Category: Entertainment

The 1950s and 1960s were the heyday of amusement parks on Long Island, where acres of open space could be transformed into candy-colored paradises promising thrills, chills and fun for the post-World War II generation. As the Baby Boom peaked, “everyone’s moving out to the suburbs, and looking for family entertainment that’s close to home, inexpensive and has a community kind of feel,” said Marisa L. Berman, 39, of Massapequa, author of “Historic Amusement Parks of Long Island: 118 Miles of Memories” (The History Press 2015). Here are Long Islanders’ memories of 10 parks that once offered a few hour’s escape from work and school.

Nunley’s Amusement Park

Where it was

Sunrise Highway, Baldwin

Attractions

Nunley’s calliope was a siren song for kids who wanted to spend a carefree day at a neighborhood park.

It was so popular that “kids in cars would erupt when their parents drove by” its building on Sunrise Highway at the Freeport/Baldwin line, said Berman, who grew up in Oceanside.

For younger children, the big draw was the whirling Stein and Goldstein carousel, with its booming calliope and brass rings promising a free ride, but almost always tantalizingly out of reach.

Nunley’s also boasted a boat ride, a roller coaster, hot rods on a motorized track and a Ferris wheel circling to a bird’s-eye view of the park below.

Leona Gagliardi, 62, of Brentwood, said that as a Freeport student she spent 45-minute breaks at Nunley’s restaurant, which was on the other side of the high school fence. “They made the best pizza in the world; it came out with the brown crispy bubbles on top,” Gagliardi said. “And their hot dogs were great, with one half relish and one half sauerkraut.”

Gagliardi recalls having her future revealed by “the gypsy grandmother fortuneteller behind the big glass case.” She played arcade skeeball for 10 cents a game in the arcade and won a free ride on the carousel. Said Gagliardi: “I still have one of the brass rings.”

Why it closed

The trio of brothers that owned the park closed it in 1995, and retired. The carousel was restored and moved to Museum Row in Garden City.

What’s there now

A Pep Boys auto store

Nunley’s Happyland / Smiley’s Happyland (Jolly Rogers Restaurant)

Where it was

Hempstead Turnpike and Hicksville Road, Bethpage

Attractions

Patrons called it Jolly Rogers, but that was actually the name of the on-site restaurant serving fries and burgers scarfed down between riding Nunley’s wet boats, fire engine or Hodges hand cars, or testing your hand-eye coordination at 200 arcade games and mini-golf.

“The greatest gift my parents could give us was a day there,” recalled Rachel Zampino of Port Washington, who grew up in Wantagh in the 1960s. “When I was finally brave enough and tall enough to ride the brand-new roller coaster, the Mighty Mouse — I had watched it being built, but it was for the big kids — what an accomplishment!”

Allison Caveglia Barash, 63, of Pittsburgh, grew up in Levittown. Barash is a self-described history buff who “appreciated the penny arcade … where you could turn the crank and watch a short film from the early 1900s.” Her other go-to: “the shooting gallery where my dad, a World War II vet, taught me how to shoot.” But Nunley’s sugary, pink cotton candy was the biggest treat for Deb Scheer, 64, of Centennial, Colorado, who grew up in Wantagh. “Every time we went, I had to have it,” Scheer said.

Why it closed

The fun ended in 1978, with the owners citing, among other causes, rising operating costs and competition from fast-food restaurants, according to Berman.

What’s there now

A strip mall

Lollipop Farm

Where it was

Jericho Turnpike (Route 25), Syosset

Attractions

By the 1950s, New York children were apparently so clueless about farm life that when surveys asked them where milk came from, they invariably answered, “the milk man,” according to Berman.

Lollipop Farm, a 4-acre kiddie park and petting zoo carved out of the Jackson family’s former farm and stagecoach stop, sought to end this udder confusion. Named for its resident goat mascot, and known for handing lollipops out to visiting youngsters, Lollipop Farm became a quintessential class field trip.

