3 Shuttered New York Theaters Captured on Celluloid

Some recent screen captures I made of the Prospect in Flushing, as seen in Fulci's New York Ripper, the Beacon, as seen in Scorsese's Who's That Knocking at My Door, and the Wakefield, as seen in Mulligan's Bloodbrothers.  The Beacon remains open, but not as a movie house.  I looked through some old New York Magazine movie listings from Summer  to late 1981, which are searchable via Google, and couldn't find a time when Werewolf and Nighthawks were playing together there.  They did play at neighboring theaters around that time, however.

The scene in Bloodbrothers actually includes footage from Enter the Dragon, the matinee that Richard Gere takes his kid brother to.  Both were Warner Bros. properties so there was some synergy there. Enter the Dragon would also appear in movie-within-movie form in Polanski's The Tenant, a Paramount picture, and, if I'm not mistaken, its use in the Polanski film did not thrill Warner Bros., but I can't find verification of that at the moment.  I'm left to wonder if the Beacon really was playing Rio Bravo at that time, or if Scorsese paid someone to dress the marquee specially for his film.

Gigolo and Warriors Together Again, With a Special Thanks to Cinema Du Meep

As I've mentioned here before, Paramount did a nice little job of promoting one of their earlier properties, The Warriors, during a scene in Par's American Gigolo.  Other than the same studio, there isn't much they share, save for both having watershed synth-based scores that remain awesome 30+ years later.

Recently, over at his Facebook feed, where he manages to unearth one cool vintage newspaper ad or marquee picture after another, Cinema Du Meep posted a December 1980 ad featuring--you guessed it -Warriors and Gigolo on the same bill.  Curiously, Warriors, the earlier film by a year, appears as the first feature.  

This was actually a traveling double-bill put together by Paramount and which opened simultaneously at several local theaters, as you can see in the below New York listing.

In this old thread on the Warriors website, posters mention that the "VGV" ("Varrio Grande Vista") graffiti on the Warriors sign above is the tag of a gang portrayed in the LA-set 1979 gang feature Boulevard Nights, which you can see here.  So, it appears there was a little East Coast / West Coast rivalry which pre-dates Biggie and 2Pac.