"Don't Say Nothing, or I'll Kill You" - a short walk around the neighborhood, circa 1966.

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.