“It was great because you could still see the old Jackson [farm] ice house,” where ice was stored after it was cut from the adjacent pond, said Gary Hammond, 69, of Wantagh, a retired Nassau County Museums registrar, who visited on a field trip while he was a Farmingdale elementary school student.

The farm was stocked with “young, tame domestic animals and fowl,” according to a brochure in Hammond’s collection. The favorite area was a children’s zoo where piglets, lambs, calves, kids and other animals lived in miniature houses and could be fed and petted by children.

Rides were offered on ponies, in a donkey cart and on a well-remembered mini-train.

Michael Kornfeld, 62, of Huntington, said, “I fondly remember riding the train,” a kid-sized, gas-powered locomotive that rode the park grounds. Kornfeld added that “those memories were rekindled eight years ago as I watched another generation of children ride the Lollipop Farm train during a pickle festival at the John Gardiner Farm in Huntington.”

Why it closed

In 1967, owners Harry and Alice Sweeney retired and moved to Pennsylvania. One of the park trains was restored by the Greenlawn-Centerport Historical Association and runs Saturdays at the John Gardiner Farm in Huntington.

What’s there now

A DSW Designer Shoe Warehouse store and the offices of David Lerner Associates.

Dodge City

Where it was

Sunrise Highway and Waverly Avenue, Patchogue

Attractions

When the Dodge City amusement park opened in the late 1950s, Westerns were riding high on TV and in the movies. It was set in the same city as “Gunsmoke,” the horse opera just beginning its 20-year run on CBS.

Long Island’s Dodge City sought to transport kids to the Old West with its movie set-style saloon, dry goods store, barbershop, jail and bank — the latter held up daily by Jesse James, Belle Starr and their notorious outlaw gang. On any given day the dust would be stirred up by rodeos, shootouts or a stagecoach getaway.

Jane Owen, who grew up in Brentwood, played outlaw Belle Starr in the holdup re-enactments, said her granddaughter, Noel Chaney, 54, of Meadows of Dan, Virginia.

“My grandmother loved that place because she felt like a movie star,” said Chaney, who was born in Glen Cove and moved to Virginia with her family when she was a child. Grandma Jane told tales of a cowboy whose tricks included making his horse rear up on its hind legs, Chaney said. She still has Belle Starr costumes worn by her grandmother, who died about a decade ago at age 103.

Why it closed

Dodge City closed in the 1960s when Western shows were in decline. Its buildings were sold to nearby farms or relocated to Mastic Beach and Center Moriches, according to Berman.

What’s there now

A section of the Sunrise Highway service road.

Spaceland

Where it was

Inside a Roosevelt Field airport hangar on Old Country Road, Carle Place

Attractions

As the Space Age took off, kids with stars in their eyes could imagine they were blasting off into the wild blue yonder at this cavernous amusement center.

Gary Monti, 69, of Westbury, recalled going to Spaceland with his mother, aunt and cousins in 1959, a year after the park opened in the heat of the space race. “It was right after Sputnik 1 [the first artificial satellite launched into earth orbit by the USSR] in 1957 and about the time NASA announced the Mercury astronauts,” Monti recalled recently.

Although only 7 years old on the day of his visit, Monti still remembers Spaceland vividly. “It was a big open hangar with a series of things to climb on, slide down and look at, and of course they had a big concessionary area.” His favorite stop, though, was a spaceship slide.

“You would climb up the stairs and go into a rocket ship, look out at your parents, and then slide down,” Monti said.

Monti, a lifelong aviation buff who grew up to be the director of museum operations for 26 years at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City, says he eventually “got to hang out” with original Mercury 7 astronauts Wally Schirra and Scott Carpenter.

Monti, who retired in 2020, and currently is the volunteer Westbury village historian, admits Spaceland “was kind of primitive compared to modern amusement park standards.” But aboard Spaceland’s spaceship, he says, “I felt like I was John Glenn.”

Why it closed

Spaceland was tangled in a stock fraud scandal in 1959, closed the following year, and the hangar later housed a film studio and “Murray the K’s World, ” a nightclub run by the legendary New York disc jockey, Berman said. The hangar was demolished.

