I think it would be fun to hear from you older guys or women if you can remember porn movies you saw in theaters. 70's, 80's or whenever. In my town the local porn theatre was shut down around 87. I live in Sweden, Gothenburg. and I saw most of the movies in a cinema called Biorama...and later they showed double features...and every other week they changed movies.. So whatever you can come up with... I will name some of the titles I can remember and add new ones...
Fleshdance (my very first one) Liquid with assets Suzie Superstar Beverly hills exposed Pussy talk Devil in Miss Jones All American girls Golden girls All American girls in heat Inside Desiree Cousteau "F" New wave hookers Bordello-house of the rising sun Body girls (Hyapatia Lee) Viva Vanessa
Dallas School Girls - 1981 my first porn movie ever. French Fantasies The Opening Of Misty Beethoven The Pleasures Of Innocences - My introduction to my all-time favorite Angel, credited here as Brandee. This was on 14th Street In Washington DC at The Casino Royal. Candy Samples made an appearance at the theater, my first time ever seeing a pornstar in person. Upstairs/Downstairs Every Inch A Woman Neon Nights - This film is still very special to me to this day !!!! A friend and I played hooky from school one day this was in 1981 I was in the 10th grade. Unthinkable Up, Up, and Away Stiff Competition Taboo 4 - This was in October of 1987 I had just moved to Venice Beach California this was a double feature I took in at the Pussycat Theater in Santa Monica. Great Sexpectations
Late '70s, on a Saturday night after a track meet, a couple of buddies and I parked in a neighborhood alongside a xxx drive-in called The Olympic. The high black tarps that had kept you from seeing the screen were severely tattered so that's how we caught the end of BEHIND THE GREEN D00R. I had seen the movie in a small neighborhood theater called the Central City but I seem to remember it being edited down to an x rating.
It's really great to read about your own experiences...your own personal stories..! I remember I took a few strolls around the building before I dared to go inside. This was in 85. Winter time. Fleshdance was the movie and I think it was Friday night and the place was crowded.. I couldn't believe it. As I got inside, Rachel Ashley was being fucked by Hershel Savage. On this huge screen! I left quite early that night but came back a few days later to see the whole movie.. then I was stuck..cinema porn was something else..
We seldom went to theaters for adult films, but the wife and I did see:
Behind the Green Door Deep Throat Debbie Does Dallas Devil in Miss Jones
Viewing porn in public settings was rather different than sitting in one's living room; for us (with some of our friends), it was a social event, followed by discussion of the film over drinks. I'm not sure it would have had the same cachet had it been movies full of gagging and anal gapes.
When I was a teenager, I had a fake ID, and the local porn theater showed a new double feature every week. I would usually watch both of them.
I continued to go to theaters as a young man, and didn't buy a VHS player until I'd been watching porn for over 10 years. Even after I owned a VHS, I would go to see the live shows in Times Square, and in between the live shows, they would show porn films on a big screen. Again, they had rotating performers, so I would typically go every week.
So I would say I went to porn theaters about once a week for 20 years. In general, I just remember scenes, and couldn't tell you what movie they were from, and if I remember a movie by name, it's usually because I liked the trailer.
That said, Taboo was the first movie to come to mind.
I have stronger memories of the female performers than the movies. Seka and Annie Sprinkle were among my favorites, so I also remember "Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle", and "Deep Inside Seka".
The scene where Annie Sprinkle shows up at a theater to interact with her fans was a particular favorite.
1977 at the Bangor, Maine drive in I saw The Spirit of Seventeen Seventy Sex. And when I lived in Portland there was the infamous State Theater. That's usually where I was on Saturdays. Saw too many movies to list.
Best advice I ever got was there, "DON'T SIT UNDER THE BALCONY". 😎
Those of you that went to the theaters to see movies and did that for a long period of time...was it embarrassing to go there or did you go with friends or did you talk about it with friends, relatives and so on? I've always had my doubts about it but then again..so many years later..I'm glad I got the chance to see some of the big stars on the big screen...porn was fun then..today it's another thing...
I can't answer with simple yeses or nos. Porn was largely separate from the rest of my life, but the two aspects of my life sometimes met.
My first girlfriend and I would sometimes go to theaters together. She liked my magazines, so I would give them to her when I got bored of them. I visited her once years after we broke up, and I was surprised to see that she still had my old porn mags. One time, her mother drove us to the theater.
My close friends knew that I liked porn, and we would talk about it in passing, but rarely dwelt on it. Most of my girlfriends saw it as a relatively harmless foible, but few wanted to watch with me- even after DVDs and VHSs emerged.
