Before it became an iconic Auckland comedy venue, The Classic was full of smut, anoraks and sticky carpets. What happened?
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“All new adult features,” screamed the sign. “Explicit sexual content may offend,” said the fine print. Inside, another hoarding promised: “Continuous sex films daily … from 11am”. Posters promoted a screening of John, New Zealand’s first, and only, professionally produced gay porn film. Sex toys were dotted around the venue. A bunch of bananas sat on a couch.
On stage, in case anyone had wandered in past all of this and still thought they’d arrived for a night of family fun and G-rated entertainment, the words “Aotearoa, it’s time to get on top of porn” were displayed on stage in large block letters.
Auckland comedy venue The Classic looked a little different than usual last Saturday night. The microphone stand and stool were absent from the stage. Posters advertising open mic nights and comedy showcases were taken down. Photos depicting some of the Aotearoa comedy icons that have performed there – from Michèle A’Court to Ewen Gilmour and Willy de Wit – were removed from the walls.
What took their place was decidedly more R18. It was the launch party for Porn Revolution, comedians Chris Parker and Eli Matthewson’s excellent new porn documentary, and The Classic was chosen for a reason – and it’s not because the Queen Street venue has been the cornerstone of New Zealand’s comedy scene since 1996.
For nearly a decade, The Classic operated as Auckland’s most public and prominent porn cinema. That’s right: from the mid-80s until the mid-90s, the building at 321 Queen Street was the only place anyone living in the country’s biggest city could officially go to pay and watch sex films.
“It was an old motley cinema [but] it was a cash cow,” says Scott Blanks, who took over the theatre in 1996 and spent months renovating to turn it into The Classic as it is today. “You could come here and for seven or eight bucks or whatever they charged … see a porn film. It was simpler times … titillating entertainment, that would be pushing the boundaries of public morality and laws.”
As a kid in the 70s, Blanks visited The Classic to watch repeats of iconic films like Westside Story, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Wizard of Oz. But, by the mid-80s, home video cassette players were being introduced. To promote the purchase of films on VHS, prints for theatres to play were taken out of circulation.
Suddenly, The Classic’s business model was defunct. But the owner, famed schoolteacher and projectionist Jan Grefstad, had other plans. “He basically said, ‘What else can I do here?’ He was fairly enterprising. He would have known pretty well that as the video market was expanding there was a market for porn,” says Blanks.
Film veteran Ant Timpson says a classification change in the mid-80s opened the door for public screenings of sex films. He remembers Grefstad taking out advertisements to promote his cinema’s quick pivot that read: “From The Wizard of Oz one day to The Wizard of Ass the next”.
By screening films like Deep Throat and Dickman and Throbbin, Grefstad courted trouble with his landlord, Auckland Council. In his obituary, NZ Herald reports Grefstad labelled the council “a moralistic, second-level censor” at this time. But Blanks says the building’s cheap rent meant business boomed. “It was a pretty rundown building … penny rent.”
Back then, that part of Queen Street was particularly quiet. “This was not the go-to area of the city so people probably felt fairly safe,” says Blanks. “The guys who came to the cinema probably felt they could just walk up and walk in without any problem. It’s fairly discreet frontage. There are no windows.” But the walls were so thin Blanks could hear the films play from his downstairs office. “You’d hear the groaning. We’d go, ‘I wonder what movie that is?'”
In the mid 90s Blanks came up with a plan to take over the building, including performing spaces downstairs, and turn it into a live theatre, cabaret and comedy hub. It was an easy pitch: “We told them, ‘One of your tenants is a porn cinema, which I don’t think is very good image for the city council’.” The council eagerly handed over the keys, but one person was less enthused. “Jan reluctantly left,” says Blanks. “He was not happy with us.”
Grefstad left the theatre pretty much as it was. Blanks roped in his comedy mates to renovate the building, spending months removing seats, taking posters off the wall and dismantling a fake floor and staircase. He still remembers the moment he lifted up the carpet. “It cracked,” he says. Instead of rolling it up, he had to fold it, like cardboard.
That’s not the only revolting job he had to do. “I cleaned the men’s urinal that’s in there and I had to use a paint scraper,” he says. “There was a coating.” Of what, he declines to say.
Finally, in 1996, The Classic was born, a new wave of New Zealand comedians began coming through the doors, and the rest is 25 years of Aotearoa comedy history. The only sign of the venue’s semi-sordid past is a photo Blanks keeps up the wall of the original frontage, the one used as inspiration for the launch of Parker and Matthewson’s documentary last weekend, the only photographic evidence that an official Auckland porn theatre ever existed.
But Timpson kept a memento from this time too, one that he still makes regular use of. “I turned up, grabbed the last row of seats, threw them in the back of my Mazda 323 and drove off with sparks flying out as they dragged along the road,” he says. They’re still in his back garden, covered in weeds, but Timpson wants to make one thing clear: “I took the seat covers off.”
