[A
story Jacobson obviously loves to tell evolves into a memorate. -- bc]
Rolling Stone, 6 August 1981, p. 18
Times
Square
A Report from the Sleaziest Block in America
By
Mark Jacobson
[In
a conversation with the head of New
York City's Office of Midtown Enforcement, the writer admits
to being an aficionado of the local grind theaters.] "Great places if you
stay out of the balcony. Angel
Dust City.
Very important to the development of my sensibility, very important to the
formation of my personal vision of Times Square. Everyone knocks them, but they're
great. Haven't you heard the great Forty-second
Street movie line, the one everyone claims to have
been there when it was said? A voice comes out of the balcony saying, 'Sorry? You
piss on my date and you say you're sorry?'" [...]
http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/trends/columns/cityside/1740/
New
York Magazine, 3
January 2000
Happy Ending
Even in the new Times
Square, signs of the possibly imminent apocalypse are everywhere.
But thanks to Rudy and Hollywood,
we may not recognize it when it comes.
By
Mark Jacobson
[...]
Down 42nd street,
the new Arnold
movie, the cannily timed and titled End
of Days, is at the brand-new Loews thirteen-screen "E Walk"
theater. Once upon a not too distant past, this street, and the movie theaters
formerly situated here, sticky-floored, semen-smeared dumps like the Harris,
Selwyn, and Liberty, invoked their own kind of post-apocalyptic landscape. One
could watch Bruce Lee coil his coil of doom and hear a scream from the balcony:
"You're sorry? You piss on my date and you say you're sorry?!" [...]
http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/anniversary/35th/n_8603/
New
York Magazine, 7
April 2003
Times Up
Times Square’s sin and vice and squalor
helped define the New York
experience. They still do. In our minds.
By
Mark Jacobson
[...]
Not every package-deal tourist sees the charm in having his feet stick to the
floor at the old Selwyn (or Harris, or Lyric) during the eye-gouge scene from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as some
balcony denizen shouts, “You’re sorry? You piss on my date and you say you’re
sorry?” [...]
http://nymag.com/movies/profiles/54318/index2.html
New
York Magazine, 15
February 2009
No Kiss Kiss, All Bang Bang
Spielberg-loving, Spike Lee-attacking
critic Armond White is the film world’s brother from another planet.
By
Mark Jacobson
[...]
[N]ot so very long time ago, the film freak could put his feet on a sticky
floor at the old Brandt Times Square theater and see a triple bill of Sergio
Leone’s immortal trilogy, Fistful of
Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The
Good, the Bad, and the Ugly for $1.50. The in-theater entertainment was
also memorable, such as on the immortal evening when, right in the middle of Enter the Dragon, yours truly heard some
skell in the balcony scream, “You’re sorry?
You piss on my date and you say you’re sorry?”
[...]
[Here
are a few other occurrences of this anecdote I've found. The first is from a
novel. -- bc]
Geoffrey
Wolf, The Final Club (Knopf, 1990),
p. 91.
[...]
And another, unlucky in drink at the Columbia
game, roused from blackout at Palmer Stadium by a Cap and Gown senior screaming:
"You're sorry? Sorry! You piss
on my date's raccoon coat and silk hose and advise me you're sorry? Oh, you'll
know sorry, sir. We'll show you sorry. You'll eat the next two years out of tin
cans. Remember me." [...]
http://www.ariel-leve.com/st_interviews/dustinhoffman.html
Ariel Leve as featured in The Sunday
Times magazine
[Leve's
interview of actor Dustin Hoffman originally appeared in the 3 December 2006
issue of London's Sunday Times Magazine under the title "Confessions
of a Driven Man." -- bc]
Dustin
Hoffman
[...]
He recalls: "To this day, Bob Duvall says it was one of the best times of
when we were all living together. Because I'd come home and they'd say, 'What
did so-and-so do today?' " Hoffman would act out the characters he'd met
there. He tells me how Hackman would see six films a day on his day off.
"He'd spend his entire day in the cinema. It was a place where the
homeless went, because for 35 cents they could sleep there all day. He was in
there at 10am and he heard one homeless guy in the balcony saying, 'You're
sorry? You're sorry? What do you mean, you're sorry? You piss all over my date
and you say you're sorry?' [...]"
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004413.html
Language Log
"Sorry" Spectacles
Posted
by Geoff Nunberg at April 16, 2007 06:35 PM
Listening
to the latest in high-profile public apologies -- from Alberto Gonzales, Paul
Wolfowitz, and Don Imus -- took me back to an incident that happened in my
undergraduate days at Columbia
about a million years ago. A bunch of my friends and I used to spend long
afternoons and evenings at the movie theaters along West 42d Street, where for
less than a buck you could see a double or triple feature of gangster movies,
war movies or westerns. That was well before the area was sanitized and
Disneyfied, and the theaters were -- well, "seedy" hardly begins to
say it. The seats and carpeting were shabby and permanently saturated with a
mixture of fluids, processed and unprocessed. The balconies were sharply raked,
the rows so close together as to make even the economy section of a United
Airlines flight seem positively spacious. And the clientele was a mix of movie
buffs, lonely guys, and down-and-outers who considered 99 cents a stone bargain
for a warm place to sleep off a bender. So it was that a friend and I found
ourselves in the balcony of a largely empty theater one rainy weekday evening
watching an Anthony Mann western when we heard a middle-class male voice behind
us saying in a loud, indignant tone: "Sorry? You piss on my date and
you're SORRY?"
I
didn't actually see the malefactor, and it occurs to me only now (a little
sadly) that the remark might have been simply a prank. [...]