What’s there now

An AT&T Store

Frank’s Buck’s Jungle Camp/Massapequa Zoo and Kiddie Park

Where it was

Sunrise Highway, Massapequa

Attractions

Frank Buck was the Jack Hanna of his day, an author, screen star and 1930s household name famed for capturing exotic animals and “bringing them back alive” for exhibition at U.S. zoos and circuses.

Buck’s exotic menagerie became a Long Island attraction after he moved his exhibition in 1934 from the Chicago World’s Fair to Massapequa, where a 40-acre camp housed lions, elephants, tigers, reptiles and some very independent monkeys.

The animals “were constantly escaping,” Berman said. Mostly famously, in 1935 150 of the 570 Monkey Mountain denizens crossed a moat on a plank accidentally left behind by a worker (Buck was on a trip to the Far East). The monkeys invaded the camp and ran down Sunrise Highway, causing havoc until they were captured and returned to their artificial mountain home.

Hammond remembers visiting the Massapequa Zoo and Kiddie Park, which took over the camp in the 1950s, adding rides and tamer animals that kids could hand feed. Hammond recalls the then still standing Monkey Mountain as a “concrete, brownish, tall, sculpted structure with a pit like a moat and a machine where you could buy food to feed the monkeys.”

Why it closed

The jungle camp closed because of a shortage of gasoline, bananas and other vital zoo resources during World War II; Buck died of lung cancer in 1950. The zoo closed in 1965, its owners citing high property taxes as the reason.

What’s there now

Sunrise Mall. A historical plaque marks the zoo’s former location.

FAIRYLAND AT HARVEY’S

Where it was

East Jericho Turnpike and Elwood Road, Elwood

Attractions

This smaller version of Brooklyn’s popular Fairyland featured a Ferris wheel, carousel, train, arcade and a miniature golf course, according to Berman.

Why it closed

The owners closed the park after a child fell to her death from the Ferris wheel in 1964.

What’s there now

A gas station

Fairytown, USA

Where it was

Jericho Turnpike, Middle Island

Attractions

Possibly the next best thing to meeting Mickey Mouse? Hanging out with Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Miss Muffet, and the Three Little Pigs at this 28-acre storybook village featuring 12 fairy-tale structures.

“As a girl, I visited Fairytown with my family,” said Gail Lynch-Bailey, 65, of Middle Island. “I remember feeling like we were walking through a living book of nursery rhymes. It was an enchanting place.”

Hammond said that on childhood visits he was most impressed by The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe exhibit, an 18-foot-tall, boot-shaped house where a live “old lady” beckoned kids inside.

Fairytown could also be “pretty tacky” and “strictly fake,” with mannequins among the human actors, Hammond recalled.

Toward the end of Fairytown’s eight-year twinkle, Hammond said, “Martians and a spaceship were added to bring it up to date.”

Why it closed

The park apparently closed around 1963, for reasons lost to history, according to Berman.

What’s there now

An empty lot where a Kmart was demolished a few years ago.

Frontier City

Where it was

Route 110, Amityville

Attractions

Like a dusty Western Brigadoon, this cowboy-themed park opened in 1959, but quickly disappeared the following year into the dust bin of amusement park history.

Touted as being open “From High Noon to Sunset,” it was where kids could pretend to be real cowboys roaming a dusty small town with a trading post, sheriff’s office, a corral and Boot Hill cemetery, Berman said.

Surrounded by costumed “cowboys and Indians,” a visitor could chase rustlers as a marshal’s deputy, join a shootout at the local “OK Corral” and attend a Boot Hill outlaw funeral. The trading post sold moccasins and cowboy hats for the ride home in the family wagon.

Why it closed

The decline in popularity of Westerns sent Frontier City to Boot Hill in 1960, according to Berman.

What’s there now

A luxury apartment complex recently replaced the appropriately-named Frontier Mobile Home Park that had been on this spot for decades.

