Adult Movie Theatres in Jacksonville

What is still open

Three Inserection stores have traded here and two are left: 10063 Atlantic Boulevard, (904) 724-4536, and 4227 Blanding Boulevard, (904) 777-8169, both open from nine or ten in the morning until midnight. The Englewood branch is closed. All retail, all the time.

The nearest booths are a long way out. There is a shop with video booths at Hawthorne, near Gainesville, roughly seventy miles south, and that is outside what this page will call Jacksonville.

Run out of town twice

America’s first film capital

This is not a footnote. In 1908 the Kalem company came down from New York and became the first studio in America able to shoot all year, because film stock froze and fogged in a northern winter and did not here. A direct rail line from New York already ran to the city, and Jacksonville was still rebuilding from the Great Fire of 1901, so there was room.

Something like thirty companies followed. The city called itself the Winter Film Capital of the World, and for about a decade that was a fair description.

What ended it was partly the war and partly the money, but it was also the neighbours. Film crews pulled fire alarms to empty buildings for crowd scenes and staged bank robberies on Sundays, and a good part of the city decided the whole business was vulgar. In 1916 an anti-movie candidate, John Martin, won. Studios cancelled their building plans, Florida banks stopped lending to film-makers, and rationing after America entered the war finished the job by 1918.

The studios went to California, to a Los Angeles neighbourhood with the same weather and more distance from New York, called Hollywood. Norman Studios is the surviving piece of all this in Jacksonville and it became a National Historic Landmark on 31 October 2016.

September 1974

Behind the Green Door came out in 1972 and spent years being prosecuted around the country. Somebody in downtown Jacksonville named a theatre after it.

In September 1974 the city ran a crackdown on its X-rated houses. The Green Door’s owner, John Graham, and two of his employees were arrested and charged with handling obscene materials, and Judge Raymond L. Simpson fined them two thousand dollars between them. The theatre closed and the building has been demolished.

Be aware of how thin that is. All of it comes from one contributor to a cinema archive citing a trade write-up in Box Office. We could not find the court record or a newspaper account, so the names and the figure are repeated here exactly as he gave them and should be treated as one person’s recollection until somebody checks the docket.

Two others are recorded and both are gone. A Roxy at 2412 West Beaver Street opened on 18 June 1966 doing adult films, and the Roxy Follies at 38 West Forsyth Street downtown was advertising pornography before it was pulled down. By the late 1970s most of the downtown single screens had closed anyway, adult or not.