I had one circle of friends with whom it was basically taken-for-granted that most guys watched porn. We talked about it, but it was basically 'locker room talk'. One of the girls in that circle worked at the Melody Burlesque (where lap-dancing got started), and described her job as "wiggling". When she was at work, we would sometimes joke about showing up, but we never did it. (It was never stated whether the reason we might go was to embarrass her or because we wanted her to wiggle on our crotches.)
One time, I saw someone from work at Showworld. Luckily, I was not flagrantly masturbating at the time.
In the late '70s, we were really late getting to the stadium for a baseball game so a bunch of my buddies and me went to a movie house showing Fiona on Fire with Amber Hunt in so many of the sex scenes. That theater, called The Fine Arts, soon went under due to the ever increasing popularity of home VHS players. My Dad had popped for one of those heavy top-loader VHS player/recorders so that's how I saw so many of the xxx titles. Some guy at work would sell him tapes with 5 or 6 xxx movies on one 6 hour VHS. At the end of some, he would have "shows" of two local people fucking with Neil Diamond tunes or the radio playing in the background.
I found watching movies in the theatres particularly exciting since it meant you're watching with others..Male watchers mostly of course, the sort of raincoat army but anyway...and just maybe one of them brought along his wife or girlfriend. Watching naked girls on a big screen anonymously with others..I found that quite exciting. It was something that brought us together in some weird way. Like going to a stripclub or a soccer game.. You share some common weird interest with others. And you're part of one audience. You don't have to explain to anyone why you're there. But I also found going to porn theatres a bit scary. What if some school teacher, school buddy or whatever saw you enter? To me it was entertainment for the lonely guy. Not something you did with others. Maybe I wish it had been different. Today watching porn at home does not give you the same feeling...it's when you reveal to someone else your secrets..that's the exciting part I think...
Well I saw a lot of very good american movies and some french (Brigitte Lahaie) at the cinemas. But I must say I prefer European movies. Sorry guys. Sarah Young and Teresa Orlowski brought something new to the whole scene. Hadn't it been great watching Sarah on the big screen?
^^ Though I wouldn't have found those words that is remarkably close to my feelings.
One difference for me was that my high school/college girlfriend sometimes went with me, and later- as I got into the Times Square strip club scene- there were women who were literally playing a central roll in the group activity.
Being part of an audience (of masturbating men) was even more exciting when the women we were masturbating to were not only aware of what we were doing, but encouraged it. (Some even seemed to get a bit of a thrill from being the center of attention in that way.)
I was active in this scene as the Gay rights movement was hitting its peak. (Harvy Milk was killed in 1978, which is the same year I saw my first porn movie.) I weirdly related to gay men, in that I felt like I had closeted sexual desires, and I wanted to come out. In fact I came out to a lot of my friends (my family knew about my magazine collection as a teenager), but I also found some pleasure and relief from being part of a group of people who all enjoyed jerking off to porn.
I dare say that's part of the reason I participate in this forum to this day.
The only one i recall at the local drive-in theatre was a movie with John Holmes, but can't recall the name of it.
It was around 1978 when i took my then 17 year old girlfriend to the drive-in to watch another movie, and during interval they showed a 5 minute trailer of this movie, showing John Holmes swimming naked in a pool and chatting to a brunette woman who was laying on a banana lounge near the side of the pool, he swam to the edge of the pool and the camera caught a front shot of him as he lifted himself up, and as his cock was revealed from behind the tiled wall, i recall my girlfriend almost fainted.
Okay, set the Way Back Machine to 1980. I lived in a little podunk town that had a one screen theater since the 50s. It was a huge theater that sat at least two or 300 people, but it was old. When they built the new two screen theater (wow, two screens! this was high-end for our town!) on the other side of town, this old one kind of fell into disrepair. To everyone's disbelief, they began to show porn movies there. Believe it or not, the old theater was porno movies all week and Disney/kiddie matinees on the weekend... Yeah, how fucked up is that?
I was 15 at the time and my buddies and I would always drive by it, wishing we were 18 and old enough to go in. The marquee never had titles on it, just "XXX double feature" in big red letters. None of us had ever seen a porn movie before, all we knew of was dirty mags like Playboy and the occasional Hustler or Penthouse. Well, I was a fan of science fiction and horror movies and I bought all the sci fi magazines, some of which told how to do make up effects. So, I devised a plan for us. I knew from experience that if you put Elmer's glue on the back of your hand while you were making a fist, let it dry, and then relaxed your hand, it made your hand look all wrinkly and old. That was the key. We would open our mouths really wide, stretching our faces out as far as we could and apply some Elmer's glue under our eyes and let it dry. Then, we could relax our faces and it made the skin under our eyes look wrinkly. Then, just apply a little of Mom's skin tone make-up over it and voila, we had bags under our eyes. Then a bit of mascara brush over our peach-fuzz mustaches and we looked (we thought) old......yeah, it was stupid, but we thought it all would make us look older.
