Sweetheart Theatres: Putting a New Spin on XXX Classics

NEW YORK CITY—AVN recently received an email announcing the release of "The Billy Bagg Double Feature: The Violation of Claudia (1977) and Hot Honey (1978)," from a company we'd never heard of: Sweetheart Theatres, which was apparently releasing the films through well-known classics distributor Distribpix. Our curiosity about Sweetheart Theatres was piqued, so we called Distribpix/Video-X-Pix honcho Steve Morowitz to find out more about the new company. "Distribpix is pretty much synonymous with classic New York erotica, preserving it as well as being filmmakers and such," Morowitz began. "But over the tenure of the company, which was started by my father and his partner back in their heyday, besides producing films and distributing, they also owned theaters, which was a big part of it all. They had theaters all over the place, including Times Square, but also upstate New York and other states as well, and they called it the Sweetheart Theatre chain. "Times Square was the most active area," he added, "but other theaters in the chain included the World Theater, the Circus—those two were basically sandwiched on 49th and Broadway—the East World, the Orleans, the Royal, the Harem, and there was also eventually a gay theater called the Spartan, and also the Big Top, which my old man owned for a while, but then a guy named Bill Perry took it over because my father didn't know how to run the theater. My dad and his partner weren't the first or the last people to put together a chain, but certainly they were pioneers in their own right and they did things pretty interestingly." Morowitz, whose company archives contain about 160 negatives for classic XXX films along with, he said, "tons of exploitation stuff," has been mulling over new ways to release the classics in a market that's quickly shifting away from physical DVDs and diving deep into video-on-demand—and he thinks he's hit on a new marketing idea. "The Sweetheart Theatre thing is really kind of unique," Morowitz explained, "because you might ask, what is the criterion for a Sweetheart Theater release? Really, just anything that's X-rated. Sweetheart Theatre releases will be the same exact movies that would have played at these Sweetheart theaters. For example, in 1977, Bill Lustig, who went on to do Maniac and all these wonderful films, and who I'm somewhat close with—we have a very good relationship and I've licensed some mainstream stuff to him that I've owned—so I own these two films that he made under the director name 'Billy Bagg' before he ever made his horror films. They were his directorial debut, and from a historical point of view, these really helped him to make films and become who he is. So we thought, since Violation of Claudia was really Sharon Mitchell's first movie, and it premiered at the World in 1977, and the following year, the other film played at the Royal, though it didn't premiere there, we thought it'd be a great double feature. "So the DVD itself, besides looking great and having color correction and scratch removal, which is standard with all our stuff, and not only does it come from a negative that was scanned at 2K resolution and has a full aspect ratio, but you get this very well done commentary not only with the director but also with a Danish filmmaker who's very famous, whose name is Nicolas Winding Refn, who directed Hollywood features like Drive, Valhalla Rising, Only God Forgives—he's a very famous director now, a young, up-and-coming director, and the hook there is, Bill is the older guy and Nic always looked up to Bill, and they just happened to become friends. Nic is this 40-something billionaire Hollywood director, a fan of exploitation and old-style murder films, from your Texas Chainsaw Massacre to all your cult underground stuff, and Bill is sort of the underground pulp filmmaker, very legendary and well-known, and Nic drills Bill about some very funny things, sort of amateur things that you laugh at and it's a good experience. "It was their idea to do the commentary, and I thought it was wonderful," Morowitz added. "People who are really into these old movies want to know stuff like, 'Why did you cast that person? What did you do? Why is that ketchup bottle in the background?' You know what I mean. So it's really well done and they had a lot of fun with it. That's just the sort of unique product hook you'll on all these releases, whether it's a commentary or an interview or what-not." But as much attention as Morowitz is paying to the image transfer itself, he's also come up with a new packaging concept that draws on the movies' own histories to help sell the product. "It's sort of a vanity thing, because nobody else really knows about it except me and four other people," he explained, "but we decided to carry through not only the concept of the Sweetheart Theater logo, using contemporary logos based on the artwork from the original Sweetheart Theatres, but the DVD cover is also branded the same way the theater was branded; the menus and extras all have that same kind of branding, so it's almost like you're in the theater; it's kind of a cool look. And of course, it's based on the real thing." Morowitz hopes to release one Sweetheart Theatres DVD per month, with the next release being a Little Oral Annie double-feature, but where the 'Billy Baggs' release is patterned on the look of the World Theater, the Little Oral Annie disk will be patterned on the Circus Theater, which Morowitz described as "really more of the X-rated arm of the Sweetheart chain, sort of a second-rate Pussycat." "The Pussycat was a great theater chain, especially on the West Coast," he acknowledged, "and of course, the World was that theater that, if you got your movie played at the World Theater, whether you were Metzger or Damiano, you could get it played anywhere, so that was a little more classy. "The Oral Annie ones, Inside Little Oral Annie and Little Oral Annie Takes Manhattan happen to be two very classic Video-X-Pix features, both shot on film, even in '84," he continued, "and they're both by Joe Sarno, shot in 35mm, and oddly enough, Sarno shot so much footage for the one movie, they turned it into two. The point is, we transferred the negatives into HD, we did the trailers, I got an interview with a couple of people who were actually on the set working, so again, it's a little bit more of a way that we wanted to continue to showcase the historical important context of these films but not make these things too ridiculously expensive and crazy so that people can't enjoy them." Also in the pipeline: Another double bill featuring two Radley Metzger hits, The Opening of Misty Beethoven and Barbara Broadcast. "Again, the DVD will have extras from [porn maven/reviewer] Paul Glickman, and I did a nice interview with Constance Money herself, which I didn't publicize because she wanted me to keep it quiet," Morowitz noted. "It'll certainly be on the DVD and it's unfortunate—it's great that she spoke and she's lovely and I like her very much, but she's damaged and she really didn't have anything nice to say about Radley, so I have to be very sensitive about it on the DVD, but there'll be stuff like this." Perhaps even better for dyed-in-the-wool classic fans will be the Max Pecas double-feature, Felecia and A Sweet Taste of Honey, both uncut and both from 2K scans. which Sweetheart Theatres will be releasing sometime this winter. "There are films that are already in my archive that have gotten video transfers of maybe 30 years ago, and have never been touched since then," Morowitz announced. "They're films from all the great filmmakers from back in the day, whether it be Blonde Ambition or Every Inch A Lady from the Amero Brothers, or Chuck Vincent's Wanda Whips Wall Street or Roommates. Many of those will also get single releases because we may want to release Blu-rays of them as well. Another way I decide what should maybe get a double or a single is, I may have plans for a release like I have for Roommates. I've done so much work over the years with Jane [Hamilton aka Veronica Hart] and Kelly [Nichols] and Larry Revene and Rick Marx and everybody involved in that film, that we decided that that would be best served, even though it fits right into the whole New York Sweetheart chain, as a stand-alone, because it's that strong of a film." Since Morowitz has to rely on an outside lab to scan his negatives, releases will likely come a little slower than from a studio that has its own lab in-house—but what the heck? Classics fans have been waiting for some of these releases for decades, so what's another few months? "I'm really having fun with it, and to be blunt, with adult distribution, the whole game's changed so much, the DVD market is sort of non-existent, and the only adult businesspeople I know that are surviving in it are the ones that serve the niche market, underground pulps, you know, the old school genre niche," Morowitz lamented. "So I'm trying to have fun with it and trying to build up the line. It's sort of a numbers game, but what is most important is to go along with the concept and then at the same time keep up the quality."