Directed by Bette Gordon and written by Kathy Acker, Variety is the story of Christine (Sandy McLeod), a woman in the city looking for work and ending up in the ticket booth of the Variety, a job that her boyfriend Mark (Will Patton) hates. None of the men that she encounters turn her on, even though a co-worker named Jose (Luis Guzmán) tries. Then she meets Louie (Richard M. Davidson), an older wealthy man who takes her to a baseball game before disappearing. She becomes obsessed with him and her sexuality is awakened by this man and a series of prank phone calls (Spalding Gray is the voice).

According to Downtown Express, “The film is a sort of Who’s Who of downtown street cred: music by John Lurie, cinematography by frequent Jarmusch collaborator Tom de Cillo, script by former sex worker and Pushcart Prize-winning feminist novelist Kathy Acker, and roles played by Spalding Gray, Luis Guzmán, Mark Boone Junior and photographer Nan Goldin, who also took production stills.” Despite that, the theater isn’t really in Times Square. It’s the Variety Photoplays, which was located on Third Avenue between 13th and 14th Streets in the East Village, the same theater as Taxi Driver where Jodie Foster jumps into the cab to escape her pimp.

As a feminist filmmaker, Gordon got criticism and praise for making a film about pornography. Yet I loved Christine’s character, someone fascinated and also upset by the sex that she spends so much of her time around, but it’s not real sex, it’s created for the male gaze. However, it inspires her, even as she reads her sexually frank writing to a boyfriend who doesn’t seem to care, is surrounded by men who just see her as the law of the invisible sex object and the strange man who keeps ghosting her. This movie has stuck with me since I watched it and I wonder, did Louie come back to meet her in that alley?