Adult Movie Theatres in Columbus

What is still open

Across the road. Maca Adult Bookstore sat at 3016 Victory Drive, directly opposite, on the telephone number one digit from the cinema’s: 689-2212 against 689-2211. Two directories now mark it closed and its listing is empty. We note the consecutive numbers because they are striking and not because they prove anything.

Not counted. Starship on Veterans Parkway is open twenty-four hours and is retail, with no room; a reviewer buying a vibrator there at two in the morning is as good a confirmation of the hours as we are likely to get. Exotic Pleasures is a shop. Night Moves is a lingerie company trading from two addresses. Two listings called Video Warehouse, one here and one over the river in Phenix City, carry no information whatsoever. The Flame, the Foxy Lady and the Carousel are clubs, which is not one of the four things we count.

Seven records, seven different businesses

We found this place by accident, which is becoming a pattern. The searches that are supposed to find adult cinemas return, for Columbus, three lingerie boutiques and a strip club. Foxes appears in none of them. It turned up in a stray directory result while we were chasing something else entirely.

Once found, the problem changes shape. The building is not undocumented. It is documented seven times over, and no two records describe the same business.

Our favourite is Yelp, which has no reviews of it, no opening hours and no idea that it is an adult venue, but has established that it serves alcohol and offers free WiFi.

The convenience store

On the evening of Thursday 26 January 2017, Georgia State Representative Gerald Greene, a Republican whose seat is at Cuthbert, was shot in the leg in an apparent robbery in Columbus. He was treated and released from hospital the same evening.

His office, through communications director Kaleb McMichen, said he had been driving home from the Capitol to his district and was robbed at a convenience store in Columbus.

Police information put the shooting at 3009 Victory Drive. Reporting at the time said fresh blood was found on the concrete behind the building. Greene drove from there to the 30th Avenue Package Store, whose owner said he was a regular customer, and the first call to the emergency services came from inside it.

Two weeks later, on 9 February, the 911 recordings were reported, and there were two of them. The first is the package store owner’s wife:

I’m at 30th Avenue Package Store and I have a customer who has been shot.

The second is a man who works at Foxes, standing in its car park, who had not seen anything and was calling because people had come inside and told him:

they say someone had got shot over here and he’s left the area

We are not going to speculate about why anybody was on Victory Drive that night, and a man who has been shot does not owe this website an account of his evening. What belongs on this page is narrower and it is the thing the whole page is about. When this building had to be named in public, under pressure, it was named as something else. Google calls it a sex shop, MapQuest calls it a traditional movie-going experience, and for about two weeks in 2017 it was a convenience store. The place itself never moved.

The oldest cinema in town

Columbus has thirty-one cinemas in the archives and almost all of them are shut. The American, the Beverly, the Bonita, the Bradley, the Dixie, the Dreamland, the Elite, the Georgia, the Grand, the Lyric, the Rialto, the Pastime, and six drive-ins including one on this same road. What is left showing films is two modern multiplexes, a restored opera house, the Liberty, and Foxes.

A contributor to the cinema archives put it plainly in July 2018, and the claim is theirs rather than ours, though we could not find anything to contradict it: Foxes is now the oldest cinema in town.

There is a version of that sentence that sounds like a joke and it is not one. Every respectable single screen in this city closed. The one that kept running, continuously, since the fifteenth of January 1973, is the one on Victory Drive that nobody can bring themselves to name. We have written the opposite story at Portland, where the adult years are the reason a grand old theatre survived to be restored. Columbus is the version where nothing gets restored and the adult cinema simply outlasts everybody.

Victory Drive itself was named in August 1945, by the Muscogee County Commission, for the end of the Second World War. It runs from Columbus out to the army post.

What we could not establish

The opening hours. Genuinely. Every directory carrying this business gives different ones and several contradict themselves. Google shows a morning opening, another listing shows an evening one. We are not printing a number we cannot stand behind, so the entry above says to telephone.

The admission price. Not published anywhere in fifty-three years of operation. The only thing anybody records is that couples pay less.

Columbus’s own rules. We found a Victory Drive overlay district concerned with the appearance of buildings along the corridor, and no adult business ordinance we could read. Unlike Shreveport, nothing we found explains why this city kept its cinema when so many others lost theirs.

And a number we dropped. Google’s own panel appeared to show a review count in the thousands, which would be remarkable. Other search snippets showed different four-figure numbers attached to Yelp category pages rather than to this business, and we could not establish which belonged to Foxes. So no review count appears on this page. It is the kind of figure that would be quoted back at us for years, and we could not prove it.