Connecticut- So, you're lonesome and frisky on a Friday night.
If you're inclined to such things - and the magnitude of the multibillion-dollar adult-entertainment industry says chances are good you are - the most likely (and publishable) scenarios go something like this:
Rummage the Internet's buffet of sexual content for a saucy film clip. Or pick up the phone and order porn straight to your TV. If you can muster it, maybe head to the adult novelty emporium just off the highway and slink back with a couple of DVDs.
And so it goes, sneaking a naughty peek in this tech-driven era of instant gratification. Get exactly what you want when you want it: lightning-quick, anonymous delivery of adult entertainment.
Which is what makes the Art Cinema in Hartford sort of quaint, if such a word can be used to describe a XXX movie theater.
"We're one of the few left in the entire United States," says owner Ernie Grecula Jr. [pictured] He leans over the concession stand selling $10 tickets to the trickle of customers this recent Friday afternoon. Today's feature: "Rich Girls Gone Bad."
But given such easy, at-home access to pornography today, just how good can business be at the Franklin Avenue cinema?
"Slow. Very slow," he concedes. Maybe half a dozen patrons sit cloaked in the theater's darkness. In the span of an hour, only three others will join them. Some are sheepish. But the regulars, they smile and wave a hello. They plunk down their cash and shuffle off, lost behind the distinctive moaning that spills from the single-screen auditorium.
His customers are overwhelmingly male, and they tend to be middle-aged and older. Some are buttoned-up professionals. Some are down on their luck. But Grecula doesn't ask them questions. And they don't offer explanations. But from what he sees, and those he's come to know, he's got some idea why they are customers. They don't have the technology at home. Or their wives don't approve. Some, he says, just like the experience of watching a sex flick in a public theater.
"You know how you like to go to the movies to get a crowd reaction? I don't know if it's the same here," he says.
Don't misunderstand. Grecula runs a clean business. There are house rules, and by and large his patrons follow them. Still, he admits, "As much as I like to think I run a tight ship, I know some things go on."
During two visits to the theater, only one couple coyly stops in. It used to be the 600-seat theater was packed with couples. And young people. They'd come from the local colleges with friends, their little brown student discount cards at the ready.
But that was in the heady heyday of the 1970s, when "Deep Throat", www.arrowfreedom.com launched adult film into the mainstream, and the neighborhood XXX-theater was the only place to get a peek.
"When I was in high school," says Grecula, 57, "everybody knew the Art Cinema. Everybody knew who we were, where we were. The younger generation has no idea we're here."
It's a rainy Friday. Business should be better today.
But such is the reality of operating an adult theater in a new kind of heyday, an electronic one. For better or worse, Grecula's theater is a dying breed, by several counts one of the last of its kind in New England. Across the country, others have been shuttered or knocked down, squeezed out of business by some combination of the mammoth adult video market, the sprawl of the Internet and the clench of local zoning laws.
About 1,500 adult theaters operated in the late 1970s, a figure cited in "Inside Deep Throat," the 2005 documentary about the film's making and its cultural consequences. With the advent of VHS, that number fell to 250 by 1990. Industry and movie theater historians interviewed for this story put that figure somewhere at between 50 and 100 today.
Last year, Americans spent $4.28 billion in sales and rentals of adult videos and DVDs. Internet video-on-demand accounted for $800 million of that.
"Frankly, it's always surprising to hear when they're still open. They are a rare breed in 2006," says Ross Melnick, co-founder of Cinema Treasures, a non-profit group dedicated to movie theater history and preservation. "Their day has definitely come and gone. And those that are still around are somehow making it work."
