From 1977 until New Year’s Eve, 1985, when it was shut down by the Health Department as part of the New York City’s war on AIDS, Plato’s Retreat was the best-known “swingers’ club” in America. From its home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Plato’s presented itself as a place where regular people could escape their cares for a while and get a piece of this sexual revolution they’d been hearing about. In the new documentary American Swing, co-directed and co-produced by Mathew Kaufman and Jon Hart, regular visitors to Plato’s (including such worthies as Buck Henry, Melvin Van Peebles, and Professor Irwin Corey, as well as the photographer Donna Ferrato, Screw publisher Al Goldstein, porn star Jamie Gillis, porn actress turned performance artist Annie Sprinkle, and Dian Hanson, the former Leg Show editor who appeared in Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb) recall their experiences for the camera, and it’s entrancing to discover how sweet some of their memories of the place turn out to be.
Even sweeter are the recollections of some non-celebrities who got their freak on at Plato’s and then found something else to do with their nights when the seventies crashed into the mid-eighties and the prospect of unplanned sex with strangers turned into a potential dance with death, but who have no regrets today. A lot of these people did not, shall we say, have the kinds of bodies that Central Casting would send over for an orgy scene, but they were all accepted and made to feel welcome at Plato’s. The club’s original owner and its public face, Larry Levenson, was a big, beefy, affable guy with a come one, come all policy. (No jokes, please.) Someone in the movie says that Levenson and his merry band made orgies possible “for the man on the street.” Because the overweight, the non-rich, and the badly toupeed were greeted with open arms, Plato’s in its heyday was sort of the antithesis of Studio 54, the late-70s New York disco that proudly, and smugly, brought the values of high school into what was supposed to be the real world. Of course, even Valhalla has its limits. The journalist and documentary filmmaker Howard Smith (Marjoe, Gizmo!) recalls that there was one and only person he ever saw at Plato’s who couldn’t get laid: Abbie Hoffman, who begged Smith to take him there at a time when Hoffman was still a fugitive from justice. After a couple of hopeless hours, Abbie asked Smith, “Do you think it’d be okay if I told them who I am?”
Larry Levenson himself died in 1999, of a heart attack, when he was 62. Luckily, the filmmakers were able to let him speak for himself in the footage they unearthed, including home movies from Plato’s, the outrageous local TV commercials that were made for the club, and Levenson’s appearances on talk shows, where such contributors to society as Phil Donahue and David Susskind can be seen denouncing him to his face about what a horrible thing he’s doing, while Levenson sits there listening politely, looking as if he’s waiting patiently for the apology he expects to receive when this fellow screaming at him realizes that he’s gotten his notes mixed up and is not addressing the kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby. In some scenes, he’s backed up by Mary, his steady girlfriend in the early days of the club. A lovely brunette with a knee-cap-melting smile, Mary served as something of a stabilizing influence on Larry, and when things went south for them and she disappeared from the picture, it was an omen of the slide to come. 
After Plato’s was shuttered, Levenson was abandoned by, in the words of Al Goldstein, all the women who had been keeping him company “for the money he didn’t have, and the drugs he did have,” and was reduced to living in the basement of a house with the upper floors rented out while making ends meet by driving a cab. That’s when he met Jon Hart, a reporter and New Yorker who remembered those surreal TV ads from his youth and first interviewed Levensky from the back seat of his taxi. (“We were degenerates,” Levenson told him about the good old days. “But we were good people.”) Hart stayed in close contact with Levensky for the last four years of his life, then teamed up with Kaufman, a veteran at TV and short film documentaries, to try to tell the Plato’s Retreat story, which for the filmmakers is very much Larry Levenson’s story, one that clearly affected Hart, in particular, very deeply.
When you first met Larry, you wrote an article about him. Did you start thinking about doing the movie then, or was that an idea that you formed after he’d died?
JON HART: I didn’t start doing the investigating, the leg work, until after he passed away in ’99. But the first time I was in his cab–he wanted to tell his story, and we spent four or five hours just driving around–I could tell that this was more than just another story. There was a lot there. Right from the get-go, I could tell that it needed a bigger canvass than the printed page. Then I met Mathew through a mutual friend.
