Adult Movie Theatres in Corpus Christi

What is still open

Nothing else in the city has a room. Friends 4 Ever at 5844 South Staples calls itself South Texas’s largest lingerie store, trades ten until seven and closes on Sundays. Cloud 9 is a boutique. The nearest other rooms are a hundred and forty miles up the road in San Antonio.

Six weeks

On 30 August 1968 a Houston circuit opened the city’s first indoor adult cinema at 615 North Chaparral Street, in a unit that had been the Mangel’s dress shop. They called it the Studio III, put in stereo sound, and hired a manager named Charles M. Martinez. The opening bill was Russ Meyer’s Mudhoney with Tropic of Scorpio under it.

Their advertising line was: if you miss attending the Studio III, you will hate yourself.

The first police raid came in October. Six weeks after opening night. And then they kept coming, for five and a half years.

Look at the fourth one. Every city in this directory has done something to these rooms. Nobody else went after the people sitting in them. Ohio shortened the trading day, Toledo took the doors off, Greenville County drew the sightlines to the half inch, and Springfield simply did not sign the form. Corpus Christi arrested the audience.

After the Supreme Court decided Miller v. California in 1973 and handed local communities their own standards, the city pushed harder against all three of its indoor adult cinemas. By December 1973 the Studio III was the only one left running.

On 22 January 1974, after that night’s programme, it was raided for the last time and ordered shut by the city.

And then the part that stops you. As part of closing, the operators signed a non-disclosure agreement. The reason given is that it protected their employees, and possibly a patron or a performer, from being prosecuted. Somebody traded their own silence to keep a projectionist and a man in a seat out of court. We have not found that anywhere else, and we would like to know what was in it.

It came back, under six more names

Here is what we did not expect. Being raided for five and a half years and then ordered closed by the city did not end it.

In 1975, after courts in Dallas, San Angelo and San Antonio went the other way, the same room reopened as the Doll House. After that it was the Sun Adult Theatre, then the Sun Adult Arcade, then the Adult Movies Theatre, and finally the twin-screen Amour, a hundred and sixty-one seats across two screens. There was a video shop in there for a year in the late eighties.

It closed for good in January 1992, which is twenty-four years after a dress shop on North Chaparral started showing Russ Meyer. The building has been demolished. The Kress building next door at 619 was still standing in the 2020s.

Nothing in this directory has been fought that hard for that long. Five and a half years of raids, a forced closure, six further names, and in the end it went the way they nearly all go, quietly, in the month after Christmas, with nobody arresting anybody.

The other three

The Studio III was not alone, and the dates show how fast it all happened.

The Melba at 1016 Leopard Street had its grand reopening as the Queen Cinne Arts in December 1970. It came back again as the Sun Adult Theatre in 1975 and closed in the early 1980s.

The Amusu at 608 Mesquite Street reopened as an adult house in 1971, ran adult films until 12 November 1973, went back to ordinary pictures, and was shut for good by that December. Six weeks between giving up the adult programme and giving up altogether.

And the Twin Palms Drive-In on Agnes Street ran adult films outdoors from 1979 until it closed on 19 November 1981, which is the same trick that South Bend pulled with Deep Throat for a whole season in 1984.

Four adult cinemas in one mid-sized Gulf city, three of them opening within three years of each other, and every one of them gone by 1992. What is left is a lounge on a frontage road with couches in it, open all night, where ten or fifteen men sit on a Saturday and the regulars think that is a thin crowd.