Stiff as a board

Dirt is a daily email about entertainment.

Daniel Clemens goes bumming around the arthouse circuit. 

As both a lifelong patron of the arts (i.e. gay) and the employee of a streaming platform, I’ve trekked across New York City for several years now in a thwarted attempt to reconcile living in the capital of arthouse theaters with the Spartan seats from which to view their programming.

Cinephilia is an unclassified incurable disease, and so the extreme lack of comfortable seating in the city’s theaters likely won’t stop terminal devotees from showing up anyway (though it may deter new guests from returning after a first visit). This becomes a problem when, for example, I recommend a more casual filmgoing friend (let’s call them a moviegoer) attend a marquee, 35mm showing of an un-streamable rarity from the Taiwanese New Wave. When they go to book their ticket, there’s no disclaimer on the venue’s website that warns them they’ll be expected to sit on an apple box coated in a thin strip of foam for three hours of foreign-language slow cinema. Especially when there are sixteen open-caption screenings of Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre at their nearest AMC. With heated seats… that recline.

With that in mind, find below a sketching of the city’s greatest theaters and the seats that will cause long-term effects to your physical health.

Metrograph

Open since 2016, this Lower Manhattan restaurant is apparently also a two-screen repertory cinema, despite what you might think about a theater needing to affix all of its seats to the floor. This is the starter venue for budding cinephiles and cheap dates to see Mulholland Drive for the first time, and frankly, I wish I had access to it as a teenager. I respect its themed vibes, allegedly modeled after the commissaries of Old Hollywood studio backlots. But I am unable to gauge what exactly was renovated during its months of pandemic closure. Certainly not the seats, which remain as ligneous as ever, with perhaps the slightest extra splattering of red velvet shipped in from Romantic Depot. Maybe it was the employees? If only they had a high-profile investor who cared about chairs. Pro Tip: I find the front row of the balcony in the larger theater to be the best place to sit, because there is a ledge available to prop up your feet (respectfully, I remove my shoes before doing so). 

Film Forum

The Grandfather of NYC rep houses, this four-screen nonprofit theater in Greenwich Village recently celebrated 50 years worth of carnage to the behinds of its geriatric audience by upgrading its metal-and-foam seats to metal-and-molded-polyurethane-foam seats. (That is one extra pad of foam away from an arrest on elder abuse charges.) But in this landscape of endangered movie houses, it’s a miracle to still get to sit here, no matter that they’ve been hawking the same Jacques Derrida-approved banana bread since 2002. A recent quote by André Gregory in the Times said it best: “If New York lost the Statue of Liberty, it would not be a real loss, but if Film Forum disappeared, it would be absolutely heartbreaking.” That said, the gargantuan fire hydrant poles that obscure nearly every conceivable view unless seated dead center could get lost.

 IFC Center

Formerly The Waverly Theater, the IFC Center is an historic landmark best remembered for originating the tradition of showing The Rocky Horror Picture Show to unhinged audiences at midnight. I’d wager that in the ‘80s, cracking your skull on a wooden seat after a gold Speedo’d twink slips in a pile of confetti-egg-yolk might’ve been par for the course. But IFC bought and remodeled the space in 2005, upgrading to comfortable across-the-board but also generally broken seats, and now as you crane your neck to watch their annual screenings of It’s a Wonderful Life, you just get scoliosis.

Quad Cinema

A frequent haunt of Andy Warhol, this cinema enjoys a unique legacy as the first to have crammed a large mass of gay men into a single theater that was not showing porn. From its admittedly plush and luxe seats (courtesy of a recent renovation), you’ll be able to see approximately three-fourths of a film per visit. It’s also worth noting that only the Angelika rivals its fire-hazardous floor plan, wherein one can only enter the rows from the center. 

Paris Theater

Opened by the French distributor Pathé in 1948, the city’s longest-running arthouse theater now operates as a screening room for the middling content spat out by Netflix, which bought and renovated the iconic Arte Moderne-styled space in 2019. Famously, it also ran out the ghost of Marilyn Monroe following the US premiere of Blonde. She now resides across the street at the Plaza Hotel’s Champagne Bar, in a seat that reclines.(While the Paris Theater’s seats are immobile, the vibes are operatic. Literally. Their single screen theater holds 535 seats, including balcony sections. However, you will be using your opera glasses to watch Gal Gadot emulate human facial expressions in Red Notice.)

Film at Lincoln Center & Museum of Modern Art

My favorite theaters in the city, due mostly to the inimitable feeling of glamor upon stepping foot inside of Lincoln Center’s Josie Robertson Plaza, as well as the thrill (and latent threat) of meeting the infamous MoMA stabber in the shadowy enclave between theater doors. The seats don’t recline, nor is there much room to extend your legs, but I look forward to the robust programming at these two venues more than most other theaters in the city. Plus, I have annual memberships to both, and would have to cancel them if I didn’t think so.

So after we all lurch up out of our unforgiving chairs to crack our stiff necks and extend our aching limbs, it’s to the credit of the movies and their so-called magic that we’ll all forget what we endured to be one of only 80 users to log the film on Letterboxd after the screening.

The Dirt: My ass feels numb just from reading this.

POP A SQUAT

MOVIE MAGIC

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