American Swing
By Robert Levin
Special to amNewYork
Plato’s Retreat, the iconic swingers club of the late 1970s-mid 1980s, is such an apt subject for a documentary that one wonders why it’s taken more than two decades for someone to make “American Swing.”
Co-directors Jon Hart and Matthew Kaufman fill their telling of the New York institution’s story with astonishing (and astonishingly explicit) archival footage and candid onscreen interviews with many of the club’s central players. The film, which opened at the Quad Cinema Friday, simultaneously mourns the loss of the club and the era of sexual innocence it signified. amNewYork spoke to the filmmakers.
The story of Plato’s Retreat is both humorous and sad. Can you talk about bringing both elements to the movie?
Jon Hart: The humor was there. The people were fun. They went there to have fun, and laugh and smile and dance, and you’re scantily clad or nude and you’re vulnerable. You’re naked. So there’s humor there. It’s inherent. There definitely were sexual relations going there, so that had to be portrayed, and the era is over, that era is over and it was sad.
How did you structure the film to best draw out both emotions?
Matthew Kaufman: We set out to make a fun movie. This wasn’t some sort of war torn documentary on some African country. This was something that we wanted to show was fun. The late '70s was fun. New York in the late '70s was fun and [at 39-years-old] I’m sad to have missed it, by the way. But inherently, sex is funny. People giggle. Yeah there’s this titillation to this film but we hope that people take from that initial titillation is that story, that really special story of a place and time that doesn’t exist anymore.
Beyond health and financial concerns, what was a major cause of Plato’s downfall?
JH: When it goes to 34th street [the club relocated there from its Ansonia Hotel home in 1980], it’s hubris. They think this is going to go up in every city. It becomes too much about commerce and less about having fun, really. It becomes a tourist trap, basically, on 34th street. You have a small restaurant and all of a sudden it becomes a chain. You [had] the Plato’s merchandise.
How did you round up so many interview subjects?
MK: This movie would be nothing without the people who shared their memories with us and their real emotional stories. Jon and I had some contacts and then when we ran out of [them] we started putting ads in the papers up and down the East Coast to Florida and in L.A. where we thought there might be transplanted New Yorkers of the age that might respond. And we really did get a lot of response. We got hundreds of people calling and Jon and I would swap numbers [and], “You call this guy, I call this guy.” It was a long process of weeding it down [to people] that were really true and would [talk] on camera.
Why do you think Plato’s was so popular?
MK: The people that went weren’t always beautiful. They might have had their backs against the wall in high school. You know how everyone’s typecast? But those are the more interesting people to talk to when you go back for your 20th reunion. They came because it was a frickin party and New York was a party town. That was where the party was. They didn’t have to have sex. They could just go and look, and have some food and [go] swimming. It was a complete carnival. I can just imagine it was a scene.
