Porn Flicks in Long Island Theaters - Short and Sweet!

Porn Chic (1969-84) also known as the Golden Age of Porn, certainly held domain on Long Island. It seemed especially prominent between 1977 and 1980, either because I was very aware of cinema and what was playing and of course I was underage so the curiosity was overwhelming. Or, the demand for product was quite extensive, and was proving lucrative at the box office. On January 12, 1979 two porn films were seized from the Hewlett Theater. The theater had 100 people in it. In my whole life I rarely remember 100 people being in that tiny strip mall theater. But yeah, the adult films were packing them in. On an even more humorous note, my brother, his best friend and their two "dates" were in the theater when it was busted. Hence I had first hand knowledge of the bust. The theater had been busted many times in the late 70's. The busts were perpetrated by complaints of obscenity. You see the theater was owned by Harold Gussin. Gussin owned the Polk Theater in Queens. The Polk theater was one of the longest running adult theaters in Queens. It closed in 2006, way past when most adult houses had shuttered their doors. The complaints were being filed by the folks in Hewlett Harbor. Hewlett Harbor was one of the wealthiest sections of the South Shore. It still is. The Harbor housed doctors, lawyers and pornographers. It was the pornographers who filed the complaint. They didn't want their own product polluting the esteemed town of Hewlett. Their product was meant for the urban areas, Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx. It wasn't supposed to play where the porn people lived. That was a no no. One girl I went to school with had pornographer parents. I believe they were involved in porno magazines, not films. She was fat and gawky. By high school I believe she had drug problems.

Article from Newsday January 13, 1979. 

The Hewlett Theater, one of many venues pornographers didn't want their films seen at.

 

But the story I just told of the Hewlett is actually late in the game. Porn had already started to spread through Long Island theaters by the mid 70's. The interesting element of this story is that the theaters showing porn were not porn houses per say. They were regular theaters that were starting to experience audience decline and were willing to try anything to bring audiences back in. In fact, the idea was that porn was going to attract couples, and hence attending a porno film was going to be part of a "couples night out". But as my old (sometimes) pal Bill Landis used to say, "porn was made for men". He was correct about this, in that at the time particularly graphic portrayals of sex weren't exactly what most (but not all) women were looking for. It may be more common now as ongoing generations become aware of pornography very early in life and mostly as a result of the internet. But back in the 70's you had to seek porn out, it didn't come to you. 

 My first experiences seeing hardcore sex films was at a theater called The Queens Village Theater. Although it was technically in Queens, it was easily accessible to Long Islander's because it wasn't more than three minutes off the Cross Island Parkway, Jamaica Ave exit. Many Long Islanders attended the theater back in the glory days of the 1950's. It was a giant movie house, complete with a balcony and mezzanine. A woman I know had seen Creature From The Black Lagoon there in '54. But by the late 70's movie houses of these size were drastically effected by the energy crisis. Trying to heat these theaters was very difficult. And by 1977, after two years of flirting with adult titles, the Queens Village went porn and never went back. There's some debate as to when it closed, either '86 or '89. If it did hit '89, it was still porn and more than likely had converted to video projection. Between '81 and '84, I attended a few screenings of 35mm porn. The theater was interesting in that it had a glass covered projection booth that allowed you to watch the projectionist as he worked. They were running hour long reels with a changeover system. The theater was mafia run, and they ran a clean house. I never saw anyone doing anything lewd, either with themselves or anyone else. Either I was so focused on the screen, or maybe I was in complete denial but folks seemed to behave themselves at that theater. If anyone reading this has an alternative story about this theater, please write in. I was technically under age when I went to this movie house. XXX was 21 and over. I went with older friends and had to use others ID. I was never refused...

The Queens Village Theater provided hardcore thrills for the Long Island audience due to its proximity. Theaters on Long Island followed suit. The Laurel in Long Beach tried to go porn but like the Hewlett kept getting shut down. It finally gave up and went out of business. Now it's a CVS....

