Adrianne: We’re all tired. Except Billy. You’re probably not tired. 

Billy: Yeah, not tired at all. 

John: Why would Billy not be tired? 

Adrianne: Because he thrives on chaos and sleepless nights.

Billy: Exactly. I feel more alive than ever. 

Adrianne: Let’s explain why.

John: Right, OK. We are all tired and sleepy because this weekend, this past weekend, we participated in KCRW’s annual 24-hour radio race, in which they give participants 24 hours to create a nonfiction documentary radio story that is four minutes or less. And going into the race, you don’t know what the theme of that year’s race will be until the race begins. So at 1 p.m. Eastern on Saturday, we all got on a call

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Billy: I’m recording.

Adrianne: T minus one minute.

John: for when KCRW dropped this year’s theme, which was “where the sun don’t shine.”  

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John: We got it guys. It’s “Where the sun don’t shine.”

Adrianne: “Where the sun don’t shine?” Hmmm.

Adrianne: Not everything fits into that theme.

Billy: It’s also very clearly a euphemism for butts.

Adrianne: Right. 

Billy: Like it’s definitely — like, all love to KCRW, I hope you guys pick us as the winner, but it’s like public radio people sitting around being like, how can we make the prompt about butts without saying butts? Like how do we force all these poor people to make a story about butts? 

Adrianne: So this was very different from our normal workflow, which is one of us will research a topic and then pitch it to the rest of the group and then we sort of decide which stories to pursue. This time we were just all brainstorming, throwing ideas around.

John: So from like one o’clock to five o’clock, we burned through as many ideas for stories as we’ve had total since starting the show. 

Adrianne: Right. Some of them, I still like. Some of them I think we should still do. 

Billy: Oh, yeah, we got a lot of good ideas for episodes. I just think you know, a lot of them weren’t things we could do in 24 hours. 

Adrianne: So it was really a departure for us to try to do it this other way and to add to that, Regina was traveling, so she had to call in from a bus, and then the airport, and then the back of a car, and that is why Regina is not on this call right now, but she did join us for the radio race. And we came up with this story that Billy found in his very own home state of New Jersey.

Billy: I mean, I’m a transplant, but sure. 

John: Let’s roll it.

Billy: Hi gang. 

Adrianne: Hi, Billy. 

Regina: Hey.

John: Hey.

Billy: So I work in Newark, New Jersey and I noticed something downtown. There’s this adorable marquee for a place called The Little Theater. 

Adrianne: What’s adorable about it? 

Billy: It’s like an old vintage sign. It’s just like kind of retro cool. 

Regina: Mm.

Adrianne: Nice. 

Billy: So I looked it up online and I found an article from about a year ago on nj.com. This is the headline: “This little porn movie house learned to survive for decades.”

John: Whoa. 

Billy: Until last week. 

Adrianne: Oh no. 

Billy: So it had been there since the 1930s, not always showing porn, but it became the last surviving porno theater in all of New Jersey.

John: End of an era.

Billy: Yeah kind of a bummer. And I was pretty surprised by all of this, but there was one detail in the article that really stuck out to me. So it says here, “First the hallway TV monitors went to static. Then an adult film on the big screen simply stopped mid-scene. And that was it.” 

John: What? 

Billy: Seems very weird, right? 

John: Yeah. 

Billy: So I have two questions. What was the last porno film to be screened in the great state of New Jersey? And why did it stop mid-scene?

Adrianne: I’m really curious. 

Billy: It turns out the guy who wrote the article I found actually was the last person to be sitting in the theater as it shut down and I met him outside the ruins of the Little Theater in Newark, New Jersey. 

Hey Whitney?

Whitney: Yeah, how’s it going?

Billy: So this is Whitney Strub. He’s a professor at Rutgers. 

Whitney: I’ve written a fair amount about the kind of the history of pornography obscenity and the debates over what places like the Little Theater mean socially. 

Billy: I start by asking Whitney for a little bit of background on the place.

Whitney: You walked in the door, and there’s a ticket booth, a very old-school ticket booth, up front. And so it had a pretty sizable screen about 300 seats. They weren’t in great condition. And then it’s sort of, almost like a baseball dugout in the back of the screening room, and a lot of men would kind of just hang out there, you could walk and stand. 

Billy: People, mostly men, would gather here to watch porn. That’s probably obvious. They’d also have sex, which may be obvious as well, but it was also kind of a casual social club. 

Whitney: You know men would have long loud conversations. People didn’t pay that much attention to the movies and so they would talk over them or eat together. It was an interesting and really unique space.    

Whitney: Most of them closed ages ago. So I mean, you know, we’re in Newark, New Jersey, which is essentially the outer edge of the New York City metro area and there’s only two adult movie theaters left in New York City even. So, you know, I think it says something meaningful that this lasted that long.

