At first blush, most people probably wouldn't consider a documentary about New York City's most notorious public sex club the ideal "date movie." But that's exactly what Mathew Kaufman calls "American Swing," the nostalgic, often amusing film he co-produced and co-directed with Jon Hart about the legendary swingers' haven Plato's Retreat.
"The movie's got everything," Kaufman said during a conference call with Hart from Manhattan. "And sex will definitely be the topic of conversation on the ride home."
Kaufman and Hart (no connection to the famed playwriting duo of the '30s) met in 2003 when a mutual colleague thought documentarian Kaufman might be intrigued by veteran reporter Hart's stash of audiovisual materials from the hundreds of hours he once spent interviewing Larry Levenson, Plato's brash, Bronx-born founder.
"I looked at all this stuff and realized no one's ever told the real story behind Plato's Retreat," Kaufman said. "No one remembers Larry Levenson, but he was a groundbreaker. He really changed the way people thought about sex."
Levenson's decidedly heterosexual club became an international destination after its 1977 opening in the basement of the Upper West Side's ornate Ansonia Hotel (and the former site of the gay Continental Baths). A quick tour of the adult playground would include a maze of walled-off "private" areas, a party-sized Jacuzzi, swimming pool, dance floor and, for the orgy set, the infamous "mattress room." There was also a hot-and-cold food buffet for, well, sustenance.
The clientele, a mix of participants and observers -- with couples preferred -- included workaday bridge-and-tunnel types as well as fast-lane Manhattanites. Celebrities such as Sammy Davis Jr., Richard Dreyfuss, Buck Henry and the cast of "Saturday Night Live" would drop by to check out the action. If the celebrities participated, Hart noted, "it was behind closed doors."
Self-styled "King of Swing" Levenson soon gained dubious fame not only for the wild success of the club he dubbed "a monument to sexual freedom" but also for the three-year prison sentence he served for tax evasion.
In 1985, beset by diminishing crowds, prostitution arrests and the exploding AIDS crisis, Plato's (which had by then relocated to a midtown warehouse) shut its doors.
By the time Hart met Levenson in 1995, the sex-obsessed, limelight-loving entrepreneur had become a rotund cab driver, estranged from his three sons and living in a basement apartment.