Sex was everywhere in the 70's. From the Malverne Theater (where I had worked for a number of years in the late 90's) showing Sex With A Smile to Sunrise Drive-In showing Linda Lovelace For President. 

Then there's the infamous Salisbury Theater that I had written about in Volume 3 Issue 2 of the Exploitation Journal. The Coitus Interrupter  theater.  Salisbury, located in Westbury, had a law against the showing of X rated films. This law was enacted as a result of trying to get John Water's Pink Flamingos shown during it's initial release. This meant that the Salisbury could only show single X films. That meant they had to be cut down to softcore status. And if a cut print didn't exist, then it meant the projectionist had to make the cuts. They also drew a black bouncing ball over oral sex scenes with an erasable magic marker. I went to see Female Athletes there. Many times I had been rejected from the theater due to my age not matching the phony ID.  When I finally got in, I was aghast to see how they cut the films. Talk about sexual frustration. This theater alone created rapists with its censorship madness. This was an abomination. Now, I visited this theater twice, actually hoping my first visit was an odd incident that wouldn't repeat. But yes, it did repeat. This was around 1980-81. I never stepped foot in it again (except to see a midnight showing of the Exorcist). It continued to show porn until it's demise in the late 80's. I was told they went to VHS projection. I was also told they were finally able to go hardcore at the very end. Too late, too little. This theater has also become a CVS.

Dig it! Intimate Teenagers plays the Oceanside (also a theater I worked in the late 90's) while Erotic Dreams wastes it's time at the Salisbury. Alice in Wonderland is all over the Island.

In the early 1990's, I began training as a projectionist and would gradually end up working at many of the theaters that had tried porn in an attempt to keep going and make a profit. While I was doing some research for this article, I was quite surprised to see that  the Oceanside Theater on Long Beach Road ran some porn. When I was working there, I always used to joke that its decor reminded me of a porn theater. It was a cheesy. It appeared to be a 50's era theater that was made into a twin in the 1970's. The wife of the guy who ran the theater told me that a film distributor worked out of the upstairs office. This distributor was handling East Coast showing of the Mitchell Brothers Sodom and Gomorrah. She remembered seeing the lobby cards for it in his desk (she had a Summer job there). Being trained by several different projectionists at different time, obviously I got to know many of the men who ran the porno shows. A lot of them mentioned that there would be an uproar when one of these neighborhood theaters started to project porn. Many projectionists recalled being arrested because the manager/owners were out of the building when the police came, and the cops had to bring someone in, hence the remaining projectionist was the fall guy. The arrests were done to intimidate the owners who would lose revenue every time a theater was shut down. It also prevented many theaters from turning completely in to porn showcases. 

Most of the places that stayed porn were in dicey neighborhoods. The Fine Arts in Hempstead started out as a vaudeville house before becoming a movie theater. By the late 50's, it specialized in racy sexploitation films. This would continue throughout the 60's and by mid 70's it went full blown porn, never to come back. Hempstead succumbed to terrible urban decay after a housing project opened up in the late 60's. what was once a great shopping area became a wasteland of hookers and addicts. And the Fine Arts housed their main clientele. It's still not a good area.

Strip Mall theaters such as the Hauppauge all had a spell where by they tried to recoup loses by showing porn flicks. Oddly enough, these theaters tended to be well attended in the porn days. Long Island folks are lazy and enjoy creature comforts. They tended to go to these theaters rather than hall it into Brooklyn, Queens or Manhattan.

The Bethpage theater was also known at one time as the CineCapri. In 1978 I had seen a double feature of both Freaks and Night of the Living Dead there. That double feature blew my mind, it made me want to become a film-maker and so I did become a film-maker. But prior to it's art house status the theater kept switching back and forth between softcore sex films (in the late 60's) to hardcore sex films (mid 70's). In the 1960's, it played films such as Ed Wood's penned Orgy of the Dead.