Also, this was in the days when our driver's licenses did not have pictures on them, just purple ink on a plastic card. I could take a razor blade and scrape away part of the 5 on our 1965 birthdays and, with a purple pen, turn the 5 into a 3... 1965 became 1963....boom, we were all 18!!.....I was a devious little fuck, but damn we all wanted to see that x-rated goodness!!
We must've drove around that theater twenty times or more trying to get up the nerve to try to go in. We were scared shitless!! To us, this was like robbing a bank or something! I mean, none of us had ever tried anything like this! We smoked a little weed and downed a pint of Pink Schnapps one of had scored. Finally, we went up to the ticket booth where an old lady of about 70 or so, who looked like my grandmother, was taking the money. God, we were embarrassed!! She asked for our I.D.s and lo and behold, she said "go on in".....We couldn't believe it!! Either she was really stupid or we were really smart! LOL!
It was always two movies showing. Well, the first one came on. I don't remember the name of it, but it was most definitely NOT x-rated. Just a hard R. We saw some boobs and some butt cheeks, but that was about it. I remember thinking to myself "Are you kidding? THIS is what porn is about?! I've seen more bush in Playboy magazines than this!!" So, for about 60 minutes, it was a huge letdown......Then...the second movie started...Holy fucking God!! Absolutely XXX-rated!!!
The name of the movie was something like (I really don't remember the exact title) "Drown In Your Eyes"...or some shit like that...
It started out with four chicks masturbating in a cemetery (of all places!). They were all lamenting the death of their chick friend. So, the next day these girls wake up and go into their kitchen for breakfast. All the chairs at the the table have these big dildos made on to them. They all sit down on the dildo chairs and drink their coffee. They talk about their dead girl friend and decide they all should die by sex....this was really freaky....
So, one girl goes outside to the pool where there is this pool boy who was struck by lighting, and has an eternal hard-on. He literally fucks her to death and throws her in the pool....that's one down..
The next girl, somehow or other, ends up hooking up with Edi Amin and driving around in a jeep with him and some soldiers. Then they--yep, you guessed it--all fuck her to death!!...this was fucked up movie!!
The third girl ends up masturbating with a lit stick of dynamite and, as she cums, it blows her to bits....
The fourth girl....well, I really don't remember how she died...my dick had been up and down so many times I was in a total state of shock, (but remember this was old 70s porn, it all sounds worse than it really was on the screen). It was all cheesy as hell, but there was actually a lot of good hard-core fucking in it.
So, the movie was over and we all walked out. Needless to say, none of us wanted to ride around anymore. Everyone wanted to go home and jack off. We didn't actually say that to each other, but we all decided the night was over...lol
We were all in my car and I had to take everyone home. After I dropped everyone off, I remembered I had a girlfriend!..Sherri... Like I said, I was only 15. She was 14. I drove to her apartment and threw rocks at her third story bedroom window until she woke up and snuck outside.....Long story short, I lost my virginity that night. I didn't force anything on her or anything like that, we had been making out for months, and she was quite happy that I was finally ready. You see, I had been raised really religious, and while I had made out with her, played with her tits, even got 'stinky finger' off her many times, I had never tried to fuck her. We fucked in the back seat of my car all night.
Needless to say, my buds and I disguised ourselves many many times and went back to the ol' porn theater. We quickly learned it was better if we didn't sit together! LOL!
Then, again, I would take them home and go hook up with Sherri.........I often wonder where she is these days. And I would love to know the name of that movie!!!
DUDE!!! That may be it!! http://www.distribpix.com/blog/kinky-ladies-bourbon-street-1976 But I don't remember it being in another language... Maybe it was, all I could think about was how much blood was rushing to my teenage dick!!
Thank you for that info. I must try to track down that movie.....not that I enjoy violence towards women, or anything like that, I don't. Seriously, I don't. I love women and would rather worship them.
I'm glad those days are over. Sitting thru hours of vanilla sex just to see 10 minutes of CJ Laing was agony. Constant seat changing, going in or out with people watching made it worse.
