Category: Theaters

Filmmakers often use the flashback to render a coming-of-age story, dipping into the whirlpool of memories that mark any rite of passage. For those who grew up with drive-in movies—first as pajama-clad kids plied with snacks and soda pop in the family station wagon, and then as adolescents making out in the back seat—the re-emergence of outdoor theaters during the current pandemic stirs up its own flashback whirlpools of childhood innocence and teenage initiation. If you came of age in Petaluma during the 1970s and early 1980s, those flashbacks inevitably include the X-rated movies displayed on the big screens at either end of town.

I was nine years old when Petaluma’s first drive-in, the Parkway Auto Movies, opened in the summer of 1964. My mother made up a bed in the back of our Ford station wagon, knowing that not long after the cartoon shorts played, my sister and I would be off to dreamland, leaving her and my father to watch the main feature in peace.

That summer was the last for the family station wagon. In a fit of midlife crisis, my father traded it in for a sporty, two-door Pontiac LeMans coupe. Once I was old enough to get my driver’s license, I drove the LeMans to the Parkway on dates. Couples wooing in the “passion pit” rarely saw more than the first 20 minutes of any movie, which at the Parkway was just as well. Built in the lowlands of Denman Flats north of town, the drive-in was plagued in summer with creeping ground fog and flooded in winter during heavy rainstorms.

I started high school in the fall of 1970. My next-door neighbor Kenny, who was a few years older, got a job changing the marquee at the Parkway, and hired me to help. We also changed the marquee at the State Theater downtown (today’s Mystic Theater). Both theaters were owned by Alan Finlay, a small, friendly man, who also owned a theater in Boyes Hot Springs.

Finlay purchased them in 1967 from Dan Tocchini, Jr., a second-generation, small town theater mogul. The next year, Tocchini bought the only other theater in town, the California, changing its name to the Showcase (today’s Phoenix Theater). Over the next two decades, Toccini and Finlay swapped theaters back and forth, dominating the movie business in town.

A second drive-in, the Midway, also opened alongside the freeway south of town in 1967, offering wired speakers that sat on the car roof instead of hooking onto the driver’s window. That not only saved speakers from being ripped off their poles by customers absent-mindedly driving away, it also provided stereo sound.

Such technological innovations were important, as moviegoers were declining in the ’60s due to the rising popularity of television. Hollywood studios, which had dominated moviemaking for decades, were being replaced by business conglomerates who shifted to financing and distributing independently produced pictures. That opened the door to the “Hollywood Renaissance” of the late 60s and early 70s, allowing young filmmakers to appeal to younger countercultural audiences with movies like Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and Easy Rider.

Lost in the transition to New Hollywood was the predictability theater owners had come to depend upon from the studios. In their heyday, movie factories pumped out enough new releases to supply a schedule of double features that changed three times a week at theaters. Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday usually screened musicals; Wednesday and Thursday, B-movies (low budget films); and Friday and Saturday, westerns.

But while in 1950, 12.3 per cent of American’s recreational budget was spent on movie tickets, by 1965, it was 3.3. per cent. As audiences diminished, theaters cut back, rotating movies only once a week, usually pairing a new release with a B-movie or a second-run hit from prior years. Even then, many big budget films were flopping at the box office.

There was, however, a glimmer of hope on the horizon. The sexual liberation of the swinging ’60s brought an end to the “Hays Code,” a set of strict moral guidelines imposed upon filmmakers. The code was originally adopted during the Depression after studios, struggling with dwindling audiences during cash-strapped times, resorted to making films touching on sex, violence, and other less-than-wholesome topics. Dropping the code in 1968, the movie industry shifted to alerting audiences about film content, adopting the film-ratings system we know today.

The new ratings proved a boon for movie theaters, providing them with a exclusive niche of R- and X-rated films that network television couldn’t broadcast. It took only a year for an X-rated movie—Midnight Cowboy, the story of a friendship between a male prostitute and an ailing con man—to win an Oscar for Best Picture. Two years later, Midnight Cowboy was re-rated from X to R, without a single frame being altered. The change was due in large part to the Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow).

Initially banned in the United States for its explicit nudity and sex, the film depicted a 20-year old female college student experimenting with relationships, political activism, and meditation. After U.S. courts ruled it not obscene in 1969, the film became the highest grossing foreign film of all time, helping to usher in the “Golden Age of Porn.”

I Am Curious (Yellow) came to the State Theater in January, 1970, where it ran for an unprecedented six weeks. Prior to its arrival, blue movies, or stag films, were largely restricted to old, whirling, reel-to-reel projectors set up in the back room of the Moose Lodge or the Elks Club on select evenings. Cheaply produced in grainy black-and-white, the films accorded with the public yet strangely private nature of fraternal orders, a characteristic they shared with drive-ins theaters.

By the time Kenny and I began changing marquees in the fall of 1970, Finlay was screening a double or triple bill of X-rated films one week out of every month at both the Parkway and the State. Our first X-rated marquee was Russ Meyers’ crossover hit, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, at the Parkway. Like most of Finlay’s X-rated films at the time, it was soft porn, meaning that the focus of the films were more on the erotic setup, with only simulated sex.

