Adult Movie Theatres in Shreveport

What is still open

• Deja Vu Love Boutique, 202 Commerce Street, downtown. Noon until two in the morning midweek, three at weekends. A reviewer back in 2017 noted it is attached to Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club next door, and the most recent account of a visit is dated September 2026. In eight years nobody has ever asked it whether there is a room, which tells you what the city assumes.
• HUSTLER Hollywood, 6109 Financial Plaza, out by the interstate in a building that used to be an IHOP. Eleven until ten, every day. It has exactly one question on file, asked about two years ago, shortly after it opened: Is there a booth there? It has never been answered. The rest of this page is, in effect, the answer.
• Cindie’s, 1106 Shreveport-Barksdale Highway. Nine in the morning until midnight, six days a week, closed Sundays. Worth one detail: the Shreveport branch is listed under lingerie and nothing else, while the same chain’s shops in Texarkana and Alexandria are listed as lingerie and adult shops. Same company, different label, and the next section is about why that label matters more here than anywhere else we have written about.
• Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club is downtown and is a strip club. We count cinemas, arcades and play spaces, and a club is none of those, so it is named here and left out of the number at the top.

The nearest room we can actually confirm is seventy-odd miles away and in a different state. It is at the bottom of this page.

The twenty per cent line

On 2 November 2022 the City of Shreveport went to court against three shops at once: HUSTLER Hollywood, which had not opened yet, and two Cindie’s stores, which had. The city’s case was that all three were presenting themselves as ordinary retail when they were in fact sexually oriented businesses, operating without the licence that status requires.

The dividing line is a measurement. Keep sexual items under twenty per cent of your display space and you are a shop. Go over it and you are a sexually oriented business, which means a licence, and a thousand feet of separation from any home, day care, school, church, park or cultural facility, and from any other such business.

Caddo District Judge Ramon Lafitte granted a restraining order. HUSTLER Hollywood was barred from opening; the two Cindie’s stores were closed. A week later the order was lifted for the Cindie’s stores, which were working toward what was described as an amicable resolution with the city under monitoring, and stayed in place for HUSTLER Hollywood.

Then, on 14 November, the court did the thing that gives this page its shape. It ordered the shop measured again. The city had to reinspect before 1 December. The parties had turned up with, as the reporting put it, a bunch of different sets of numbers, and the store’s attorney Scott Sternberg said the new measurement would establish whether 18.5 per cent was the right figure. One and a half points of shelf space, and a courtroom to settle it in.

The hearing was set for 12 December. HUSTLER Hollywood opened on 6 December, six days early, and it is open today. Alan Clarke of the Metropolitan Planning Commission had told the City Council back in October that the commission might have to reassess the ordinances in the Unified Development Code. We could not find any reporting on how the case finally ended, and we are not going to assume a result from a shop having its lights on.

What the rule does to this directory is the point. It never mentions booths and it does not need to. A shop can shuffle its stock to sit under the line. A room with screens in it cannot, because a room with screens in it is entirely given over to the thing being measured. In a city that counts floor space, the arcade is the first thing that becomes impossible, and it goes quietly, without anybody having to ban it.

Fifty-one years earlier, the same argument

On 25 June 1971 the district attorney for Caddo Parish filed suit against the owners of the Broadmoor Theatre at 4026 Youree Drive, over a film called The Stewardesses.

Read what the court actually ordered, because it is not what you would expect. The defendants were restrained from showing the film, yes. They were also restrained from opening the theatre at all, and from removing any movable property from the building. They were given five days to show cause why a final injunction should not close the Broadmoor for one year. The statute the district attorney used declared both the film and the premises where it was shown to be a public nuisance, and it allowed the action to be brought not only by officials but by any association formed for the suppression of vice, and by any citizen of the parish.

