It's August 1963. Blissfully unaware of the presidential tragedy lurking in the wings, a smart young Phoenix couple blithely sets out to see the most-talked-about film of the season.
He wears a sharkskin suit with a dark skinny tie.
She opts for a linen sheath and faux pearls.
And as they join the other postbeatnik thrill seekers in line outside the rustic little movie house on Scottsdale's Main Street, this broad-minded duo flash knowing smiles at each other. This is the theatre where they'd seen Jayne Mansfield in the raw! And tonight's attraction? An Italian documentary in which an old woman actually breast-feeds a baby pig! Right on camera!
In the early Sixties, a trip all the way out to the Kiva was an exciting adventure indeed. What other theatre in the Valley dared show a "foreign film" as shocking and bold as tonight's attraction? And dared to show it "Uncut! Uncensored! Unexpurgated! The way it was meant to be seen!" Not for nothing did the newspaper ads urgently warn moviegoers: "If You Never See Another Film, You Must See Mondo Cane!"
Never mind that only a handful of people in the audience could pronounce the foreign title correctly, let alone knew what it meant. No one ever said it was easy being artsy in the middle of the Arizona desert.
And according to theatre owner Louis Sher, that's exactly what's kept his downtown Scottsdale art house in business for nearly thirty years, even though the X-rated "artistry" onscreen at the Kiva these days might best be appreciated by a circus sword swallower.
An anomaly in today's relentlessly upscale Scottsdale, the Kiva is the only downtown "art house" left in Arizona.
SITTING IN THE CLUTTERED OFFICE of Art Theatre Guild of America, the 76-year-old Sher sits at his desk buried beneath piles of XXX-rated video catalogues. On the wall to his right hangs a framed poster for The Stewardesses in 3-D, a soft-core novelty chronicling one of the most ludicrously lurid layovers in aeronautical history. The stereoptic oddity was a box-office smash, trailing only Love Story as that year's biggest grosser.
Sher hitches a thumb in the direction of the poster's ad copy ("The unpublishable novel is now America's most controversial film!"). "Know why it was unpublishable?" he laughs. "Because there never was a novel in the first place!"
But he begs off when asked to elaborate on the high-flying blockbuster that inspired an entire film genre dealing with hormonally haywire nurses, substitute teachers and other swinging career girls. "My daughter keeps telling me I've got to save something for my book," Sher explains. "I say `What book?'"
For the lifelong movie buff, the deal for the art house began on a Cleveland psychoanalyst's couch in 1954. "Before I got into movies, I was very unhappy," confesses Sher, who was operating a string of taverns at the time. "Whenever I'd go see this doctor, I kept talking about this empty theatre four blocks from my house. He finally convinced me that if that's what I really wanted to do, I should buy it." Sher smiles. "I used to think that tomorrow would be better. But once I opened that theatre, I realized today was great!"
Using Cleveland's Bexley Theatre as his flagship house, Sher founded the Art Theatre Guild of America, a chain of theatres specializing in foreign or independently produced films far removed from the Hollywood mainstream. "Retiring" to Scottsdale in 1962, Sher added three more screens to his circuit. In addition to the 450-seat Kiva (which had previously operated as the Tee-Bar-Tee, a mainstream second-run venue), he bought the much more intimate Portofino, a 100-seat theatre just down the street from the Kiva. (Sher also acquired Tempe's Valley Art, which he sold long ago. The Portofino closed several years ago; Sher's nationwide chain is down to seven theatres.)
Drawing on urban sophisticates seeking something "different" (read: racy), Sher's chain eventually peaked during the early Seventies at more than forty screens in eleven states.
Generally smaller than conventional moviehouses of that era, Sher's theatres featured rotating art exhibits in the lobby, often offered patrons complimentary coffee, and did not sell popcorn and candy--or at least not until Sher made the profitable realization that art and snacks were not mutually exclusive. ("My God! This is a business in itself," he recalls saying after visiting another art house where customers could buy "everything but gefilte fish.") During his Scottsdale heyday, Sher effectively transformed the folksy Main Street of the West's Most Western Town into a cinema paradiso, a filmland free zone unbutchered by the censor's ax.