Parkway Theater Ad (Petlauma Argus Courier, September 25, 1970)

After finishing the marquees every Tuesday night, Kenny and I stopped in the Parkway’s projection booth to get paid. Finlay, who maintained a small living room there, was usually watching television with his mother between changing reels.

The Midway drive-in south of town also added adult films to its rotation at that time. While the drive-ins were popular with customers seeking anonymity, they also drew public attention. The Midway’s screen faced the freeway, which meant drivers got a full view of the movies as they passed by. The Parkway’s screen had its back to the freeway, but looked out upon Stony Point Road, a rural lane that was often lined with parked cars during X-rated showings.

Outraged parents and religious leaders appealed to city hall to shut down adult films at the drive-ins on the grounds that they were creating safety hazards for distracted drivers. They also complained that underaged teenagers were not being carded for X-rated films, or else were sneaking in, hidden in car trunks. In response, police increased their patrols of the drive-ins during the showing of adult films.

The Showcase remained the only theater in town showing family fare. That was important to me, as the theater served as a clubhouse for my clique of high school friends. One of our classmates, Tom Gaffey, was assistant manager, and since the Showcase’s manager was off most evenings playing cards, Tom was in charge, allowing us the run of the place.

In September, 1971, Finlay began screening the country’s first hardcore hit movie, Mona. Unlike the soft porn he had been running, the sex in Mona was not simulated. The film ran at the State for five continuous weeks, packing in audiences. By the fall of 1972, the State, Parkway, and Midway theaters were running adult films almost exclusively, both hard and soft porn, drawing customers from hours away by car, and earning Petaluma a reputation as the Hardcore Capital of the North Bay.

That Christmas, Finlay upped the ante, screening the film Deep Throat at the State. Classified as hardcore due to its graphic enactments of oral, vaginal and anal sex, group sex, and masturbation in a dozen and a half sex scenes, it was among the first pornographic films to feature relatively high production values with both plot and character development. Drawing half of its audience from middle class married couples and single couples on dates, Deep Throat ushered in a new acceptability for X-rated films that The New York Times dubbed “porno chic.”

In the early spring of 1973, Tocchini leased the Showcase to Finlay, providing him with a monopoly on Petaluma’s three theaters. Finlay brought in his own staff at the theater, putting an end to our teen clubhouse. With the State and Parkway showing adult films, he maintained the Showcase as the only venue in town for family fare. Meanwhile, Deep Throat became the most popular movie ever to play in Petaluma, running 28 consecutive weeks until Petaluma’s city council decided in late May to shut it down.

At the time, the film faced obscenity charges in at least a dozen American cities. However, as Sonoma County’s district attorney warned the city council, getting a conviction would prove difficult, as there was no common legal definition of pornography to cite.

Kenny was working as a projectionist at the State when the Petaluma police showed up to confiscate Deep Throat. Finlay immediately substituted it with another hardcore hit film, Behind the Green Door. A few days later, the police came back with a warrant for that film. Finlay replaced it with another copy he was running simultaneously at his theater in Boyes Hot Springs. Having just turned 18, I was hired to shuttle the film reels between the two theaters each evening in my father’s LeMans, until police also confiscated that copy of the film.

At his arraignment before Petaluma judge Alexander McMahon, Finlay was charged with exhibiting obscene matter and “assisting persons (actors) to expose themselves.” In the district attorney’s filing of the charges, he cited a related case in New York where a judge had denounced Deep Throat as “a nadir of decadence and a Sodom and Gomorrah gone wild before the fire.”

The second copy of Behind the Green Door was returned to Finlay at the arraignment, as the original warrant only specified one copy. He immediately began re-screening it at the State until he was able to replaced it a few weeks later with another copy of Deep Throat.

On June 4, 1973, a few days before my high school graduation, the city council, passed an ordinance prohibiting films with “explicit sexual materials” from being shown at drive-in theaters. At the recommendation of legal counsel, they avoided use of the word pornography. That put an end to X-rated films at the Parkway, but not the Midway, which was outside city limits. County supervisors later passed a similar ordinance a few months later, targeted specifically at the Midway.

In late June of 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling defining obscenity as based in part on community standards. Intended to give local communities more agency in applying their own moral standards, the ruling actually served to undermine Petaluma’s case. Judge McMahon dismissed the charges against Finlay on the grounds that the prosecution failed to present evidence of a community standard of obscenity.

Elevated to a symbol of free speech and free sex thanks to the trial’s publicity, Deep Throat continued to draw audiences to the State, where it ran continuously until June 1974, and then episodically until the summer of 1976, almost four years after its Petaluma premiere. Finlay also acquired the Midway during that time and, in defiance of the county ordinance, began screening adult-only films there again.

As cable television and video rentals further eroded theater attendance, theater operators shifted to multiplexes, placing many screens under one roof to provide customers with more simultaneous viewing options. Petaluma’s first multi-plex theater, Washington Square Cinemas, opened at the shopping mall of the same name in 1976.