Billy: The Little Theater had been showing porn since the 60s, but then in the last couple of years the neighborhood started to change. 

Whitney: Down the street there’s a Whole Foods anchoring the next block, which opened in 2017, and that’s sort of indicative of what the new Newark increasingly looks like. Obviously a pornographic movie theater with a big neon sign glaring out on a major road, you know, is really at odds with that gentrified aesthetic in downtown Newark.

Billy: We go for a walk and it’s not hard to see what Whitney’s talking about. The Whole Foods, the luxury apartments, Amazon even took over a giant church and called it the “innovation cathedral.” Then Whitney shows me another shuttered adult theater called The Cameo.

Whitney: So we’ve walked about three blocks from the Little Theater to The Cameo, and so together you can think of them as anchors of a little bit of a 1970s red light district that no longer exists. And the other big anchor of that, if you look ahead of us, what used to be there was a place called The Lincoln Motel and on the bottom floor was a dance club called Zanzibar, which was kind of like the hot spot of house music in New Jersey. Again, with gentrification that got demolished about a decade ago to make way for this incredibly useless baseball stadium that’s actually not in use. 

Billy: Yeah, I was going to say, who’s playing at this baseball stadium? 

Whitney: Nobody. It was for a minor league team that failed.

And that was definitely a hotbed of LGBTQ scene formation, and so I think it also speaks to what’s lost when you clean up this kind of urban red light district. You really just literally erase important institutions. 

Billy: Have places like that moved somewhere else in Newark, or they just gone? 

Whitney: No, it’s just gone. It’s mostly just loss rather than relocation.

Billy: So you wrote an article about this place in 2016 for Vice before it closed. The headline on that was, “Can New Jersey’s last porn theater survive gentrification?” So it sounds like the answer is- 

Whitney: Yeah. The answer is unquestionably no, unfortunately. 

Billy: On June 25th, 2018, Whitney Strub sat in an empty theater as they played the final porno ever screened at a movie theater in New Jersey. 

Whitney: But I had no idea what the movie was. I took a cell phone shot of the movie. There were no other patrons by the end, I was the last one there all alone. So I figured it didn’t violate any ethics to shoot photos. So I took a shot of the final sex scene. 

Billy: And someone uploaded that photo to the popular forum Adult DVD Talk, and they solved it. 

Whitney: The sleuths on Adult DVD Talk were able with almost certainty to identify what it was. I don’t remember the title though. It was a pretty nondescript movie. Just some pretty standard movie with no plot, unfortunately. I wish it had gone out with something more interesting or iconic but it was pretty much boilerplate heterosexual porn.

Billy: It was a film called Black Mommas 4 starring Sean Michaels and Jayden Starr.

Regina: Why did it- I still don’t understand why it stopped midway. 

Billy: Well, it just turned out it was just time to close. 

Billy: Why did the movie stop mid-scene? 

Whitney: I think it was because the shift ended. The movie times, I will note, they were always at bizarre times. There would be a handwritten list for the day and it wouldn’t be like 2 p.m., 4 p.m. 6 p.m. It would be like 2:17 p.m., this title, 4:47, this title, and I could never understand it. I have no idea why it was so idiosyncratic. And so yeah, the movie was just playing midstream, I think it was probably 10 p.m. was the final closing, and it just stopped. There was no reason to to see it through to its conclusion, so it ended very anticlimactically in every way. 

Billy: Basically, no one was there to watch for the plot. They were there for the very unique community. One Whitney says wasn’t just pushed out of Newark, it was basically pushed out of existence. 

Whitney: You know, it kept sex queer and messy. And that that’s important, I think. I mean that’s an act of resistance in its own way. It’s something that is a genuine loss as they close and I think you see that those those spaces don’t exist in the same way in these new iterations. 

Billy: And you don’t you don’t think that’s happening at the Whole Foods? 

Whitney: I mean, you know there’s there’s cruising going on in the aisles of Whole Foods. No doubt about it.

Adrianne: Thanks for listening. Underunderstood is produced by Billy Disney, John Lagomarsino, Regina Dellea, and me, Adrianne Jeffries.

John: This piece was originally produced as part of the 24-Hour Radio Race from KCRW’s Independent Producer Project.

Billy: If you’re new to the show, welcome, we’re glad you’re here. There’s a bunch of other stories waiting in our feed. You can hear them by subscribing in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other app you use to listen to podcasts.

Adrianne: And if you wanna follow us in other ways, we’re @underunderstood on Twitter, we also have a page on Facebook somewhere. And we’re on Instagram.

John: Thanks for listening.

Billy: Smash- oh.

John: Do it.

Billy: No, I don’t want to say it.

John: OK that’s it. Thanks for listening. We’ll be back next week.