Adult Movie Theatres in Orlando

What is still open

Nothing in Orlando that this directory counts. Both searches were run and every candidate opened. Premier Couples Superstore at 5009 South Orange Blossom Trail, (407) 857-2050, trades 9am to 1am and to 2am at weekends, which are arcade hours, and somebody did once ask on its listing whether it has video booths. Nobody from the business answered, and in thirty-three reviews not one person mentions a room. Read the history below before you write that address off, though. Original Adult Bookstore at 2203 South Orange Blossom Trail, (407) 839-8505, is an unclaimed listing with no reviews and no posted hours. Fairvilla Megastore, Forbidden Pleasure and the two Video Extra shops at Kissimmee, one of which trades twenty-four hours, are shops.

The one place with rooms is a resort

Forty-six businesses on one road

Orange Blossom Trail, which locals call the Trail or just OBT, is US 441 running south out of the city. Between 1975 and 1985 most of the county’s forty-six adult businesses were on it, by one local account, at a time when the county’s laws were lax and enforcement close to nonexistent.

Two things in that list are worth stopping on.

The first is the name. The cinema that opened on 20 April 1973 at 5009 South Orange Blossom Trail was called the Adult Theatre. Not the Art, not the Capri, not the Paris. Across this entire directory the pattern is a respectable name doing the work: an Art Cinema in Hartford and Pittsburgh, a Downtown Cinema in Lexington, a Theatre of the Arts in Toledo. Orlando put it on the marquee. That is what lax enforcement buys you: you do not have to pretend.

The second is the address. That cinema left the listings in 1988 and the building did not leave the trade. 5009 South Orange Blossom Trail is the Premier Couples Superstore today, open until one in the morning, selling over a counter what the same walls used to project.

That continuity is rarer than it sounds. On this site an adult building usually becomes a church, a concert hall, an oil change or a car park. Only Lansing matches it, where the cinema that fought the police over Deep Throat in 1973 is a Deja Vu shop at the same number today.

The company that sued the city and won

Fairvilla opened in 1971 as the Fairvilla Twin Cinema showing ordinary films. After Deep Throat came out in 1972 it turned to adult features, and in time it stopped being a cinema and became a shop. It is still the best-known adult business in Orlando.

In 1994 its owner wanted to enlarge the store on the Trail. City departments, zoning among them, had supported it. Then came what the record calls an outpouring of neighbours and churches, and the departments reversed themselves and refused the permits.

He sued the city and won, and won again on appeal. Then he sued for a million dollars, and the city settled for $275,000.

That account comes from an encyclopedia entry which carries a warning that it is thin on citations, so treat the figures as reported rather than checked. The shape of it, a refusal reversed under pressure and a city paying to end the case, is not in doubt.

Set that against the rest of this directory. In Allentown a nuisance order shut a cinema in about a month. In Syracuse the city gave up prosecuting and bought the building. Orlando is the city that tried to stop an expansion and ended up writing the cheque.

Seventy million visitors and nowhere to sit

This is the largest tourist city in the United States and it has no adult cinema. Not one room, in the whole of Orlando.

Nothing in the record says that was done to the city. There is no Orlando ordinance in our sources, no raid, no prosecution, no licensing scheme. The one documented fight, in 1994, the city lost. What happened on the Trail is what happened everywhere: the films went home, the buildings became shops, and the shops kept the addresses.

If you are in Orlando tonight looking for a room with other people in it and a film on, there is nothing to drive to inside the city. There is a resort at Kissimmee if you want the whole evening and a booking. Otherwise the nearest thing is above, and it opens in a browser.