Ben Barenholtz, Midnight-Movie Innovator, Is Dead at 83

Ben Barenholtz, who began the midnight-movie phenomenon at his Manhattan theater in the 1970s and nurtured the movie careers of David Lynch and the Coen brothers, died on June 27 at a hospital in Prague, where he had been living since last year. He was 83.

The death was confirmed by Tom Prassis, the executor of his estate and an executive vice president of Sony Pictures Classics.

Mr. Barenholtz had been running the Elgin Theater in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan as a repertory and art-film house for two years when he decided, in late 1970, to show “El Topo,” the Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s surreal, bloody Spanish-language western, at midnight on Sundays through Thursdays and 1 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays.

“I was told by the experts: ‘Who’s going to come to see a film at midnight? You’re out of your mind,’ ” he recalled in an interview with The New York Times in 1995.

But something about “El Topo” — which had its United States premiere at the Elgin on Dec. 18, 1970 — suggested to Mr. Barenholtz that it would appeal to a young audience eager for a new type of late-night movie experience in a run-down theater where marijuana smoking was condoned. He was right. With little advertising but strong word of mouth, crowds soon filled the Elgin’s nearly 600 seats during the film’s exclusive run.

“Within two months, the limos lined up every night,” Mr. Barenholtz was quoted as saying by J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum in their book “Midnight Movies” (1983). “It became a must-see item.”