Sports Plus

Where it was

110 New Moriches Rd., Lake Grove

Attractions

For the Millennial generation, Sports Plus, which opened in 1996, was the place to play on weekends or attend a birthday party.

“They had an epic laser tag,” recalled Long Island historian Christopher Verga, 40, of Bay Shore, author of “World War II Long Island: The Homefront in Nassau and Suffolk” (The History Press, 2021). “When you walked in everything was glowing with black lights, and you wore a vest with a target on your chest that lit up when you got shot,” Verga recalled. As a 12-year-old, though, he was often out-lased by older players. “I thought I was bad and then — boom! — I was done — but it was still fun.”

The $32 million family entertainment center’s 169,000-square-foot play area encompassed separate video game arcades for young children and teens, a rock climbing wall, a National Hockey League regulation-size ice rink, a 48-lane computerized bowling alley, a pizzeria and a pub, according to contemporary media accounts when it opened.

Debuting in 2004, the 700-foot-long Thriller Coaster, touted as Long Island’s first indoor roller coaster, sent passengers 22 feet up through a haunted castle roof before plummeting downward. Sports Plus also hosted rock concerts, a pro-wrestling tournament and, in the run-up to Halloween, the House of the Living Dead haunted house.

Why it closed

Reportedly plagued by financial problems, the facility closed in 2007.

What’s there now

LA Fitness and Whole Foods Market

A ride through time: Amusement parks of the past

They are Long Island’s lost picture palaces — the single-screen movie theaters that for decades were as much hometown fixtures as the firehouse, public library or all-night diner where you dissected the night’s movie with friends over a burger and cola.

Whether truly palatial with grand prosceniums and balconies or modest shoe boxes with a few hundred seats, they ruled the Long Island entertainment scene from the silent era on, bringing moviegoers together for a few shared hours inside one cavernous, often sold-out theater. And like the Silent Era, Hollywood’s Golden Age and stars who sparkled on their single screens, they are sadly (mostly) gone now.

“If you were lucky enough to have sat in a sold-out movie theater and engaged with an audience of people you didn’t know, you had an experience so many will never live,” said filmmaker and cinema historian Keith Crocker of North Baldwin.

“With multi-screen theaters you often find yourself sitting all alone,” said Rita Hines, 73, of Merrick, a retired Seaford High School English teacher and a longtime movie fan. Hines intentionally saw “The Call of the Wild” (2021), a Harrison Ford movie based on the Jack London tale, at the 300-seat Bellmore Movies and Showplace, the Island’s last surviving single-screen movie theater, founded in 1915. “There were children in the audience and you could feel the communal experience. It was going to the movies old-style,” Hines said.

Ross Melnick, co-founder of Cinema Treasures, an online guide to 56,000 movie theaters around the world, said: “At a single-screen cinema, everyone gathered for the same film at the same time for the same experience. The show, as they say, began on the sidewalk. The buzz began there and continued until the lights went out and the projector whirred.”

Melnick continued, “In an increasingly divided country — especially during the pandemic — there are few venues where you can share a collective experience with others you might otherwise never meet. In the movie theater, for those two hours, differences can melt away.”

Here’s a look at 11 of LI’s single-screen theaters and the moviegoing memories of those who frequented these long-vanished gems.

Calderone Theatre, Hempstead

Seats: 2,500

In the early 20th century, the Calderone name was synonymous with Long Island moviegoing. Sicilian immigrant Salvatore Calderone, who had opened his first Manhattan movie theater in 1907, moved to Hempstead in 1914, founding a small entertainment empire with a half-dozen locations from Valley Stream to Glen Cove — and earning the nickname the “Master Showman of Nassau County,” according to documents in the Calderone Theatre Collection at Hofstra University.

The Calderone Theatre and Concert Hall, one of the chain’s most expensive theaters at a cost of $2 million, opened in 1949, designed by William Lescaze, a pioneer of Modernism in American architecture.

Cinema historian Crocker worked there as a projectionist and said the Calderone “was so large, you really felt like you were in a palace, so whether you were going to a movie or an event, you felt like it was grand.”

