Adult Movie Theatres in Los Angeles

Open from Santa Monica Boulevard to Sherman Oaks

Where the Pussycat chain began

The Pussycat chain started at 444 South Hill Street, where the Town Theatre became the first Pussycat in early 1966. Dan Sonney and Dave Friedman founded it, and it grew to thirty houses across California. The Town closed in the mid-1980s, and by 2018 a 1987 building with a jewelry store stood at the address.

Inside the city the chain’s houses closed one by one between 1977 and 2003. Among them:

• The Sunset, 1508 North Western Avenue, a Pussycat from 1966, closed in 2003. Housing and a Walgreens parking lot stand there now.
• 6656 Hollywood Boulevard, a Pussycat from spring 1975, renamed the Ritz in June 1987. The punk club the Masque ran in its basement from August 1977 to January 1978.
• The Lankershim, 7532 Lankershim Boulevard, North Hollywood, a Pussycat from 26 November 1976 to July 1977, when it closed after neighbours objected. It reopened as Teatro Lankershim in August 1977 and is a Spanish-language church now.
• The California, 810 South Main Street, a Pussycat late in its life, demolished in 1990.

The chain’s last house, Studs at the Pussycat, 7734 Santa Monica Boulevard, is in West Hollywood, a separate city, and by 2003 it was the only Pussycat left. It opened in 1940 as the Monica, became the Left Bank on 30 August 1968 and a Pussycat on 13 March 1970, and closed on 29 October 2022, fifty-six years after the chain began on Hill Street.

Western, Hollywood, and a festival in Westlake

The Tiki opened in November 1969, when adult cinemas were opening along Western Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard:

• The Flick, 1082 North Western Avenue, from March 1969.
• The Erotica, 1187 North Western Avenue, opened in March 1970.
• The Projection Room, 713 North Western Avenue, running in 1970.
• The Film Festival, 1066 North Western Avenue, from February 1971 to at least July 1977.
• The Avon, 7059 Hollywood Boulevard, showing gay films from February 1970.

In July 1968 the Park, 710 South Alvarado Street in Westlake, showed the Original Pat Rocco Male Film Festival. Anthony Slide, in Nitrate Won’t Wait (2000), calls it the first program of all-gay films in America.

Hill Street and Main Street, downtown

The Mayan, at 1038 South Hill Street, showed adult films from the late 1960s or early 1970s until June 1989. Carlos Tobalina ran it.

The Regent, at 448 South Main Street, was an all-night adult cinema until it stopped showing films in 2000. It is a music venue now.

The XPO on East Anaheim Street

The XPO, 3131 East Anaheim Street in Wilmington, opened on 4 July 1973 and closed in 1974 by one account. John Margolies dated his photograph of it 1977, three years later, and in the picture the signs are up: Adult Theatre, and a new movie every Friday.

Spacing, by the city’s code

Section 12.70 of the city’s code took effect on 1 September 1978. It followed a 1977 city study linking clusters of adult businesses to crime. At its core, a new adult business may not open within 1,000 feet of another or within 500 feet of a school, a park or a place of worship. The section sets further limits and allows some exceptions.

A 1983 amendment limited how many adult businesses may share a building. Two businesses challenged it, and in 2002 the Supreme Court, five to four with no majority opinion, let the city rely on its 1977 study at that stage of the case, in City of Los Angeles v. Alameda Books. The case went back to the trial court in 2012.

The fifth vote was Justice Kennedy’s, and he set a condition on it: a city may zone against the side effects of adult businesses, but it has to leave the amount of speech, and people’s access to it, substantially intact.