6/22/2023 0 Comments Gaslight cafe sign![]() It was written by Pittsburgh-based lawyer and screenwriter Vincent Restauri. The film was directed by David Castro, who also plays Albert Grossman, the surly but prescient manager of Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary. Having the Gaslight and John Mitchell allow these performances of all races and genders to express who they are and what they are, was kind of a powerful moment in time.” There wasn’t really a safe place for artists to go to express themselves. “The Civil Rights movement, feminism, the gay rights movement, the McCarthyism, TV blacklist. “Basically, during that time, what I’ve learned is that there were a lot of things going on,” says Buglione. ![]() To tell the world about who this guy was, is a complete honor.” People don’t know the story of John Mitchell. “But like most people, I didn’t know the story about what really went on. “I knew about the Gaslight and that it existed on MacDougal Street,” says Buglione, a native New Yorker. Soon, snapping one’s fingers was the mark of hipness to people in the know around the world. The way the building was constructed, loud clapping would carry through the air shafts and annoy the neighbors, so patrons snapped their fingers instead. On any given night, the crowd could contain luminaries like Andy Warhol, Marlene Dietrich and Salvador Dali, whose pet ocelot had his own chair. ![]() From that perch, patrons could witness the rise of the folk music movement of Bob Dylan, Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul and Mary), Dave Van Ronk, Woody Guthrie, Tom Paxton and the Beat Generation poets and writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg. That spot Mitchell opened was The Gaslight Café, in a cramped, dingy, converted coal cellar. On April 7, there will be “A Night at The Gaslight Cafe … The Festival Concert” featured as the finale of the Carnegie Mellon University International Film Festival, at the Kelly Strayhorn Theater in East Liberty with many of the performers from the film. “Not knowing that it would change the music industry, and change the world.”īuglione (who recently finished season three of Marvel’s “Daredevil”) plays Mitchell, in an independent film, “116 MacDougal” that’s filming in late spring or early summer in Pittsburgh. “He basically got out of his car and thought, ‘This might be a great place to open up a coffee shop,’ ” says actor Dave Buglione. ![]() As legend has it, Pittsburgh used car salesman John Mitchell was taking a road trip to New York City in the late ‘50s, when he got a flat tire on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. ![]()
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