Paul Baar, 65, of Islip, went in the 1970s when the Calderone was being turned into a live performance venue. He said the Calderone had a balcony and “was way bigger” than the theater in Babylon where he grew up. “I went to see ‘The Three Musketeers’ (1973) and the next year I went to see Santana,” Carlos Santana’s legendary rock band, he said.

What’s there now

The Calderone family sold the property in 1982 and the building is currently the Faith Baptist Church.

Uniondale Mini-Cinema

Seats: 416

For Baby Boomers coming of age in the 1970s, the Mini-Cinema was the go-to destination for Hollywood classics, concert movies and midnight shows.

Larry Jaffee, who grew up in Kings Park, lined up in 1977 to get into “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”

Jaffee, 63, a NYIT professor who lives in Washington Heights, remembers a “Rocky Horror” fan asking “whether I was a ‘virgin,’ i.e., encountering the film for the first time. I lied and said, ‘No.'” When the self-appointed gatekeeper demanded to know Jaffee’s favorite scene, he said, “Totally bluffing, I blurted out, ‘All of them!'”

For classic movie fans like Gary Apple, now 66, of Manhattan, the Mini-Cinema was the closest thing on Long Island to Manhattan revival houses like The Thalia (which itself closed in 1987).

“The Mini-Cinema changed my life,” said Apple, who grew up in Old Bethpage. “I saw a Bogart film. And then got into Bogart and the other Warner stars. Then the Marx Brothers,” said Apple, who grew up to be a writer of situation comedies (“The Simpsons”) and off-Broadway musicals.

What’s there now:

Grace Cathedral International

Old Bethpage Theater

Seats: 600

Opening in 1961 as The Bethview, and for a time an adult film showcase that closed after a 1969 police raid, the theater shut for good in 1986.

Renamed the Old Bethpage Theater in 1971, it was a favorite of Apple and his friend, Mark Barash, who grew up on the same block in Old Bethpage.

“Gary and I enjoyed going there in part to see horror movies” such as “Frankenstein” and “Dracula,” recalled Barash, 66, a retired TV sportscaster in Pittsburgh.

Barash and Apple eventually figured a way to save the $1.50 admission price, by striking a deal with the theater manager to record the “movie phone,” in exchange for free passes. Apple wrote the scripts, and they both recorded the audio. “We would ham it up, like it was a scary movie.”

Both were off in college in 1977 when the name changed, to Cine-Capri, and remained so until lights out in 1986, according to Cinema Treasures.

Century’s York Theatre (Huntington)

Seats: 650

The York, which opened on the day after Christmas 1961, offered a rare amenity on Long Island: black-suited ushers who used flashlights to escort guests to their seats.

Dylan Skolnick, co-director of the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, remembers seeing “Halloween III” at The York, despite the reviews. “As we were going in people were coming out saying, ‘don’t go in, it’s terrible,’ and of course we went in and enjoyed it.”

Baar said he went to The York “when they were starting to show exploitation movies,” British horror films from Amicus and Hammer studios, and Philippine-American productions starring American actors, such as “Beyond Atlantis” (1973).

The York closed in 1985, according to Cinema Treasures.

Syosset Cinerama Theater

Seats: 1,400

If you wanted to see a widescreen spectacular the way the filmmaker intended, this was the place to feast your eyes, fill your ears and blow your mind.

Films were shown in 70 millimeters, on a huge, curved screen, said Skolnick. As a young teen, he attended a rerelease there of the 1968 Stanley Kubrick science fiction epic, “2001: A Space Odyssey.” “We stayed all day long and watched it two and a half times straight through,” he said. “It was spectacular, and the sound was great, six-track stereophonic.”

The theater debuted in 1956 — in a decade when many studios were introducing novel cinema processes — with a benefit screening of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, “Oklahoma!” (1955), one of the first films shown in Todd-AO, according to Cinema Treasures. In 1959, it was converted into a three-strip Cinerama theater presenting “This Is Cinerama,” according to Cinema Treasures.

