![]() The Roxy Theater, at its 1967 grand opening. | |
![]() | |
Address | 1527 Washington Avenue Miami Beach, Florida United States |
---|---|
Owner | Leroy Griffith |
Operator | Leroy Griffith |
Capacity | 725 |
Current use | Club Madonna (adult nightclub) |
Construction | |
Built | 1948 |
Opened | July 21, 1967 |
Renovated | 1994 |
Reopened | March 17, 1994 (as Club Madonna) |
Years active | 1967-present |
The Roxy Theater is a former movie theater located at 1527 Washington Avenue in Miami Beach, Florida. [1] [2] In 1994, the Roxy was converted into an adult nightclub and renamed Club Madonna. It is owned and operated by theater and nightclub proprietor and former Broadway theater producer Leroy Griffith.
The Roxy, billed as "Miami Beach's newest and most fabulous theatre," opened on Friday, July 21, 1967. [3] For its grand opening, the theater premiered The Way West , starring Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, and Richard Widmark.
"The theater is luxurious, designed for comfort and seats 400," wrote Miami News columnist Herb Kelly. He also reported that Griffith planned to add vaudeville later.
Griffith generated publicity there when, in 1967, he publicly invited city officials to a screening of the film, Man and Wife. "It was advertised as the art of making love 49 different ways," he said in a 1993 interview. [4] "I don't remember inviting them, but I vaguely remember the incident. I think that was the first hard-core movie ever shown down here." According to press accounts at the time, the officials seemed to think the movie was boring, but not obscene.
In early 1994, Griffith converted the Roxy from an adult movie theater to an all-nude strip club (Club Madonna), which it remains today. He successfully withstood an attempt by attorneys for the pop singer Madonna to prevent him from using the name. [5] According to an April 1994 item in the Daily Mail ,
"The singer, who wants to open a parade of strip clubs herself, had her lawyer fire off a letter to the club's owner, Leroy Griffith, telling him he would have to change the name of his establishment 'because it gives the impression that my client endorses your club and its activities.' An attorney for the club hit back saying: 'If Madonna wants to take down the sign, she'll have to stop by with a ladder and do it herself.'" [6]
Newsweek reported that her lawyers claimed she had been "injured" by her perceived association with the club and that its name was "a serious violation of our client's rights" under U.S. trademark law. Griffith's attorney countered that Madonna is a name "that's been in the public domain for a couple of thousand years." [7] Griffith declared to a local TV station, "Our name is Club Madonna, Incorporated, and it will be there as long as we're legally allowed to do so, and I think that'll be for a long, long time." [8]
Scenes from the 1995 movie South Beach Academy were shot inside Club Madonna.
Donald Trump's one-time sex partner and adult film star Stormy Daniels was featured in a two-night appearance at the club in 2018, during her “Make America Horny Again” tour. "I got her at the right price," Griffith told a local newspaper. [9]
Lena Mary Calhoun Horne was an American singer, actress, dancer and civil rights activist. Horne's career spanned more than seventy years and covered film, television and theatre.
The Whisky a Go Go is a historic nightclub in West Hollywood, California, United States. It is located at 8901 Sunset Boulevard on the Sunset Strip, corner North Clark Street, opposite North San Vicente Boulevard, northwest corner. The club played a central role in the Los Angeles music scene from the 1960s through the 1990s.
Melanie Richards Griffith is an American actress. Born in Manhattan to actress Tippi Hedren, she was raised mainly in Los Angeles, where she graduated from the Hollywood Professional School at age 16. In 1975, 17-year-old Griffith appeared opposite Gene Hackman in Arthur Penn's neo-noir film Night Moves. She later rose to prominence as an actor in films such as Brian De Palma's Body Double (1984), which earned her a National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress. Griffith's subsequent performance in the comedy Something Wild (1986) attracted critical acclaim before she was cast in 1988's Working Girl, which earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress and won her a Golden Globe.
Daniel "Danny" Tenaglia is an Italian American DJ and record producer.
The Roxy Theatre is a nightclub on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, California, owned by Lou Adler and his son, Nic.
The Viper Room is a nightclub and live music venue located on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, California, United States. It was established under its current name on August 14, 1993, being co-owned by actors and 21 Jump Street co-stars Johnny Depp and Sal Jenco. The Viper Room has undergone several changes in ownership, with the present owner being Viper Holdings, Ltd CEO James Cooper. It continues to host music of multiple genres, including metal, punk, and alternative rock. While predominantly known as a music venue, the Viper Room also has a lower level which is home to a large whiskey bar.
