The Elgin Theater opened in 1942 on Eighth Avenue in New York City. It was designed in the Art Moderne style by Simon Zelnik and was a popular movie house for decades seating 600. It served as a home to cult films and revivals and, later in its career, as an adult theater. In 1978 the community forced it to close. Even while it was an adult theater, it still kept up its program of showing midnight movies. The Elgin is credited inspiring other New York theatres to show midnight screenings. In 1970, the managers showed Alejandro Jodorowsky's 1970 surrealist western El Topo at midnight with the idea spreading midnight showings to other New York theaters.
Read more about Elgin Theater: Notable Midnight Films, Joyce Theater
Famous quotes containing the word theater:
“All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self.... What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself—a troupe of players that I have internalised, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required.... I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.”
—Philip Roth (b. 1933)