It became a triplex in 1983, and closed in 1995.

Nassau Theatre (Roosevelt)

Seats: 404

According to Cinema Treasures, this was “a neighborhood house that played double features for low prices. It opened as the Roosevelt Theatre and was renamed Nassau Theatre in 1939 after a refurbishment.”

Nassau Theatre had one of its most successful nights in July 1966, after protesters gathered outside to decry its bill of “obscene films,” according to a contemporary Newsday report posted on Cinema Treasures. In an attempt to placate censors, the management used India ink to paint bras and panties on nude women in advertising posters, and shortened “Days of Sin and Nights of Nymphomania,” to “Days of Sin.” The theater soon switched to G-rated blockbusters such as “Zorba the Greek” and the musical, “My Fair Lady.”In the 1970s it was popular for “blaxploitation” triple features, according to Cinema Treasures.

What’s there now:

A parking lot

Amityville Theater

Seats: 1,000

According to Cinema Treasures, the Amityville theater opened as The Star Theatre in 1913. It was replaced by a new, larger Amityville Theatre in May 1936 with “A Message to Garcia” with Barbara Stanwyck and Wallace Beery.

The theater was luxurious for its era, with air conditioning and a smoking loge. It was demolished in 1960 by a road widening project and replaced by yet another, larger, theatre at the same site.

What’s there now:

A pizzeria

Meadowbrook Theatre (East Meadow)

Seats: 1,200

The huge, family-oriented movie house on the Levittown/East Meadow border offered a triple play for a weekend date or a scout outing. You could roller boogie to an organ soundtrack in the rink at the Levittown Arena, take in a matinee at the Meadowbrook — “Yellow Submarine,” The Beatle’s 1968 animated feature, was a typical family-oriented offering. Then you could walk to Jahn’s Ice Cream Parlor and Restaurant to share a gargantuan “Kitchen Sink” sundae.

Like the era’s other avid Beatles fans, Robin Leidner, 64, who grew up in Wantagh, stood on a long line that “coiled around the building” to see the Fab Four’s debut, “A Hard Day’s Night” (1964). Leidner, a college professor in Philadelphia, said “At seven years old, I was already a fervent Beatles fan. Still am.”

What’s there now:

A TD Bank

Northport Theater

Seats: 500

Built in 1912, the original Main Street theater burned down in 1932, and a new theater was built in the adjoining lot, according to a history posted online by the John W. Engeman Theater at Northport.

The theater was renovated in 1950, but by the early 1980s was showing second-run movies at 99 cents, then $1.25 per ticket.

For Glenn Andreiev of Kings Park, The Northport Theater was an essential part of growing up to be an independent filmmaker. At age 18, on the weekend after he received his driver’s license, he drove a friend to see Ridley Scott’s “Alien” (1979).

“It was pretty packed,” Andreiev said. In “Alien’s” most notorious scene, “The whole theater was going nuts when the alien comes out of his chest.”

Skolnick saw “The Road Warrior,” (1981) there when the theater “was a little rundown,” but the movie looked “spectacular on the big screen.”

What’s there now:

The John W. Engeman Theater at Northport.

Sunrise Drive-In, Valley Stream, Century’s 110 Drive-In, Melville

One of Hines’ earliest memories involves seeing the Film Noir classic, “Kiss Me Deadly” (1955) at the Sunrise Drive-In when she was 8.

“I was very happy wearing my pajamas outside of the house and getting snacks at the concession stand, and was very intrigued with the concrete slide” at the playground, Hines said. “I also remember being very bored with the movie until the end when she’s opening the suitcase with a bomb” in the film’s famously explosive finale.

Opened in the summer of 1938, the Sunrise Drive-In was noted for its huge, curved screen and a big play park, which drew a stream of moviegoers in automobiles from across the city line. It was the first drive-in theatre in New York State, according to Cinema Treasures.

Crocker recalls sneaking into an age-restricted 1979 double bill of “Dawn of the Dead” and “Meatcleaver Massacre,” by hiding under blankets in a car.

