Adult Movie Theatres in Phoenix

Five rooms, all of them open

Arcades, cabarets, motels and theaters

These are City of Phoenix rules. Scottsdale writes its own.

Phoenix licenses four kinds of adult business: adult arcades, adult cabarets, adult motels and adult theaters. It costs six hundred dollars to apply for an arcade, cabaret or theater licence and six hundred a year after that. The City Clerk has forty-five days to approve or deny, and an application nobody answers inside forty-five days is approved. Police, Planning and the Neighborhood Services Department all sign off, and the application carries a diagram of the premises drawn to scale.

Phoenix was licensing arcades by 1980. Ellwest Stereo Theatres, which ran a Phoenix arcade, was turned down for a licence and sued. On 23 July 1982 the Ninth Circuit held the ordinance was not unconstitutional on its face. The court also recorded where Phoenix got it: the City Council had patterned the section on a Los Angeles ordinance a California court had upheld in 1979. Both sides in that case agreed that eleven premises in Phoenix then had video viewing machines in them.

The fairground that was residential land

Section 417(B)(2) of the Phoenix Zoning Ordinance, as it stood in 1980, kept an adult business a set distance away from any land zoned residential. A company called Book-Cellar ran an adult bookstore called The Owl on Grand Avenue, in a spot it was entitled to keep because the shop was there before the rule was. It wanted to move to another address on the opposite side of the same street, and the site it wanted was too close to land that was zoned residential.

That land was the Arizona State Fairgrounds, going since 1905. By 1980 it held Veterans Memorial Coliseum, open since 3 November 1965, where the Phoenix Suns had played their home games since 1968. The court that eventually decided the case listed the Suns, the ice shows and the rock concerts among the uses the fairground’s own zoning tolerated for having got there first.

The city zoning administrator found for the bookstore: the residential zoning of the fairgrounds did not bear on the purpose of the rule. The city appealed. On 8 October 1980, at a special public hearing, the Board of Adjustment reversed the administrator: for the purposes of that ordinance, the State Fairgrounds was a residential district.

The bookstore went to the Maricopa County Superior Court, which threw the petition out without reaching the question at all. On 15 December 1983 the Court of Appeals held that the question should have been heard and sent it back, and review of that was denied on 13 March 1984. The trial court then heard the merits and sided with the board. On 7 May 1986 the Court of Appeals affirmed, five and a half years after the hearing.

The fairground is where the state put it, the court held, so the city has no control over what becomes of that land and the land may be developed for housing in future. Read the way the bookstore wanted it read, the ordinance would leave the city unable to plan anything. The fairground is still at 1826 West McDowell Road. The land the board called residential held the Arizona State Fair again this year, from 1 October to 1 November 2026.

Four that closed: the Paris, the Rama, the Paradise, the Kiva

The Paris, 315 East Washington Street, downtown. One screen and eight hundred seats. It went adult in March 1967, after a spell as a burlesque house, and closed in 1972.

The Rama, 2812 West McDowell Road, earlier the Pornarama. One screen. By 2018 the address was a Mexican restaurant.

Paradise Adult Boutique and Theater, 130 West Osborn Road in Encanto. Two screens behind an adult shop, one programme straight and one gay. Closed January 2022. The building, 4,250 square feet on the corner of Osborn Road and 2nd Avenue, was being offered to lease as street retail in April 2025.

The Kiva, 7125 East Main Street, is the Scottsdale one. It opened as the Tee-Bar-Tee in June 1948, took the Kiva name on 17 October 1955 and had 386 seats. It ran adult films from the early 1970s until 1993. In the late 1990s it became a shopping centre in Old Town, and most of the front of the building is still there.