Adult Movie Theatres in Louisville

What is open right now

Seventh Street Road carries a run of adult shops with arcades, more than almost any single street on this site. The Showboat there had fifteen booths and a glory hole, and recent visitors report it dark.

Fifty years against one building

Theatair X stood at Exit 4 off I-65 in Clarksville, Indiana, about five miles from downtown Louisville. It opened on 23 June 1947 as the Theatair Drive-In, room for 232 cars, and by 1959 it was the Twin Drive-In. In November 1970 it put X-rated films on the drive-in screen, and a group called Citizens for Decency formed in response almost immediately. The concession building was later converted into a twin-screen indoor adult cinema.

The Clark County prosecutor Dan Donahue began a legal campaign against it in 1973. That effort ran out of road around 1978, partly because the ownership became hard to establish and partly because the higher courts had loosened what could be prosecuted. The theatre kept running for another forty years.

It came apart in 2018 and 2019. An undercover investigation produced two arrests, and the town’s building commissioner reported more than twenty holes cut through the walls between viewing booths. Police arrested patrons for public indecency in February 2019, and in May 2019 the town council voted unanimously to revoke the adult business licence. In August 2021 a Clark Circuit Court judge upheld the revocation, and on 30 August 2021 the cinema closed.

Then a new operator took it on and went to federal court, and won.

The town has also pursued the business for roughly $770,000 in past code violations, and the question of that fine reached the Indiana Supreme Court in 2024. Fifty-four years after the first X-rated film went up on the drive-in screen, the argument was still going and the building was still shut.

Two river banks, two answers

It is worth holding those side by side. Clarksville is a town of about twenty thousand people and it spent half a century, an undercover operation, a licence revocation, two court systems and a three-quarter-million-dollar claim on one cinema. Louisville, across the water, has a venue that never closes from Thursday to Sunday and another selling tickets at nine in the morning and still selling them at four the next.

Indiana turns up twice on this site now and both times the state or its towns went the distance. Indianapolis took two different theories to the Seventh Circuit and lost both. Clarksville skipped the theory and simply outlasted the building.