“The line was so long for getting into this film that they didn’t check the car,” he said. The audience was very demonstrative. “Whenever something gruesome happened on the screen, patrons in the cars tended to honk their horns in excitement,” he recalls.

Leidner wore pajamas watching the movie from the back seat of her parents’ car at Melville’s 110 Drive-In — where the capacity was about 3,000 cars.

Leidner said, “The sound from the speaker that hung in a window was usually terrible.”

What’s there now:

The Sunrise Drive-In closed in 1979, and was replaced by the Sunrise Multiplex, which itself closed in 2015. The site is now Green Acres Commons, the outdoor shopping complement to Green Acres Mall. The Long Island Marriott hotel now stands on the site of the 110 Drive-In, which closed in 1976.

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Vintage movie ads from Newsday

In his senior year at Bridgehampton School, Jamari Gant finally decided to try out for its famed basketball team, the Killer Bees. An affable kid who had honed his skills during lunch periods at East Hampton schools before transferring to Bridgehampton’s two-story, pre-kindergarten-through-12th-grade school as a freshman, Gant made the cut but then found the pressure was on. Not only would the Killer Bees attempt to defend its state championship title that year — without its star player, who had left the team — but a documentary crew had signed up to film the Bees’ 2015-2016 season from start to finish.

“I was like, ‘Oh, great — the first time I’m ever going to be playing, and I’m being recorded,’ ” Gant says. Privately, though, he had more pressing concerns. He and his family — his mother and five siblings — were in the process of being evicted from their home.

The Killer Bees’ Tylik Furman takes a shot in a game against Southampton during filming of the documentary. Photo credit: Hilary McHone

“I just hadn’t really told anybody,” says Gant, 20. “I just didn’t want to bring it upon people to worry about me. So I just worked hard in school and tried to do my best to get good grades.”

Gant plays a crucial and perhaps symbolic role in the documentary “Killer Bees,” which opens in select theaters July 27 and becomes available on video-on-demand Aug. 7. Written and directed by two Bridgehampton natives, Benjamin and Orson Cummings, “Killer Bees” focuses on a nearly all-black high school team in the Hamptons, a region synonymous with white wealth. Produced partly by Shaquille O’Neal, “Killer Bees” uses basketball as a way to explore how Bridgehampton’s black community — one that goes back decades, to the days when black migrants worked Long Island’s potato fields — is being squeezed out by new development and rising real estate prices.

“Basketball is one of our ways of speaking out,” the school’s former basketball coach, Carl Johnson, says today. “We’re a little school, probably one of the smaller schools in the state of New York. And we want to show them we can compete on and off the court.”

The idea for “Killer Bees” came to the Cummings brothers through an alum of the Bridgehampton School who suggested, via Facebook, that they focus on Coach Johnson as a local institution and part of a disappearing demographic in the Hamptons. That idea appealed to the filmmakers, both in their 40s, who had attended Bridgehampton School in the lower grades (they graduated elsewhere) and still remember it fondly.

Orson credits his “somewhat Bohemian” parents — they were both writers — for sending their Caucasian kids to a mostly black school. “They felt we might learn something being around a minority group in our formative years,” Orson says. “We were the minority, and nobody seemed to care that much.”

JP Harding in a scene from the documetary about the Bridgehampton basketball team. Photo credit: Hilary McHone

In the summer of 2015, the brothers met for lunch with Johnson at Bridgehampton Candy Kitchen, a traditional hangout for generations of local students. There, they learned that the Killer Bees’ star player, Charles Manning, had switched schools to Long Island Lutheran (a defection that Johnson says stings a little even today). More importantly, the brothers learned that Johnson felt, as they did, that the film should address larger issues of race, income inequality and gentrification in Bridgehampton.

The documentary film crew follows JP Harding as he walks by a house in Bridgehampton. Photo credit: Hilary McHone

“Carl came and said he had one condition, that he wanted it to be about more than basketball,” Orson recalls. “He said there were all these things he wanted to talk about.”