I agree. It was a pain in the ass. You never knew what you were going to get. Most of the time it was garbage. No such thing as 'fast forward', you just had to sit through it and hope. Your cock would go up and down so many times and there wasn't anything you could really do. I can remember only one time I actually jacked off in a theater. My buddies and I went to the theater one night and I don't remember the scene or the movie, but it was some of first really really good anal stuff I ever saw...
No jacking off that night because I was there with my crew, but I knew I had to see that scene again!! The next night I went back by myself. Like I said before, my particular theater always showed double features, and since each one was usually only about 60 or 70 minutes, they showed both of them twice. Usually by the time the first set of two was over most of the guys in there left. But I stuck around. The scene I wanted was towards the end of the second movie. And as long as there was one person in there they wouldn't shut it down. I remember the usher coming in to check to see if anyone was still there.
By the time "my" scene came on again it was close to midnight. I was really tired of sitting there but godammit I wanted to see that scene alone!! It was the first really good buttfuck I had ever seen!! Finally it got to it and I looked around and I was the only one there so, yep, I whipped my dick out and jacked off to it. I was scared to death I was going to get caught, but I didn't. I shot my load onto that sticky carpeted floor, gathered my senses and got up and left, totally spent.
Only time I ever did that. Luckily, VCRs came out soon after that and our local record store rented out XXX tapes. That was a Godsend.....no more of that "raincoat" shit....LOL!
Yeah maybe, but if you were a teenager back then, you didn't give a shit about story or plot. You could get that from real movies. All you wanted was real raw fucking on screen.
Nowadays, yeah, sometimes I like watching all that old shit--actually trying to see if the story actually makes any sense, all that stuff. I have more respect for it now.
And I'll tell you this--being weened on all that 70s and 80s porn really makes me appreciate "cheesy" acting! I love that shit!! It seemed so horrible at the time, but nowadays, I LOVE when porn girls do all that over-the-top acting!! Personally, I like that better than 'good' acting. To me, that is what porn is. For some reason, the worse the acting is, whether intentional or not, the more it turns me on!!
Girls saying stuff like "Oh my goodness, it's so big!" or "You mean you can put things in your butthole?!" or "I didn't know it could feel this good!" or "Oh my God, I didn't know it squirts!" etc.
Stuff like that really turns me on.....I guess it takes me back to those old days.
Another thing that used to piss me off - there was no way to know if there was any anal or decent deep throat scenes. Screw magazine had some ok reviews, but many times they omitted the good stuff. I had a crush on Little Oral Annie , but usually she would get ignored and the camera would focus instead on dude butt or dude face. I tended to prefer the peeps, live shows, and hookers.
What I miss is the big screen. You can't get that kind of feeling today watching porn movies. It was something special. My favorite was probably Desiree Cousteau and Hyapatia Lee. But you really couldn't relax. You had to check if someone you knew entered. That was a nervous feeling I had, I remember. It never happened as far as I remember. Shame these cinemas are all gone. What a great loss for humanity.
^---Pine, check out the Rialto Report thread and their podcasts. Info about old theaters and the like is more likely to pop up there---tb
My trading partner recently gifted me the double feature that I had seen in the theater:
LABOR OF LOVE is much like I remember it. The flick is a study in frustrated filmmaking as director, cameraman and crew attempt to make a film with hardcore sex scenes in the middle of the winter. Most of the crew seemed to care more about drinking beer than helping out the director. VINEGAR SYNDROME did their usual terrific job restoring it.
EXHIBITION (1975, France) is something that everyone should see. A documentary filmmaker named Jean-Francois Davy does interviews with feisty French porn actress Claudine Becarrie plus other porn actors are on board for a few sex scenes. This new extended version that I saw features new Becarrie scenes, some shot in 1979 then some shot in 1983. Her life-after-porn scenes bring the original documentary full circle. Well-done.
One more note about EXHIBITION---I did not recognize any of the other performers but through a bit of research I was able to uncover that the lovely Frederique Baral had performed in Lasse Braun's SENSATIONS (1975) so I was at least able to see her in a different film.
pornography wasn't sex but fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world 12377 Posts 9/07
Posted - Sep 7 2020 : 6:17PM
There are a number of books on the golden age of porn at this point, two less academic books that come immediately to mind are Legs McNeil's oral history The Other Hollywood and Golden Goddesses by Jill Nelson.
The best book on old porn cinemas is Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel Delany. The first half or more of the book is an amazing autobiographical history of Delany's time crusin' for gay sex in the 42nd Street Theatres. It is very uncensored. Bill Landis' Sleaze Express is another very personal history of the 42nd grindhouse and porn theatres, a classic.
pornography wasn't sex but fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world 12377 Posts 9/07
Posted - Sep 7 2020 : 7:03PM
^ For sure it isn't reliable but he was working from a purely oral history with no documentation. So he vomits up rumours as well as truth. I think he captures the time convincingly in his drug-fueled style.
