Adult Movie Theatres in Baton Rouge

What is still open

Nothing this directory counts. We ran three differently worded searches, and the second one had left the parish by its third result and the third one had reached New Orleans, eighty miles away, by its second. When a search for booths in a city of eight hundred and seventy thousand people starts answering with another city, that is the answer.

Grand Cinema Station at 10732 Florida Boulevard, (225) 272-2010, is the top result and the name is the whole joke. It is a shop. Its own description calls it a fantasy and couples store and lists DVDs, toys, smoke shop accessories, tattoo numbing cream and enhancement honey. It shuts at ten on weekdays and at eight on Sunday, and it closes for Thanksgiving and Christmas Day. Four reviews in five years, all of them about how nobody there makes you feel awkward. Two questions have ever been asked on its listing. The only one that got an answer was answered this month by Yelp’s own robot.

Adult Emporium at 2855 I-10 Frontage Road in Port Allen, (225) 381-3400, is the one across the river, open nine in the morning until one the next, seven days. Nobody has ever described a booth there. What people have described is each other. Somebody asked on the listing whether men go there to meet women or only men, and a customer answered that he had seen both. The one review on the page is a complaint about a member of staff and about a lavatory door that will not close.

Frenzies at 8028 Florida Boulevard in Denham Springs calls itself the first and only adult store in Livingston Parish and trades until two at weekends. Hustler Hollywood on the other side of town is a chain. Both are shops. The nearest rooms we have verified are in New Orleans, and New Orleans has none either.

The cinema a man named after his daughter

On Valentine’s Day 1942, at 2559 Plank Road, a new cinema opened with a film called Small Town Deb. Six hundred and thirty-four seats, Streamline Moderne, sixty thousand dollars to build. The operator was Joseph A. Barcelona, and he called it the Regina, after his daughter.

He put CinemaScope in later and subleased some of his other houses. Then, in 1969, the Regina started showing X-rated films. A photograph from 1973 has it advertising something called Saddle Tramp Women on the front. Blaxploitation came through after that, and some time in the 1970s it closed.

The building stood for another forty years, which is longer than it traded. Somebody looking at street photography of Plank Road found it still standing in 2011, missing its left-hand side by 2013, and gone altogether by 2016. Nobody appears to have written anything down when it went.

This directory is full of cinemas that turned, and most of them are remembered by their last programme. The Regina is the only one we have found that was named after somebody’s child first. A stretch of Plank Road carried her name from 1942 into the 1970s, the first twenty-seven years of it respectable. We do not know what she made of the rest, and we have found nothing else about her at all.

We looked for a rule and there is not one

Almost every page on this site turns on a local rule. Doors cut down to four feet. One person to a booth. A sightline from the counter to every corner. Five hundred feet from a school. Shut at midnight. Thirty per cent of the shelf.

We went through the Baton Rouge and East Baton Rouge Parish code looking for the equivalent and did not find one. No sexually oriented business chapter that we could locate, no booth construction standard, no occupancy limit, no separation distance aimed at this trade. Louisiana defines an adult arcade in state law, as a place with coin operated machines showing images to five people or fewer at a time, but a definition is not a restriction.

That may mean there is nothing to find, or it may mean it is filed somewhere we did not look, or under a heading we did not guess. The parish code runs to twelve titles and is codified through an ordinance passed in April of this year. We would rather hand you the gap than invent a cause. What we can say is that nothing in the public record we could reach explains why this city has no rooms, which makes it unusual on this site, where the explanation is normally sitting in a municipal code waiting to be read.

The box office came back as an app

Here is what Baton Rouge does have, and it is bigger than any ordinance on this site.

House Bill 142 was brought by Representative Laurie Schlegel, a counsellor who works on sexual compulsion. It went through a Republican legislature in June 2022 with almost no debate and exactly one vote against it, from Representative Mandie Landry of New Orleans. Governor John Bel Edwards signed it. It became Act 440 and took effect on the first day of 2023.

The rule is that a site where a substantial portion of the content is pornographic, and the statute fixes substantial at thirty-three and a third per cent, has to carry out reasonable age verification, and a parent can sue it if it does not. Pornhub complied by routing Louisiana visitors through a third party, and the third party checked them against LA Wallet.

That is the part worth stopping on. The law worked because the state already had the machinery. Louisiana authorised a digital driver’s licence in 2016 and launched the app in July 2018, the first state in the country to do it, under the same governor who would sign the pornography bill four years later. By late 2022 it had over a million and a half users and had issued more than two and a half million credentials. Nowhere else in America had an ID in everybody’s pocket ready to be asked for.

So Louisiana went first because Louisiana could, and the rest of the country followed. Arkansas passed its own version the next year, and a run of other states did the same, and the shape of all of them is the shape of the one written here.

And look at what it is. A door you cannot pass without showing somebody your age. A threshold expressed as a percentage of how much of the stock is pornography, which is the same arithmetic Fort Lauderdale applies to a shop shelf, moved onto a website. The Regina ended because the thing it sold stopped needing a building. Half a century later, a short drive from where that building stood, the state put the ticket window back on it.

We are not telling you the legislature was thinking about Plank Road. Nothing suggests anybody in that chamber had ever heard of the Regina, and the bill is about children, not about cinemas. The only thing connecting the two is the map, and the map is enough to be worth pointing at.