Jan Freeman writes The Word column for Ideas.
Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based writer, editor, and multimedia
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Christopher Shea writes the Critical Faculties column for Ideas.
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« The house of Poe -- mystery solved! | Main | Poe preservation » Monday, April 9, 2007Grindhouse: BostonThis past Friday, the Globe ran a Ty Burr review of the Tarantino-Rodriguez movie "Grindhouse" in its Weekend section. In a sidebar, Burr explains that grindhouses were tatty downtown theaters that showed exploitation movies: in Boston, the West End Cinema near the old Garden, and the Stuart, the Center, and the recently demolished Gaiety (its nom-de-plume was the Publix), all on Washington Street. At the Globe's Movie Nation blog on Friday, Ty admitted that "I was in rural New Hampshire during the heyday of exploitation cinema, and even if I hadn't been, I was a late-blooming wussypants who preferred the old-movie revival house to the grindhouse."  Now, I was in elementary school in those days (the 1970s), myself. I did live in Boston, but didn't make it to the Combat Zone too often. So how was I supposed to know, when I called the Publix a "movie house of ill repute," in the Ideas section back in 2005, that I was unfairly conflating grindhouse movies with porn? Defenders of the Gaiety, who were trying to stop its demolition, protested. I did some research and decided that they were probably right: The Gaiety (when it was doing business as the Publix) didn't show porn, just biker and kung fu movies, Italian horror flicks, splatter films, and other forms of grindhouse. So I retracted my comment, pending future discoveries. Posted by Joshua Glenn at 02:00 PM
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