As I stated before we lived in Hewlett, which was far closer to the Queens NY boarder, hence why we were able to frequent theaters in Nassau and Queens with far more ease that the theaters that were located out in Suffolk. In fact in Hewlett we weren't even close to the parkway, you either had to head East toward Rockville Center or North to Valley Stream in order to get the Southern State parkway. But porn had certainly made it's way East of Nassau and found a home in Suffolk county. The Hauppauge was a strip mall theater that only went porn temporally. Apparently, and according to folks who worked the theater the husband and wife team who owned the theater had a thing for porn. Even after they stopped showing adult titles, they'd have private screenings of adult films so that goes to prove they were lifelong fans. And then there was the Regent in Bayshore. That remained a theater through the 1990's, as I remember when I was dating my wife to be we'd head out East and pass it. By that point, it was called the Hollyrock, and it featured programing for children exclusively. Talk about irony. From porn to Disney. But from the mid 70's through the late 80's it functioned as a full blown porn theater. It was at the Regent that one of the projectionists I knew was arrested for projecting porn. He said he felt that "the manager must have had warning there was going to be a bust, so he stepped out just in time for the cops to nab the projectionist". By the way, the Regent has now become the Bolton Center. It is one of the best concert venues on Long Island, a small and comfortable space that attracts local and international music. However, the energy of pornography that has been projected there still haunts the place. You can't help but pop a boner the minute you enter the lobby. The theater is owned by the YMCA. 

The Regent was run by the same guy who was running the Lake Ronkonkoma Art Cinema. Also known as the Lakeside Cinema, the Ronkonkoma was also a strip mall theater that opened in the early 60's. Like the Fine Arts in Hempstead, it turned to softcore fare quite quickly. Parents staged protests. The owner told the kids who were protesting with their parents that they needed to frequent the kiddie shows if they wanted the theater to stay kiddie. They said they would, but the theater stayed sex until going hardcore, from which it never rebounded. According to a fellow film-maker I know who lives out that way, the Ronkonkoma was located right next to a gay bar. So if you came out of the "straight" theater with a case of the hornies, all you had to do was "go next door to bar, close your eyes and pretend what's blowing you was a girl".

Strip mall theater gone naughty! 

Now the Bolton Center of Bayshore. Live music acts that include groups of the vintage era such as Vanilla Fudge, The Strawbs, Chris Hillman of the Byrds, and the tribute band The Band The Band now play this famous former porn palace.

All the theaters playing these softcore porn's were once regular movie houses that continued on long after the porn interest waned.

The Belair theater once played the film Catch Us If You Can, which featured the Dave Clark Five. The Dave Clark Five made a live appearance at this theater when it played their film. About ten years later, Russ Meyer mammaries smacked audiences in the face.

This theater would become the art house the CineCapri. It showed movies like Mondo Cane, Freaks and Night of the Living Dead. Back in the 60's it showed Ed Woods Orgy of the Dead. It became a play theater. I saw a production of Chess there. Now it sits empty once again.

The perfect theater to help create an atmosphere of sexual frustration. They censored the hardcore porn here, hence leaving you with virtually nothing. It did this for almost ten years of it's porn run. But Long Islanders were desperate and went anyway. Video tape availability finally put this place to rest. It's a CVS now. Viagra sells big there....

Known as the Lake Ronkonkama Art cinema, this place played porn for a solid 15 years, not counting all the years of softcore porn it showed.

Yep, softcore crap made by the miserable John Russo of Night of the Living Dead fame hit the Island quicker than the theaters could book it.

Folks, do not expect an end to this article. It's an ongoing piece that I'll be contributing too for quite some time. I will say this. All porn theaters on Long Island either shuttered their doors or went back to regular fare by the late 80's. Beta and VHS killed the porn theater market. It privatized the viewing of porn and made it a discrete tiny cassette that was put in a brown paper bag and brought home for your enjoyment. Your neighbors never knew if you were kinky. Unless of course you bumped into them in the adult room of your local video store.....