Home

Back to Essays

Adventures In The Skin Trade

By David Warner

03/01/86

New Business  (Copyright Clubhouse Publishing Inc. 1986)

Sarasota, FL, US --

This is the confession of a man who grew up loving the movies. In the Alabama town where I was reared, there were three theaters. Two featured first-run films; the third was the Ritz (nicknamed the Ratz by us kids), and it screened double and triple bills of dubious quality, Westerns and horror pictures mostly.

Sometimes the projectionist, who was invariably drunk, would get his reels mixed so that the end of the movie was in the middle and the beginning at the end. It didn't matter. The action was all that mattered, not what passed for a plot.

Now I support myself by owning a theater for adults, and the same principle applies. It's the South Trail Cinema, that Triple-X place down past Gulf Gate with the steady stream of elderly men ghosting in and out. Most likely, you envision it as a regular Sodom and Gomorrah. It's the sort of place where the projectionist, eager to get home on time, can simply leave out the middle reel of an especially long feature, and hardly anyone will notice.

These films leave nothing to the imagination. Most involve male fantasies, like the one about the plumber in a sorority house full of available girls, and the plot is a flimsy excuse for the action. In one of them, a wicked husband fakes a fatal heart attack, then pretends to come back as a ghost in order to scare his buxom wife to death and inherit her fortune. Nice plot, but it wasn't really introduced until the last few minutes of the movie.

Occasionally, I run across a fairly decent film. There was a gangster porn film, for example, that was more realistic than anything in the regular theaters simply because the actors spoke real street talk as opposed to Hollywood-ese and the hoods really looked the part, which they probably were.

But these are the exceptions. Most of my films are the farthest thing imaginable from the quality I hoped to offer when I bought the theater five years ago. I wanted to screen "classics" and foreign films. At the time, the market for this was almost nonexistent.

So I decided to go "first-run" with films starring actors like Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford and Burt Reynolds. But these movies cost big bucks. The theater owner must guarantee the distributor so much money against a percentage of the take. For instance, I once screened a bomb entitled "The Fifth Musketeer." The guarantee was $10,000 against 70 percent of the first week's gross, 60 percent of the second's, and so on down the line. Columbia, cognizant that the film was a loser, cancelled all TV and radio spots and left me holding the bag. The first week's receipts totaled a little over $600. The second week, I pulled the film and brought in another. Columbia kept the 10 grand. On the other hand, if advance word indicates the film is a winner the distributor will most likely award it to a chain-owned theater rather than waste it on an independent like me.

Next, I tried to screen second-run flicks at a buck a head, the advantage here being that I could pick them up for a flat percentage of the take, usually 25 percent. But by the time a film has run long enough to be considered second-run, it's probably already been shown on cable TV or, nowadays, released on videocassette.

The I tried free beer and pretzels with a $3 admission and blew $1,000 on newspaper and radio advertising. I even hired a security guard to patrol the aisles for rowdies, then bought four kegs of draft beer and enlisted the aid of three friends to help pour. The night arrived and six people showed up -- two bikers and four teetotalers.

GOLDEN OLDIES

Sarasota is what they call a "retirement market." The local sports arena is named after the founder of a chain of funeral homes. And as it turns out, the elderly comprise about 90 percent of the Sarasota market for porn films.

Since I knew of a fellow in St. Petersburg who was screening porn for an elderly audience, I decided to give him a call. Fred Hand (not his real name) is an independent theater owner from Buffalo, N.Y., who at that time owned three theaters -- two up north and one in St. Pete. All three were screening porn . Hand had found the same problems dealing with the major distributors that I had, and had converted to porn 10 years before. To this old-time theater man who had been screening films since the 1930s, porn -- like "talkies," "3-D," of "Dolby Sound" -- was simply the latest in a long string of developments.

Hand gave me the number of a distributor in Miami. When I dialed the number, the man on the other end of the line claimed to know nothing about dirty movies; in fact, he'd never seen one. So I called Hand back. When I finished explaining what had happened, he said: "Tell him Fred told you to call and ask to speak with Sally." Sure enough, the second time ground I got through.

Within the week, a car drove up to the theater, and a man got out to deliver two hour-long features for a double bill. The man wasn't my idea of Mafia at all. As a matter of fact, he was quite polite with a soft Southern accent and a quiet, unassuming manner. We went next door to the Red Lobster and, over drinks, he explained the legal ramifications of what I was getting into.

First, each film had to be tried separately on its own merits for obscenity. In other words, a police detective had to sit through an entire showing, then confiscate the film and arrange for a trial during the course of which the film would be screened before a judge. It was a long and costly procedure and, during the interim, I could be showing other films.

Two things to watch out for were prostitutes and minors. An advantage a theater has over a bookstore, say, is that there is nothing a customer can carry home (where it might be viewed by children). Run a clean operation, he advised, and the law won't bother you.

Another advantage of porn was that the distributor doesn't want an arm and a leg for his product. All that was required was a $500 guarantee against 25 percent of the gross. Other distributors wanted even less, but Hand insisted that the reliability of this particular outfit made it worth the extra money.

CUSTOMER COMPOSITE

The first couple of days, I worked the box office myself. The majority of men attending the matinees -- including those whose wives dropped them off at the entrance prior to going shopping -- were elderly. Some were nervous about entering, but an equal number were matter-of-fact. As the weeks rolled by, I noticed that some attended daily, but most attended at least once a week. (The films change every Friday.)

I can make these generalizations about the clientele:

* Quite a few park next door, then sneak around the corner to the box office. Some tell the cashier, week after week, that it's their first porn flick. Others walk briskly along the sidewalk as though passing by, then veer sharply at the last instant, hand extended with the correct change.

* The evening crowd and the matinee crowd differ a little, with the matinee drawing mainly old men; at night some couples attend. Most of the patrons are attractive and well-dressed, the sort you'd expect to see at the country club.

* The crowd is steady throughout the day. Hardly anyone worries about starting times, since pretty much the same sort of thing is always happening on the screen.

* At least 80 percent of the patrons attend one or more times a week. (In this way, the theater resembles a neighborhood bar.) Most come alone, so the parking lot is usually jammed with cars.

* Some customers don't mind being recognized, like the elderly couple who attend every Friday afternoon. They remain seated throughout both features, and on their way out the man signals his opinion of the films with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down gesture. But others prefer anonymity. Once an elderly man suffered a stroke inside the auditorium. When the projectionist started to phone an ambulance, the man insisted that he be carried next door to the Red Lobster first.

* By talking with my steady customers, I've discovered that most of them think that women are the aggressors in any relationship, and that their sole criterion in choosing a mate is the size of his instrument.

Fridays and Saturdays are the best days; Sundays are by far the slowest. A surprising number of the cars in the parking lot on weekdays sport religious decals.

Although there's seasonal variation, weekly receipts are remarkably consistent, seldom varying by more than a few hundred dollars -- proving that the titles are irrelevant so long as they're Triple-X. (In fact, the same film will sometimes run under three different titles over the course of a year.) The one exception is any film with the word "teen-age" in the title. "Teen-age Hitchhikers" was the biggest grosser ever, even though the women portraying the teen-agers were at least in their 30s.