Adult Movie Theatres in Bakersfield

California · last checked 23 October 2026

Bakersfield has one, and it is not a back room behind a shop. It is a 1920 movie palace with four hundred and eighty-six seats that has been showing adult films since 1963 and is open nine in the morning until one the next. Eight dollars for the booths, eighteen for the theatre, and the booths have no doors on them.

What is still open

Adult Cinema 19 Theatre & Bookstore

Theatre

1224 19th Street, Bakersfield, CA 93301

Opened: 1920, as the Virginia Theatre
Seats: 486, one screen
Booths: $8, and none of them have doors
Theatre: $18, and you pay again if you leave
Hours: 9am to 1am, seven days
Phone: (661) 323-7711

A nearly empty DVD shop at the front, a cashier behind an open window, and the prices posted outside it where anybody can read them. Somebody did, in February 2026, and wrote them down: eight dollars for the booths, eighteen for the theatre, and no re-entry on the theatre ticket.

The booths have no doors. A wide doorway and no privacy, by three separate accounts. The February visitor added the one qualifier that makes it bearable: you cannot actually see into a booth from the corridor without putting your head in.

The theatre is the better buy. Seating, multiple screens, and worth the extra ten dollars according to a visitor in June 2026, who also noted the single lavatory back there has no lock on the door.

And one detail nothing else in this directory has. A regular in August 2023 described the big screen running a straight film with the volume on and a gay film without it. One room, two audiences, one soundtrack.

Go in knowing what it is. It is a known cruising spot for men, and the people who like it say so plainly: very seedy, as it should be; only one in town, too bad, very dirty, but guaranteed entertaining. A couple who went in September 2025 hated it and said Bakersfield does not offer a clean adult cinema experience. A woman in May 2025 found only men, most of them masturbating, and suggested they run a couples night.

Last checked 23 October 2026 · Prices read off the posted list on 24 February 2026; layout described 9 June 2026

Nothing else in the city has a room, and three separate searches say so. Fun Zone Gifts & Video at 2500 New Stine Road, (661) 323-0100, trades 11am to 10pm and to midnight at weekends and is a well-liked shop. Red Hot Thrillz and Hustler Hollywood are shops. The next rooms in any direction are a hundred miles away at Santa Clarita and Santa Barbara.

A hundred and six years at one address

Most of the survivors in this directory are shops that put booths in the back. This one is the building it always was.

1919 to 1920John Carnakis builds the Virginia Theatre. It opens in 1920, 486 seats.
20 November 1930Relaunches with Western Electric Sound, showing The Squealer.
28 June 1963Renamed the Paris Theatre, and begins showing nudie films.
11 August 1967Renamed Cinema 19 and turned into an art house. It soon goes back to adult films, soft at first and then hard.
9 December 1974Boxoffice reports it in the ten-theatre Amber Theatres chain of adult cinemas, run by Nancy Lindsey, aged thirty-three.
TodayOpen 9am to 1am, seven days, as Adult Cinema 19 Theatre & Bookstore.

One hundred and six years at 1224 19th Street, and it is still a cinema.

And the order is backwards. The single most common story on this site is the art house that turned: a Downtown Cinema in Lexington, an Art Cinema in Hartford and Pittsburgh, a Jeanette Art Theater in Allentown. Foreign films first, respectable name, then the programme changes underneath it.

Bakersfield did it the other way round. The Paris was already showing nudie films in 1963. In 1967 it was renamed Cinema 19 and tried being an art house, and it did not take. It went back to adult, soft and then hard, and it has stayed there ever since.

We are not going to tell you this is the longest-running adult cinema in the directory, although 1963 is seven years earlier than Chattanooga. There is the art house gap in 1967, and one contributor says the place closed in 1985, which two others contradict. Chattanooga’s is the one with a clean unbroken record, so Chattanooga keeps it.

Nancy Lindsey, aged thirty-three

The trade paper Boxoffice of 9 December 1974 puts this cinema in the Amber Theatres chain, ten adult houses, operated by Nancy Lindsey, who was thirty-three.

A woman running a ten-cinema pornography chain in 1974 is not something this directory has turned up more than once. The only comparable figure is Rose La Rose, who bought two theatres in Toledo, beat the city in federal court when it banned burlesque to stop her, and ran them until she died.

Everywhere else the operators in these pages are men: Harry Mohney out of a Durand drive-in, Herman Hausman refusing a deal in Syracuse, the Switows in Lexington, Dr Merz saving the Astor in Akron.

That is one line in a trade paper and we have not found anything else about her. If somebody has, we would like to know. A ten-cinema chain is not a footnote.

The question nobody answered

Nine months ago a trans woman asked on this venue’s own listing whether it would be a good place for her to go. She said she would love to, that she did not know anybody, and that she was nervous.

The only reply came from another customer, who said he had never been in the theatre part either, that he felt awkward going in alone, and that he would not mind checking it out with her.

Two people who both wanted to go, neither of whom wanted to walk in by themselves, finding each other in the questions section of a listing for a ninety-year-old cinema. That is the whole problem this trade has always had, and it is the thing a room full of people on a screen solves without anybody having to be brave first.

Sources

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