His essay on his time in porn as an actor in the 80s with George Payne is terrific, unfortunately not collected and his wife had it pulled from online last I looked.
1. One of the 1st porn movies I saw was Score. This was in a XXX rated theater, although Score was not really a hardcore film. It contained a bit gay content as well, which was not appreciated by the audience. Heard quite a few groans that day.
2. 1st porn star that really got my attention was Heather Young in Hot Honey.
3. Biggest hit porn movie I remember is Bad Girls. There was a porn theater north of Hartford that just kept running it. They'd play it for several weeks, rest it & back it would come. Porn theater in my hometown changed films every week.
4. Last movie I remember seeing in a porn theater was one of the Flesh & Laces starring Shauna Grant. The VCR had begun to take hold spelling the end of the theater experience.
5. As an Abigail Clayton fan, Seven into Snowy was probably my favorite theater viewing experience. Came to the conclusion later on that Health Spa is actually her best movie.
pornography wasn't sex but fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world 12377 Posts 9/07
Posted - Sep 11 2020 : 4:47AM
^ Big fan of Score by the great Radley Metzger.
Bad Girls is fun. Great cast.
Unfortunately Seven into Snowy had truly terrible quality release on DVD by VCX although the VCA version looks better but may be cut?
My favourite film to feature Abigal Clayton was Sex World although she isn't the lead there. I also dimly recall liking Naked Afternoon where she starred. I think it was Eric Edwards, or Richard Pacheco, who dated her and had his heart broken when she developed a drug problem? It was on one of the Rialto Report podcasts.
^ It was Ken Scudder that dated Abigail Clayton for a brief while, Eric Edwards dated Arcadia Lake she developed a drug problem and Richard Pacheco when he entered the Adult Film Industry in 1978 was and still is married to a woman named Carly.
^ I liked Abigail in Dixie and October Silk as well and I throw in Femmes DeSade and Hot Cookies into the mix. Dixie and Hot Cookies are a couple of titles I wish Vinegar Syndrome cold get their hands on. 7 Into Snowy I purchased in the early 90's at The Pleasure Chest in West Hollywood, Ca when they had VCA titles of VHS tapes in small boxes on sale, it was pretty chopped up. Abigail Clayton was a favorite of the late Adult Film Historian Jim Holliday.
Discovered this thread today. Great stories, thank you all!
I only made it to the drive-in-theatres in my youth. The problem there was to get your own private 15 minutes to jack off in the car, thus the other firends who joined had to leave the car which was unfomfortable at rainy or cold days. And if you had bad luck you were supposed to do your job with a lame sequence that didn´t really excite you at all.
@Black Six: Thanx for the recommendation of Leg´s book. Ordered it today. I enjoyed his Oral history of Punk a couple of years ago and looking forward to reading this one.
^ I'm a city boy, so people started discussing watching porn in drive-ins, I was a little perplexed. I couldn't fathom showing porn movies outside where anyone could see it.
When you mentioned jerking off in the car, it suddenly made sense.
It's a shame your friends spoiled the experience- with the right friend(s), drive-in porn has real potential.
^ Due to the fact that the fake-ID opportunity always has been more or less an US phenomenon and didn´t work in Europe at least some decades ago and the fact that I appeared rather younger so no one would have offered me a seat in a regular theatre at the age of 15-17 even with a fake ID the drive-ins offered the opportunity to enter the theatre hidden in the trunk of the car. All you needed were friends above 18 with a driving licence and willingness to wait outside while the others tried to enjoy their 15 minutes privacy
Acutally it wasn´t really fun at all. But when you are under age you do quite a lot of stupid things to taste the forbidden fruit at least a couple of times.
And the first one I saw there was a movie with Annette Haven, don´t remember the name. She became my favorite porn star at that time.
The cinema where I went quite often showed movies with Annette Haven. In one of them she is under the table taking care of Eric Edwards. Has something to do with an election for President I think. I sat there in the dark waitning for that scene to reappear. As someone said earlier you had to stay in your seat a couple of hours at least for the scene to come back..she was a Goddess.
pornography wasn't sex but fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world 12377 Posts 9/07
Posted - Sep 19 2020 : 2:28AM
Fox was often very hot in her scenes and one of the best actresses of the era. An underrated Chuck Vincent feature starring her is Bad Penny, Distripix has it I think (and most of the other Vincent features). Would be nice to see it get a better quality release.
