Watching porn in public: The rise and fall of the adult movie house
Once a staple of the urban landscape, they are now almost gone
Once a fixture in every major metropolis and most main streets, the adult theater has all but disappeared from our modern urban landscape. Razed for shopping malls or shuttered into derelict, crumbling heaps, it’s quite possible that we have seen the end of watching porn in public.
Adult films, of course, are as old as film itself. For the first 50-odd years, however, screening them was something of a problem. Pornographic silent films were widespread in the 1920s, but showing them was a crime associated with prison time. Up through the 1930s and 1940s, these “blue movies” — filmed and produced by amateurs, sometimes even developed and processed in bathtubs — were circulated underground by either organized crime groups or traveling salesmen, and shown in private “exhibitions” held in brothels.
By the 1950s, business starting booming with sex films shot on the new 8mm film and distributed to peep show booths. The loosening of social and sexual mores in the 1960s (including the abolishment of censorship laws in several countries in Europe and several key developments in legal rulings on obscenity versus the First Amendment in the U.S.) brought even more explicit sexual films to the mainstream public eye. The Adult Film Association of America was formed by producers of erotic films in 1969, to help make the case for freedom of speech and defeat obscenity charges leveled at films and producers. (The notorious O’Farrell Theater in San Francisco—home of the lap dance, and Hunter S. Thompson fame—also opened in 1969.)
California was home to the first adult theaters in the US, which quickly populated strips like Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles with astonishing density — but the phenomenon quickly spread, both to smaller towns like Pasadena and to the nation beyond. In 1960 there were roughly 20 adult movie theaters (theaters which showed only pornographic films); by some accounts, by 1970, there were 750. The 1980s saw the boom of certain adult theater chains like the Pussycat Theaters, a chain with over 47 locations in California from the 1960s to the 1980s. There was even a large, national franchise of drive-in adult theaters, starting with a single drive-in in Durand, Michigan in 1966; the “Durand Dirties,” as they were known, quickly spread to depressed rural areas such as upstate New York, Alabama, or Arkansas, reaching peak numbers of about 70 in the nation by the mid-1970s.
By the 1970s—the “Golden Age of Porn”—the mainstreaming of porn had reached an all time high. Your average movie theater wouldn’t screen the likes of “Deep Throat” and “Debbie Does Dallas” — but the public demand for those films was, ahem, big. Competing with television drove cinemas to try new things, including air-conditioning, more comfortable seats… and other less innocent pleasures. The late 1960s until the mid 1980s was the heyday of the adult movie theater, also known as “dirty movie houses,” “adult cinemas,” or “girlie theaters.” These “nudie houses” were a familiar sight in large metropolises and suburbia alike, and solid, profitable businesses for their owners.
Then came the 1980s, when technology started to once again overtake the porn industry, in the form of VCRs. Why leave your house and sit in a sticky-floored theater with a bunch of other lonely, single men when you could watch from the privacy of your own home?
Why indeed. By 1990, only 20 Pussycat Theaters remained; by 1992, less than a dozen. The onslaught of DVDs only made porn even more accessible to consumers at home. By 1994, the owners of Pussycat Theaters filed for bankruptcy. The number of adult theaters in the US had started to fall dramatically, to less than 250 theaters. Adult drive-in theaters were razed to make room for strip malls and shopping centers.
Although the adult film industry is larger than ever thanks to the Internet, the adult movie house is dead and gone. Today almost all of them — some of them once quite grand — have been sold, demolished, or abandoned. A few stragglers remain, in gritty neighborhoods in New York, or LA, or Kansas City. But the era of the adult theater is clearly over. In the age of the Internet and streaming video, porn is all too available at the click of a button—not the punch of a ticket.
