By Whitney Strub

Last Monday night at 10 o'clock, Newark's longest-running movie theater shuttered its doors. That it spent the past five decades showing adult films should not obscure the fact that for nearly a century, the Little Theatre charted Newark's film culture like no other place. In many ways, the history of the Little Theatre is the history of a small slice of Newark.

The Little Theatre opened in March 1930, debuting with the Indian film "Shiraz." The trajectory of the 300-seat venue followed that of many similar small independents. In the 1930s, its manager claimed to hold exclusive rights to first-run Jewish pictures in New Jersey. Many of its films were in Yiddish, and German films starring Walter Janssen and Willy Fritsch also graced its ads. The 1940s found it screening second-run and revival titles from the Hollywood studios -- Otto Preminger's "Laura" or a double bill of "King Kong" and "Son of Kong."

But already, the die was cast: "Ecstasy" (1932), which featured both Hedy Lamar's infamous (albeit brief) nudity and the first onscreen depiction of a female orgasm, was a longtime perennial. Young Philip Roth sneaked in to see it around 1949, and who will ever know how often that formative moment replayed itself in his mind as he wrote "Portnoy's Complaint" and other books? A tipping point was reached with Russ Meyer's 1959 "The Immoral Mr. Teas," which ushered in a "nudie" craze that found legal protection in the courts.

Incensed Catholic leaders urged city inspectors to "find any sort of violations of plumbing, electricity, etc., that they could" to combat the looming threat of smut, but to no avail. Things grew more graphic as the sexual revolution commenced, moving from burlesque films with Tempest Storm to, ultimately, hard-core pornography in the early 1970s.

And that's where things stayed, until Monday. The features changed -- shot on film, then video, and finally projected digitally -- but for its final decades, the Little Theatre became a place where men (overwhelmingly) gathered to watch, and often have, sex. Unlike purportedly urbane and decadent places in New York or Los Angeles, this caused relatively little consternation in Newark. I can find in news archives only one police raid, related to the North Jersey-shot "Deep Sleep" (1973). And when I interviewed locals a few years ago -- a security guard down the street, a young mother at the YMCA and others -- all agreed there was no cause for alarm. Consenting adults who knew the score went in, and what they did there was their business. I love that about Newark.

Danny Ganota ran the theater from 1966 until his death last year, and while he had no personal affection for porn, preferring childhood memories of Abbott and Costello or the Bowery Boys in Newark's larger downtown movie palaces, he fiercely defended his patrons. "These are people you sit and have coffee with, nice human beings," he told me.

Based on my many trips to the Little Theatre, I agree completely. I saw plenty of cruising but zero coercion. The theater's great flaw was its tacit exclusion of women, but for men seeking the company of other men, it offered a place of respite, dingy but welcoming, sleazy but alluring.

Maybe you don't approve of that. That's fine, of course; there were no glaring explicit posters, and nobody forced you to attend. Regardless of how one assesses the Little Theatre, the fact remains: If you browse The Star-Ledger movie pages from the early 1990s, only two listings appear for Newark: the Cameo and the Little Theatre. Both showed adult films. The Cameo closed in 2010, and no other movie theater in Newark comes close to the Little Theatre's unbroken run, 1930 to 2018. It holds a special place in our cultural history.

I was there for the final, unceremonious, lights-out on Monday. First the hallway TV monitors (the always-dubious "third" screen, its front poster advertised) went to static, then an adult film on the big screen simply stopped, mid-scene. And that was it, a wrap for nearly a century of local cinematic culture.

Whatever its new developers do next, as the regretful sign on the door said, "it's been a heck of a ride."

Whitney Strub, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Newark, is author of "Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right" (Columbia University Press, 2010).

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