The trial judge found the film had no plot or story, was merely scenes and acts, and was without any redeeming social value, and permanently enjoined any version of it anywhere in Caddo Parish. That phrase was doing real work. The producers re-cut The Stewardesses that same year to earn an R rating for wider release. The Shreveport order covered the softer cut too.

The Second Circuit struck the statute down and recalled the injunction. The Supreme Court of Louisiana took the case and, on 29 June 1972, put it back. Then it granted a rehearing, for a reason stated plainly in the opinion: no member of the court, nor the district judge rehearing the case, had seen the film. So the court watched it, and on 18 December 1972 reinstated its own judgment, Chief Justice McCaleb writing that the picture was hard-core pornography in all respects and that its box-office success showed, perhaps, public curiosity, but did not rescue it from the gutter. On the question of whose standards applied, the opinion asked who could possibly give expert evidence of a national standard of obscenity, and answered its own question: not Variety magazine.

Three justices dissented. One of them wrote that it was regrettable that the court should approve a censorship statute even for a short time, when other constitutional means of controlling obscenity were available. That was the argument in 1972, and it lost.

For the record, the film was a 3-D novelty comedy shot for a little over a hundred thousand dollars that went on to take somewhere above twenty-five million, and remained the highest-grossing 3-D film ever made until Avatar in 2009. Its X rating was self-imposed.

Both fights, half a century apart, were about the building. Not what the audience saw, not who was allowed in, not what happened in the seats. In 1971 the remedy was to lock the premises and forbid the furniture from leaving. In 2022 it was to measure the premises and see which side of a line they fell on. Shreveport has been consistent for fifty-one years about where it thinks the problem lives.

What happened to the Broadmoor

It opened on 28 May 1947, eight hundred and forty seats and a single screen, designed by Samuel G. Wiener. Contributors to the cinema archives describe it as a nice neighbourhood theatre with a huge auditorium. One records that the operator closed it after a screening on 30 November 1975.

After that, according to a contributor writing in 2017, the building was bought by Broadmoor Baptist Church and torn down to make a parking lot. An attempt to get it onto the historical register was made and came too late. The cinema that the State of Louisiana and the Parish of Caddo went to the Supreme Court to padlock is now somewhere to leave a car on a Sunday.

The nearest room is in another state

Shreveport sits about eighteen miles from the Texas line and inside an hour and a half of Arkansas. Everything we could confirm is over one of those borders.

The nearest one we are willing to put in writing is Venus Adult Superstore, 6780 Arkansas Highway 108, Texarkana, Arkansas, roughly seventy-two miles north. Nine in the morning until midnight, and open around the clock Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Somebody asked its listing what the theatre actually was, and a customer answered:

Its literally just a theater where you go in and sit down and watch porn

A separate account describes a small theatre area with four largish screens and five private rooms. That is a real venue, and it is in Arkansas. Closer in, Venus at Longview, Texas carries the tag but the direct question, is there a adult theater at your store, has sat on its listing unanswered for three years, so we are not counting it. That silence is a pattern we wrote about at Long Beach, and it holds here too.

What we could not establish

The text of Chapter 72. Shreveport regulates this trade in Chapter 72 of its code, and we could not read it. The main code library refuses automated requests, the mirror times out, and the city’s own licence application is a PDF of empty form fields. So we have the twenty per cent rule and the thousand-foot separations from court reporting and the zoning code, and we do not know whether Shreveport also has booth rules of the kind we quoted at Greenville. It may have none at all, and on the evidence of this page it would not need them.

How the 2022 case ended. The coverage runs from the filing on 2 November to the opening on 6 December and then stops. The shop is trading today, which tells you how it worked out in practice and nothing about how it worked out on paper.

And one thing we will not repeat. A search result told us the cinema archive page for the Broadmoor says it turned to soft porn before closing. Reading that page directly, no contributor says anything of the kind. The 1971 lawsuit is the only evidence we have that the Broadmoor ever showed an adult film, and one lawsuit about one picture is not a change of programming. We have said exactly that and no more.