Adult Movie Theatres in Oklahoma City

Oklahoma · last checked 26 September 2026

One place is trading in Oklahoma City, a shop on South Eastern Avenue with viewing rooms at the back, open late on Fridays and Saturdays. The city’s adult cinema on West Main closed in the early 1990s. What Oklahoma City is actually known for is the year the police came to people’s houses to collect a film that had won an Oscar.

What is open right now

Eastern Avenue Adult Superstore

Booth arcade

1105 South Eastern Avenue, Oklahoma City, OK 73129

Has: Shop at the front, video viewing rooms at the back
Hours: 10am to 10pm Sunday to Thursday
Friday and Saturday: 10am to midnight
Phone: (405) 384-1100

Last checked 26 September 2026 · Listing refreshed July 2026

Showplace Adult Theatre

Closed

517 West Main Street, Oklahoma City, OK 73102

Opened: Early December 1980
Seats: 193, one screen
Closed: Early 1990s

A single 193-seat screen in a Mission Revival office building by the old Union Bus Depot, fitted out behind tinted black glass with scarlet velvet curtains and hot pink pleated drapes. It went in the early 1990s when the city turned on downtown’s adult businesses. The building is still standing.

Last checked 26 September 2026

The year the police came for The Tin Drum

The Tin Drum is Volker Schlöndorff’s 1979 adaptation of the Günter Grass novel. It shared the Palme d’Or at Cannes and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It had been in American libraries and video shops for seventeen years.

1
A talk show host
Raises the film on Christian radio.
2
Oklahomans for Children and Families
Borrows the library's copy to review it, then asks police to arrest library staff for circulating child pornography.
3
Judge Richard Freeman
Declares the film child pornography in June 1997, in the Oklahoma County District Court, without a hearing.
4
Oklahoma City police
Call at six video shops and leave with the cassettes.
5
The video shops
Hand over the names of two customers who had rented it.
6
Oklahoma City police
Go to those two homes to collect the tapes.

Six steps from a radio programme to a knock at a private address. The film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

The police account of the shop visits is that nothing was seized. Captain Ted Carlton said they had solicited the voluntary cooperation of people in order to head off future legal problems, which is a sentence worth reading twice. Six shops were called on by officers who had a judge’s ruling in hand, and they left with the tapes.

The part that made it a national story was the last step. Michael Camfield, who worked for the ACLU of Oklahoma, had rented the film. Police arrived at his home and left with his copy. He sued. So did the Video Software Dealers Association, on the ground that handing over rental records breaks the federal Video Privacy Protection Act, a law Congress passed after a newspaper printed a Supreme Court nominee’s video rentals.

In October 1998 a federal judge in Oklahoma City held that the film is not child pornography, and that taking it from the library, from the shops and from a private home had failed to meet constitutional standards.

Why it is on a page about theatres

Because it is the same instrument, pointed one step further along. Every city in this directory has a version of the moment where an official decides what a film is. Richmond is a magistrate signing a seizure warrant having been told only the titles. Cincinnati is a museum in the dock. Memphis is a prosecutor choosing the jury pool before choosing the charge.

Oklahoma City is the one where it left the building. A cinema can be picketed, licensed, zoned or closed, and everyone involved understands that as a fight about a public premises. This was two people who had taken a videotape home, identified from a shop’s records, and visited. The venue has nothing to do with it by that point. That is the whole reason the venues were ever the argument.

Sources

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