To Film Forum's Showman, New York City Is World's Greatest Movie Set A case might be made that Bruce Goldstein, who has directed repertory programming at the Film Forum, now on Houston Street, for more than a quarter of a century, was destined to practice his craft the moment he first drew breath. He was born in Amityville, N.Y. Who, upon hearing "Amityville," does not think of the horror films set in that town on Long Island? "I never saw them," Mr. Goldstein said. But, he added, "I knew the producer, Sam Arkoff." That would be Samuel Z. Arkoff, a master of the low-budget flick whose philosophy was, "Thou shalt not put too much money into any one picture." "That was Sam's biggest box-office hit ever," Mr. Goldstein said of the original 1979 "Amityville Horror." When he told Mr. Arkoff (who died in 2001) where he was born, the man "flipped," he said. Mr. Goldstein's boyhood, though, was spent a few miles away, in Hicksville, N.Y. "The problem of growing up on Long Island is that you don't have the movie theaters," he said over lunch in SoHo. "If you grew up in the Bronx" - as his interviewer interjected that he had - "you went to the Loew's Paradise. We had theaters, but you had to drive to get to them. So I had to bug my parents. Then he discovered there were trains to Manhattan and its art houses. Thus did the Long Island Rail Road nurture his lifelong attachment to classic films. Mr. Goldstein, 61, is a showman, dedicated to giving movie-devoted audiences what he senses they want but also - why not? - what they ought to see. His stock in trade is the past: vintage films, best appreciated in the company of others. "I consider movies after "85 new movies," he said. Like many New York film lovers of his generation, Mr. Goldstein's self-education included pilgrimages to revival houses that once stretched along Manhattan, like the Bleecker Street Cinema in Greenwich Village and the New Yorker and the Thalia on the Upper West Side. When it came to basic maintenance, those theaters threw nickels around as if they were manhole covers. "I like to say the New Yorker was lit by fireflies," Mr. Goldstein said. At the Thalia, which he ran for a while, the floor was carpeted with the remains of spilled soda and chewing gum; customers had to do a moonwalk to keep from sticking to the floor. He was lured to the Film Forum in 1986 by its director, Karen Cooper. Later, he founded Rialto Pictures, a company dedicated to tracking down and distributing projection-worthy 35-mm. prints of vintage films - no small challenge. For many movie buffs, he is, to borrow from J. Hoberman, a former film critic for The Village Voice, "the indispensable man." Mr. Goldstein was invited to chat over a meal about his work and, while we were at it, some of his favorite New York movies. As timing would have it, he was putting the finishing touches on his 100th repertory calendar, a series that began on Friday with "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," the Steven Spielberg masterpiece from 1977. He suggested lunch at the Dutch, a handsome restaurant at Sullivan and Prince Streets. Was he a regular? Regular? Mr. Goldstein replied. I work for a nonprofit. You think I eat here all the time? But he knew the menu well enough to approve of his interviewer's main course of fried chicken with honey butter biscuits. For himself, he chose grilled chicken. Both started with a tomato gazpacho and finished with dessert: a cherry crisp for Mr. Goldstein, a salted lime pie for his tablemate. They confined themselves to water during the meal, and had coffee at the end. While waiting for the first course, Mr. Goldstein discussed how 1950s television had helped shaped his cinephilia, especially a program that many older New Yorkers remember fondly, "Million Dollar Movie." It ran on Channel 9 and featured terrific oldies like the original "King Kong" (1933), the 1939 "Hunchback of Notre Dame" and "Yankee Doodle Dandy" (1942), and showed them over and over and over, every day for a week. " "Million Dollar Movie" was VHS before there was VHS," Mr. Goldstein said. That childhood experience led him, with Ms. Cooper, to create Film Forum Jr., an attempt to acquaint today's children - generally, age 5 and up - with the Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton and great musicals like "Singin" in the Rain." His own first movie, at 5, was "Pal Joey," in 1957. "I didn't know how sexy it was till years later," he said. "You can't talk down to kids," he said. Kids have taste. On Mother's Day, he screened Alfred Hitchcock's 1956 version of "The Man Who Knew Too Much, which involves an assassination plot and a boy's kidnapping. "Someone said, "That's not for kids, it's too scary," " Mr. Goldstein recalled. "I said: "Yeah, it's scary. But it's not as scary as "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." The Disney movies are really scary. So he showed the Hitchcock film and "the kids loved it." For Mr. Goldstein, nothing compares to watching a movie with others around. "You focus on the film," he said. You don't focus at home or on your iPhone. Second, you get the benefit of the other audience members picking up on things you might not have noticed. While it is not a phrase he likes, he added, there is such a thing as "communal experience." "Some films don't work on video at all," he said. Silent comedy doesn't work on video, as far as I'm concerned. You need an audience to laugh with you and to pick up on the gags you may not notice at home because you're distracted in 20 different directions. Dessert arrived as conversation turned to New York's undying attraction for filmmakers. Asked for his list of the greatest films shot in the city, Mr. Goldstein shied from labeling any as being "the best." Instead, via an e-mail a day later, he offered what he called 10 of his favorites, arranged chronologically - a list, he said, that could easily be far longer. At the table, though, he did not hesitate to name a couple of his top choices: "Sweet Smell of Success" (1957) and the original "Taking of Pelham One Two Three" (1974). As a movie set, nothing can duplicate New York, "the most visually exciting city not just in America, maybe in the world," Mr. Goldstein said. He told of taking a friend from France on a bicycle ride from SoHo to Grand Street, where he lives. "Three or four worlds unfold on that trip," he said. No other city can offer that. "You know," he said, "the industry was here in the early days. They were using the city as a back lot, basically. Yes, but it was almost a full century ago. "That's yesterday for me," Mr. Goldstein said.