Queen of the Deuce
Directed by Valerie Kontakos
Written by Christos Asterious, Valerie Kontakos and Despina Pavlaki
Running time 1 hour and 18 minutes

by Daniel Pecoraro, Staff Writer

I think at this point you all know the story of the big bad New York City of the 1970s. The city was broke, businesses and families were leaving for the suburbs, crime was up, graffiti was everywhere, hip-hop got invented, etc., etc. Amid all this upheaval, the pornography and sex shop business exploded in Times Square and along 8th Avenue and would be the cash cow of the district until the Giuliani administration and Disneyfication.

Queen of the Deuce is part of that story, but it’s able to transcend that narrative thanks to its colorful subject and a few storytelling tricks up its sleeve. Combining archival footage, family photos and home movies, contemporary talking-heads, and animation (I’m such a sucker for animation used in documentaries!) paired with oral histories, Valerie Kontakos vividly portrays the life and world of Chelly Wilson, the titular queen of 42nd Street’s porn theaters. We see Chelly’s life from her Sephardic Jewish upbringing in Salonika (Thessaloniki), Greece, as Rachel Serrero (as a tomboy, she was given the sobriquet “Solomon Serrero”). As a young woman, Chelly had a marriage arranged by her father, was arguably a victim of marital rape (though it’s not described as such in the film), and left her husband to move to Athens, taking her younger daughter Paulette with her.

Chelly presciently escaped the Holocaust in 1939, hiding Paulette with a family friend and taking a boat to New York City with just $5 in her pocket. She parlayed that $5 into a concession stand outside the Dyckman Oval in Washington Heights, and her business sense took her to owning as many as five theaters in the city, plus a Greek restaurant (Mykonos) which became a major nightlife spot. From her start in the film industry — producing the wartime newsreel compilation Greece on the March (1941), which she’d screen at the Cameo Theater on 8th Avenue, where her second husband, Rex Wilson, worked — we get a microcosm of New York cinema history. Through the lens of her theaters (the Cameo, the Adonis, the Eros, the Venus, the Lido West and East), we see a shift from American film fare, to bringing Greek cinema to the diasporic community, to screening softcore and then hardcore porn, making so much money that cash got carried up to her apartment above the Adonis in shopping bags, as the seedy world of The Deuce came into being.

It’s an only-in-New-York style rags-to-riches tale, yes, and Queen of the Deuce plays that card with regularity. Yet it’s also the tale of Chelly’s two daughters (Paulette, kept safe in Athens, and Bondi, who was born in America) and their family bond. It’s a story of Chelly as a not-quite-gender-conforming lesbian Greek Jew — Solomon Serrero never fully disappeared — and the world she cultivated with friends and lovers. It’s a story of surviving the Holocaust when coming from a city that saw only 5% of the Jewish population make it out of the war. It’s a history of pornography, especially gay porn, in the mid-to-late 20th Century, in one of its epicenters (the Adonis was itself the setting of a gay porno, A Night at the Adonis). And it’s a family tale from the perspective of Chelly’s grandchildren, who were clearly fascinated and awed by their grandmother’s bizarre life, even if they didn’t fully understand it.

Kontakos does well in utilizing all the arrows in her filmic quiver to tell the story of the singular figure that is Chelly Wilson, with Queen of the Deuce serving as an engaging and at times moving feature on a unique figure. Based on the list of production firms, it appears that Queen of the Deuce will eventually be released to Canadian streamers via the CBC’s Documentary Channel. I look forward to that day, while hoping that this Canadian-Greek coproduction finds its way from the festival circuit to a theatrical release.

Queen of the Deuce was screened at the 2023 Athena Film Festival and will hopefully be released soon.