When American Swing writer/co-director Jon Hart hailed a cab on a Manhattan street little did he know that its driver was former Plato's Retreat founder and head proselytizer Larry Levenson. Once they began speaking, Hart was hooked and Levenson found someone to tell his story and that of his notorious club not long before he would die at 62.
Long lost to the annals [so to speak] of New York's cultural history, Plato's Retreat was more than just another night club, high-energy disco, or part of another era. It was both a phase in the sexual awakening of America and a public heave-ho to traditional morality that was motivated by both grand intentions and a sleazy greediness endemic to our pop culture.
But it wasn't merely a swinger's club--private, discreet, with members vetted--it was a bold attempt to bring relationship-free sex to the forefront of our world. That was something which both Hart (a longtime journalist) and his co-director Mathew Kaufman (an experienced doc director) wanted to explain while telling of the rise and fall of Levenson and his club.
American Swing, the story of the place and its founder, begins with humor, which is inevitable when you bring together a lot of wildly divergent naked people in one space. It emerged at that point in the "me" decade of the '70s, when the disco served the elite as it morphed into naughtiness. Much like the music itself, the scene changed to sleaze and pandering rather than creativity and philosophical adventuring. Finally, it descended into a kind of sadness accompanied by the sense that yet another search for utopia--this time a sexual utopia--had gone wrong.
JH: Definitely. We knew the humor was there, it's inherent; it was intentional. And there were sexual relations in this as well. People went to Plato's Retreat to laugh and dance and have fun--and the fun was there. They were also vulnerable--because, well, they were naked. So the humor there is very apparent.
The sexual relations going on there, too, had to be portrayed. That era is now over--but it was sad. That interview where Larry says, "I thought I was the king. But it was just me." He was in his cab--myself and him alone.
He's symbolic of that era being over, but it had to be reported, and yes, it's sad. The laughter was there, and it's intentionally in our movie, but so is the sadness; that all had to be there as well.
Q: I assume the structural arc was intentional--describing its meteroric rise and grimy end...
MK: We set out to make a fun movie. It was a worn torn doc about some African country; we wanted to show it was fun, life in New York during the late '70s was fun... But we totally missed it.
Q: How old are you guys--you seem too young to have experienced any of this first-hand?
MK: We're both 39...
JH: We lived all this as kids via Public Access television--like [late night sex shows like] "Midnight Blue -- when our parents were asleep that was my intro to it.
MK: Yeah, there's a lot of titillation to this film, but it also had to be there. Sex is funny--people giggle. Because it's so much a part of that whole story, of the time and place and people; the sex is funny. It is the rise and fall of Larry Levenson. It is his story and the story of the times.
He was the proselytizer of the couples movement in all its stages. When you're up up up, everybody wants to be your frtiend. But he had to know that weren't really his frends.
At the beginning there all this innocence and that fun, club-like atmosphere. And then, after it ended, after the "up".... and then ultimately the downfall. No one can sustain [that kind of scene forever.]
He was the king and have fun and then after it ended -- and that was the arc.
JH: I knew Larry for a number of years, and I was always trying to understand him. And believe [him]. When he first told me the story, it was hard to believe him, and I wanted corroboration.
I genuinely liked Larry, and that made me ever more curious, and I wanted to put the pieces together and corroborate him. Larry lived in the moment. He did want people to be his friends. At some point, yes, it was innocent at the beginning, it was a great, alternative lifestyle and it was fun, but then you get corrupted by commerce by...
Q: The Mafia.
JH: Exactly. The wise guys who come in and years go by... The club was open at the Ansonia for eight years. At some point you lose the innocence it becomes a grind. Time passes. When Larry and Mary [his wife and partner in the club--she was an active participant] break up, that's the end of the innocence.
Mary loved Larry before he became anything and she partnered with him. No strings attached they actually met at one his underground events and she moved in with him...
Q: Is Larry's first wife still living?
JH: Gloria? Yes. She's in the movie...
Q: Right, but you lose her along the way
MK: She lives in Florida now, and she talked to Larry right until the end.
JH: We put time into making this palatable... When Plato's moved from the Ansonia to 34th St, they {Larry and his partners] had an idea that this was the beginning of something great. Then it becomes almost hubris. They thought this same kind of club could take off in every city around the country. So it becomes too much about commerce and less about having fun. On 34th St, it becomes basically, a tourist trap.
I'm not sure what the analogy would be: Maybe... you have this small but popular restaurant that suddenly wants to becomes a chain...
Q: The interviews with the various characters in the film -- how did they happened, how did you get them to go on camera and how did they take shape?
MK: This movie wouldn't be anything without the people who let us put their stories in here. Jon had some original contacts, of course, and when those ran out, we put ads in the paper all up and down the east coast and in California, where we thought that transplanted New Yorkers of a certain age might reside and respond.
And we really did get a lot of response -- hundreds of people called from all over. We followed it all up--"You call this guy, I'll call that guy" -- trying to weed out and find the people who were real. It was frustrating, because you sometimes would follow these people for a good long time, and then suddenly, "Oh, my husband will not let me be a part of this."
Or, "Oh--I couldn't let you put me on film." And that, after we'd spent hours and hours doing that. We had celebrities and all the notable folks but ultimately, we wanted to get the regular people who spent time there. And we did get a lot of people. And we wanted to make this an honest film where people really appeared in it, rather than having their faces obscured.
Q: You had to do a lot of research... Regarding the archival interviews, you must had a problem getting rights with all the nudity and sex...
MK: We had some really seasoned researchers go through everything. But we were really lucky that Bill Lustig [director of exploitation films] owned the whole Midnight Blue collection. We had to go through boxes and boxes and boxes of all the old tapes from this collection, in every imaginable configuration. It took weeks and weeks to go through everything -- any scrap we could get, from anywhere.
All the tapes had to be pulled and cleaned and transferred and -- it was a technological nightmare because there were so many formats: half-inch, quarter-inch, even some were on the old Beta format.
Q: How long in total have you worked on this film?
MK: Since late 2003 we were corresponding.
JH: I met Larry in 1994.
Q: So you've been dealing with sorting out these rights for a long time.
JH: When I first wanted to do this project, I met with much resistance from his family. I met his son, the prince and then Larry told me about Howard Smith, who had written about him in The Village Voice.
So I basically hung around Howard, who had carried the baton before me... I think time helped a lot. Larry and some of the family members still had some open wounds, and it took time for these to heal. Now, the family definitely appreciates Larry much more. What I've heard from them is that they feel very protective of Larry. When they see him on the screen they want to reach out and protect him.
MK: Rather than portraying him as some sort of sexual deviant, you can see that in someway he was just a regular guy. When you see the film, you can make your own choice about the man. Some people walk away from the film liking Larry, and some don't.
Q: I think you can like him -- and still feel that he was full of shit.
MK: Of course!
JH: Hard as this might be to believe, I think that Larry genuinely believed in what he was saying.