Speed-the-Plow is a 1988 play by David Mamet that is a satirical dissection of the American movie business. As stated in The Producer's Perspective, "this is a theme Mamet would revisit in his later films Wag the Dog (1997) and State and Main (2000)". As quoted in The Producer's Perspective, Jack Kroll of Newsweek described Speed-the-Plow as "another tone poem by our nation's foremost master of the language of moral epilepsy."
Stephanie A. Gregory Clifford, known professionally as Stormy Daniels, is an American pornographic film actress, director and former stripper. She has won many industry awards and is a member of the NightMoves Hall of Fame, AVN Hall of Fame, XRCO Hall of Fame, and Vanity Fair Hall of Fame. In 2009, a recruitment effort led her to consider challenging incumbent David Vitter in the 2010 Senate election in her native Louisiana.
The Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theatre was a strip club at 895 O'Farrell Street near San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood. Having opened as an X-rated movie theater by Jim and Artie Mitchell on July 4, 1969, the O'Farrell was one of America's most notorious adult-entertainment establishments. By 1980, the nightspot had popularized close-contact lap dancing, which would become the norm in strip clubs nationwide. Journalist Hunter S. Thompson, a longtime friend of the Mitchells and frequent visitor at the club, went there frequently during the summer of 1985 as part of his research for a possible book on pornography. Thompson called the O'Farrell "the Carnegie Hall of public sex in America" and Playboy magazine praised it as "the place to go in San Francisco!"
Belle Barth was a Jewish American comedian who worked primarily during the 1950s and 1960s. She was known for her foul mouthed, bawdy, irreverent humor.
The Gaiety Theatre was a gay male burlesque theater in Times Square, New York City, for almost 30 years until it closed on March 17, 2005. The name on the awning over the entrance was Gaiety Theatre, but it was also called the Gaiety Male Burlesque or the Gaiety Male Theatre in advertisements. It was located at 201 W 46th Street, New York, NY 10036, on the second floor of the building that also housed what was the last Howard Johnson's restaurant in New York City. The Gaiety opened in late 1975 and closed in 2005 and was owned by Denise Rozis, run by both her and her younger sister, Evridiki Rozis.
Chris Paciello is an American former Cosa Nostra associate, member of The Untouchables car-theft ring, and government informant who was convicted of racketeering. During the 1990s, and again in 2012, he became a prominent night club owner in the South Beach section of Miami Beach, Florida.
George Hopkins was an American comedian and musician.
Thee Experience was a psychedelic nightclub in Hollywood, California, United States. It was located at 7551 Sunset Boulevard, on the Sunset Strip.
The Beacham Theatre is a cinema built in 1921 by Braxton Beacham Sr. in the city of Orlando, Florida. The current address of the theater is 46 North Orange Avenue, and it is located at the southwest corner of Orange Avenue and Washington Street. The building's current lack of impressive architecture is offset by its significant cultural history. The Beacham Theatre was considered an important contributing structure when the Downtown Orlando historic district was created in 1980 and the building was granted local landmark status in 1987.
Leroy Charles Griffith is an American theater and nightclub proprietor, former Broadway and off-Broadway theater producer and director, and former burlesque and adult film producer. In a career spanning 75 years, he has owned, leased, or operated more than 70 theaters, cinemas, and nightclubs across the United States, dating from the burlesque era of the 1950s to the present.
The Boulevard Theater is a former movie theater located at 7770 Biscayne Boulevard in Miami, Florida. It is owned by theater and nightclub proprietor and former Broadway theater producer Leroy Griffith.
Tears of a Clown was a show by American singer Madonna, first held at the Forum Theatre in Melbourne, Australia on March 10, 2016. The singer had not included Australia during her previous five concert tours, until the Rebel Heart Tour (2015–2016), so she created the show for her Australian fans since they had waited so long for her to perform there. Madonna explained that the idea behind Tears of a Clown was to combine music and storytelling, being influenced by clowns. Tickets for the first show were made available to members of Madonna's official fan club, Icon, and were non-transferable, with the person's name printed on them.
An alleged one-night sexual encounter took place in 2006 between businessman and later U.S. president Donald Trump and pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels, followed by a conspiracy on the part of Trump to cover up the story in the month prior to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and Trump's falsification of business records as part of the conspiracy. The story broke in 2018, when The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump's former attorney Michael Cohen paid US$130,000 to Daniels as hush money to buy her silence during the 2016 Trump campaign.