worth a look, if only for the cool street shots of Dexter-Gordon-era Copenhagen, the hilarious scenes with the Sharks, and the somewhat-less-than-successful attempts to pull off "Ocean's 11"-style casino-gambling scenes on a 32 Kroner budget. In the garage.
The site of the former Turf Club in August 2015, now the storied home of Sunset Strip "Indianapolis's premier urban cabaret." At least the building is still there, I guess.
