Avant-garde cinema was shot on cheap, decaying Lower East Side building rooftops

Evidence

Regarding his eccentric roommate with benign disdain, Conrad offered to help Smith transport a gigantic gray painting of a vase with flowers, identified by Smith as the backdrop for his new movie, some fifteen blocks downtown to the leaky, tar-paper roof of the Windsor Theater at 412 Grand Street. There, over the course of eight or nine weekend afternoons, Flaming Creatures was staged and shot. (Having established the Charles as an ongoing concern, Walter Langsford had acquired the venerable Windsor—said to be the city’s oldest extant movie house—with an eye to expanding his Lower East Side exhibition empire.) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 415

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete instance of the reader’s core thesis: cheap spaces (a leaky tar-paper roof on an aging theater) as preconditions for avant-garde production.