In the late 1970s, as home video began to cut into pornography ticket sales, Finlay exited the theater business in Petaluma. The new owners of the State transformed it into a repertory theater they called the Plaza, featuring art-house and foreign films. The Showcase was purchased by a group that renovated it into a performing arts center renamed the Phoenix.

Tocchini took back the Parkway, continuing to screen largely second-run family features. He also purchased the Midway, renaming it the Sonomarin Drive-in and maintaining its roster of hardcore adult films, which by that time movie producers were rating on their own as “XX” or“XXX” to distinguish them from soft porn (the X-rating itself was changed in 1990 to NC-17).

“We like the X-rated movies,” Toccini said at the time, “because it eliminates competition for commercial films in our immediate area.”

Rising land prices and the continued transition to home video brought an end to the Parkway in 1986, taking with it what had once been a way of life for families and teenagers in Petaluma. The site was eventually converted into a golf driving range. The Sonomarin (Midway) followed in 1988, the property later purchased by the state of California for use as a flood control reservoir.

For those like Kenny and me, who came of age during the Golden Age of Porn, Petaluma’s reign as the Hard Core Capital of the North Bay left an indelible mark. As our former boss Finlay proudly noted, “Deep Throat put this city on the map.”

SOURCES:

Newspapers

Los Angeles Times: David J. Fox, “X Film Rating Dropped and Replaced by NC-17,” September 27, 1990.

The New York Times Magazine: Ralph Blumenthal, “Porno chic; ‘Hard-core’ grows fashionable—and very profitable,” January 21, 1973.

Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Sale is Finalized,” June 8, 1967; “Mad Hatters at Spa,” Bill Soberanes column, November 24, 1967; “New Drive-in to Open Here Friday,” December 14, 1967; “California Theater Sold,” September 25, 1968; “Filmmakers Becoming New Breed,” December 27, 1969; Midway film ad for X-rated Paranoia, November 21, 1969; “In Defense of New Rating System,” December 6, 1969; film ads for the State and Parkway theaters, January, 1969 – March 15, 1970; film ads for the State Theaters, September 1-October 6, 1970; “Group Campaigns for Family Movies,” February 3, 1972; ad for State Theater featuring Deep Throat, December 13, 1972; “Showcase Movie Theater Leased,” February 8, 1973; “Sex Movie Measure O.K.’d,” May 22, 1973; “City Asks Help on X-Rated Movies,” May 19, 1973; “City Police Seize Sex Film,” May 24, 1973; “Second Sex Film Seized at Movie Theater Here,” June 5, 1973; “Duplicated Sex Film Seized by Police,” June 6. 1973; “X-Rated Movies Charges Filed,” June 11, 1973; “Plea Scheduled on Sex Movies Charges,” June 12, 1973; “Should Tackle Real Problems,” September 5, 1973; “Civil Offense for Drive-in X-Rated Films,” September 25, 1973; “Controversial Film Ends Long Run Here,” June 6, 1974; ad for Deep Throat at Midway, September 29, 1976; Final ad for Deep Throat, May 20, 1976 (The record for a continuous run of Deep Throat was ten years at the Pussycat Theater in Hollywood, “Hologram USA Hollywood Theater,” http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/2364); “Opening Set for New Firms,” July 15, 1976; “X-rated Movies Leave the Downtown,” February 1, 1977; “New Owners to Reopen Theater,” May 25, 1977; “Rejuvenated Theater to Return as Performing Arts Center,” May 23, 1979; “Drive-in Theaters A Dying Breed,” January 25, 1980; “Adult Films Are Not Appreciated,” April 14, 1983; “Parkway Closure Ends An Era,” January 24, 1986; “Drive-in a ‘Headache,’” December 17, 1986; “Washington Square Mixes Movies, Videos,” June 12, 1987; “X-rated Drive-in to be Sold,” August 13, 1988; Harlan Osborne, “Tocchini Family Builds Legacy with Sonoma County Theaters,” December 8, 2016.

Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “Showcase Theater Leased,” February 7, 1973; “Hard Core Capital of North Bay,” May 25, 1973; Porno Trial Begins,” September 12, 1973.

Books and Websites

Film History of the 1970s, filmsite.org.

Alison M. Parker, “Mothering the Movies,” Movies Censorship and American Culture, Francis G. Couvares, ed. (University of Massachusetts Press, 2006).

Susanna Paasonen and Laura Saarenmaa, “The Golden Age of Porn: Nostalgia and History in Cinema,” Pornification (Oxford: Berg Publishing), pp. 23-32.

Scott Tobias, “Midnight Cowboy at 50: Why the X-rated Best Picture Winner Endures,” The Guardian, May 24, 2019.

Interview with Aaron Sizemore, who worked as a projectionist at the Sonomarin and the Parkway: “The Sonomarin from 1983 until its closure in 1989 was operated by the late Allan ‘Duck Dumont’ Shustak, who also operated a couple of hardtop porn houses in the Bay Area. The screen came down in 1989 and the building was demolished in 1991. The property was sold to the state for use as a flood control lake (it was cheaper than elevating the freeway at that spot.”