For help producing the film, Orson turned to a man he knew primarily as a tennis partner in the Hamptons: Glenn Fuhrman, a Rockville Centre native and co-founder of MSD Capital, an investment firm that handles the capital of tech mogul Michael Dell. Furman then got in touch with O’Neal, with whom he had worked on a nonprofit project several years ago.

Elijah Jackson, 20, Coach Carl Johnson, Jamari Gant, 20, all from Bridgehampton, stand inside the gym at the Bridgehampton School in Bridgehampton on Friday, July 20, 2018. Photo credit: Randee Daddona

“I called him and asked if he would be involved, and he just instantly said yes,” says Fuhrman. “That was an exciting moment because he obviously has a lot of requests on his time… We were excited that this was something he felt good enough about to align himself with.”

Although “Killer Bees” tackles a number of larger issues about race and income inequality, what emerges most powerfully is the role Johnson plays in the lives of his young athletes. Johnson was once a hotshot player at Bridgehampton himself, known by his mysterious nickname, Pujack. As a number of people testify in the film, Johnson seemed destined for the NBA — but a dispute with a friend led to a shooting incident that damaged Johnson’s right arm and ended his hopes for the pros.

Elijah Jackson and Coach Carl Johnson in a scene from “The Killer Bees” documetary. Photo credit: Hilary McHone

“He flew in an orbit that was mythical,” says Benjamin Cummings. “I remember the day he got shot, even though I was just in grade school. The whole school was traumatized.”

After college, Johnson took the coaching job at Bridgehampton thinking it would be a short-term gig. “I told myself I was never going to coach any of my former players’ kids,” he says, though that’s exactly what happened. “I guess I overstayed my years.”

For that, many young basketball players have been grateful. Elijah Jackson, 20, a former player who appears in the film, calls Johnson a father-figure whose best qualities were a strict sense of discipline, an infectious love of the game and, occasionally, a soft touch. When Jackson needed a late-night ride home from a friend’s house, he recalls, Johnson would be the one to pick him up. “I’m not calling my parents to come and get me,” Jackson says with a smile. “Like, I’m calling Carl. He was always there.”

Elijah Jackson, JP Harding, Tylik Furman, Maurice Mungin and Kevin Feliciano in a scene from “The Killer Bees” documentary. Photo credit: Hilary McHone

Jackson’s teammate Gant credits Johnson with helping him through a tough year of borderline homelessness. “Coach Johnson was always like, ‘If there’s anything wrong, or you need someone to talk to, always come to me,'” Gant says. “He was like a father to me. I never had a father.” (Gant, now studying computer science at SUNY Fredonia, currently has no home to come back to; his family lives in a shelter. Gant says he is spending this summer at the house of another Bridgehampton teacher.)

Johnson retired in 2017 and now serves as an aide at the Bridgehampton School, but seems unable to stop coaching. Former players still call him “coach” on the street, he says. He’s trying to chase down two recent graduates to coax them into a “sit-down” and find out why they’ve stopped attending college. And the younger students at Bridgehampton, he says, seem to have claimed him as their own.

“These little kids in the lower grades were like, ‘OK, now that you’re not coaching the big boys anymore, you’re our coach now,'” Johnson says. This past winter, he began volunteer-coaching fifth and sixth graders. “It was fun,” he says. “That’s what my job is, to help that grassroots grow.”

Matt Hostetter, Joshua Lamison and Tylik Furman in a scene from the documentary about the Bridgehampton basketball team. Photo credit: Hilary McHone

WHEN | WHERE At Cinema Village, 22 E. 12th St., Manhattan. Showtimes daily at 1:10, 3:10, 5:10, 7:10 and 9:10 p.m. Tickets are $12. Call 212-924-3363 or go to cinemavillage.com. Available Aug. 7 via video-on-demand.

Opening excerpt from the “Killer Bees,” which documents a Hamptons championship basketball team, but also explores race, inequality and gentrification. Credit: Frank Publicity / Photo credit: Hilary McHone