AMERICAN SWING: Q&A with Co-Director Jon Hart

Jon Hart and Mathew Kaufman’s entertaining documentary American Swing chronicles the rise and fall of Larry Levenson, whose nightclub & sex club Plato’s Retreat became, along with Studio 54, one of the top New York City hangouts of the late 1970s.
Jon Hart (right) has kindly answered (via e-mail) a few brief questions about American Swing. See below.
American Swing is currently playing at the Laemmle Sunset 5 in West Hollywood.
Photos: Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
 
How difficult (or easy) was it to get all those people who had worked at or gone to Plato’s Retreat to be so candid about their experiences at the club? Did you run into many who refused to discuss the past?
Almost everyone was extremely apprehensive about being [...]

by Andre Soares | April 6, 2009   
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AMERICAN SWING d: Mathew Kaufman and Jon Hart

American Swing (2009)
Direction: Mathew Kaufman and Jon Hart
Screenplay: Keith Reamer
Interviewees: Buck Henry, Annie Sprinkle, Melvin van Peebles, Ron Jeremy, Jamie Gillis, Helen Gurley Brown, and others
 

 
By way of interviews, photos, and home movies, Mathew Kaufman and journalist Jon Hart’s American Swing humorously chronicles the rise and fall of all-American entrepreneur Larry Levenson, free-sex advocate and self-proclaimed "King of Swing," while painting a nostalgic — though hardly all-flattering — portrait of the heyday of Plato’s Retreat, New York City’s foremost sex club-disco of the late 1970s.
Earlier in the decade, wholesale meat purveyor Larry Levenson had decided to reinvent himself as a Sexual Liberation Messiah. Even so, it’s debatable whether Levenson actually saw himself as a Man with [...]

by Andre Soares | April 3, 2009   
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