MATHEW KAUFMAN: I was looking for a project, too. And I like sort of weird, subcultural movements and the people behind them; they’re just regular people, really. And Larry was such a fabulous character, with this story that was perfect for a movie: he was Plato’s Retreat.
So I spent a lot of my own money making a little trailer, shooting and cutting some stuff so that I could show it to [potential backers] and they could see what we had in mind, what it could look like. I’ve made documentaries before, but in terms of having a name that these people can recognize, I’m not Ken Burns, y’know? Luckily, we found our way to HDNet, where somebody was able to get it to Mark Cuban. Basically, over a weekend, he looked it and said to us, go ahead–start right now! Of course, we’d already really started, running around, interviewing people. It’s crazy to put your own money into a project like this, but I couldn’t help myself. I loved this story.
Unlike Jon, you never met Larry. So I guess you were sort of the surrogate for the movie’s intended audience, because you got to know him through the old clips of him that appear in the movie.
MK: And through what I experienced talking to the people that we interview. Talking to people who did meet him, you can just hear what a fascinating character and interesting guy he was. People remember who, say, Hilly Kristal was, but Larry Levenson was more or a radical, more of a groundbreaker, than many of these other figures, and he died alone and forgotten. He lives on, but nobody’s ever told this story. People who remember Plato’s Retreat just think of it as this sex club full of sex-crazy swingers. But Larry really believed that it was a model for something that could help the world. I don’t mean to make it sound as if he was completely innocent…
In the movie, he comes across as really uncynical and even romantic.
JH: Oh, he was romantic. People who knew him would like, roll their eyes about it. He wasn’t totally innocent, but there was a naivete there. Plato’s was his passion, and it did become corrupted. And he was left unprotected.
What about at the end? Was he bitter at all?
JH: He was human. He loved life. In his DNA, he was a happy person, an optimist. He had moments of frustration, but in the end he appreciated life and the few friends who stuck around him.
MK: I think that part of the magic went when Mary went.
JH: Mary was the love of his life, whether he knew it or not. Once Mary left, he was just the owner of Plato’s. When I talked to him about Mary, I had to be relentless about drawing him out. But I don’t think we realized how much that relationship meant until we were watching some of that old [TV talk show] footage…
MK: And you can see there, it’s obvious how much she loved him.
JH: It’s obvious, and then he says something about how there’s no way that he can get everything he needs from just one woman, and you see her face–you can see the relationship unraveling, right there. And she was the woman who loved him for who he really was. She’d known him before Plato’s, when he was just a guy running underground swing parties.
How did you find your interview subjects?
MK. We placed ads in papers all around the country, in place where we thought there would be transplanted New Yorkers. “If you’ve ever been to Plato’s Retreat and have a story, please call!” And we got lots of calls, hundreds of calls; people were coming out of the woodwork. And some of them, they’d talk for fifteen minutes, tell us a great story, and then they wouldn’t agree to go on camera–“My wife would kill me!” So, we got a lot of that, but we did get a lot of people who said, yeah, I’ll do it.
Why was it so important to you to only interview people on-camera, with their faces shown?
MK: Why would we make a documentary about such a celebrated place and then degrade it that way? We could have had people just saying anything. That’s not the kind of documentary that I’ve made before, I didn’t want to make it now, I think it sets a bad precedent. These people are talking about something that they maybe haven’t talked about in twenty or thirty years, and we wanted the viewer to be able to have a direct emotional connection to them. These stories are heartfelt, and these people really miss those times. They took a risk and went outside themselves and tried something different. Finding people was really different, but once we found them, they really shared their lives with us. Cheapening that by putting a bar across somebody’s face…no. We weren’t gonna do that.
It would have been easy to turn a movie like this into a freak show, and make fun of some of them, but you clearly didn’t want to do that.
MK: [shrugs] They’re nice people.
[“American Swing” opens in select theaters Friday, March 27.]