Or at least that was the idea foisted on a thrill-hungry public rapidly tiring of a steady diet of Doris Day and Rock Hudson.
"The fellow that put our ads together for us did a hell of a job," recalls Sher. "He was a genius. He'd stay up all night wrestling to find just the right word or phrase that was going to grab the reader by the throat when they saw that ad."
Twenty-five years later, many of those old ads can still stop a historian in his tracks--if for no other reason than to decipher the cryptic quagmire of overheated hyperbole. "The scenes in this film are real--too real for the immature!" screeched an ad for one mid-Sixties shockeroo, while another cinematic slice of life-in-the-raw was trumpeted as "the film without false modesty!" Needless to say, both movies were also deemed "Frank!," a word that cropped up in Kiva ads so frequently that casual readers easily might have assumed the theatre was running a perpetual Sinatra festival.
An even more enigmatic head scratcher heralded A Cold Wind in August: "This is as close to hiding under the sofa as anything in films!"
Generally promising much more than they ever delivered, the Kiva's ads have historically come under much more heat than any of the films they ever ballyhooed. "Whew!" says Sher. "I remember going down to the Arizona Republic to see the head of the advertising department because they didn't want to accept one of our ads for one reason or another. I forget why. It was probably the same old story--the Kiva, the Portofino, these terrible pictures we were running. Well, we went round and round. Finally, he told me, `I don't want people going into your theatre, then coming out and raping little kids.' I said `Good--we're on the same side of the street. I don't want that either.'" The ad ran.
"Citywise, we've had very little pressure," says Sher, who claims the Kiva hasn't run into any legal trouble since a copy of Deep Throat was seized seventeen years ago. "During the late Sixties, early Seventies, the city of Scottsdale was always trying to flex its muscle, but we haven't had any problems since then." (Not unless you count the time a midget and his girlfriend entered the theatre, triggering a visit from cops investigating reports that a mother had taken a child into an X-rated movie.)
An avid anticensorship activist who has used the services of famed civil-liberties lawyer Alan Dershowitz more than once, Sher has been embroiled in a number of censorship battles over the years--virtually all of them far removed from the Kiva. Thirty years ago, while Sher was showing respected French filmmaker Louis Malle's The Lovers at one of his theatres in Cleveland, he was charged with exhibiting an obscene film. Sher took the case to the United States Supreme Court, won, and eventually earned back quite a bit of his court costs by playing up the picture's controversial past. Like an aging soldier relishing an old war story, Sher beams. "I can still see it," he chortles as he uses his hands to frame words on an imaginary marquee. "BANNED IN CLEVELAND!"
These days, however, the Kiva's marquee is far more likely to read Bimbo Bowlers From Boston or When Larry Ate Sally, two titles that have actually graced the sign in recent months. Bowing to the "porno chic" craze that made Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones household words, the theatre began booking hard-core porn twenty years ago and has never looked back. Enigmatically answering a question about the switch in policy, Sher says, "I couldn't get art films"--even though he persists in referring to his current porno pix as "art films."
VISIT THE KIVA TODAY and you'll find very little art and absolutely no film. "No one uses reel-to-reel projectors anymore, not in this business," announces 32-year-old Roger Kurth, the Kiva's manager of nearly four years. "All the adult entertainment theatres like the Kiva have switched to video."
The resulting effect is something like watching big-screen TV from across a football field through foggy binoculars. During a recent screening of something called Raw Sewage, the images glowed with hallucinatory pastel colors, while the dialogue (or what little could be heard above the ersatz Tijuana Brass music droning in the background) was virtually inaudible. When one customer came out in the lobby to complain the soundtrack was fuzzy, Kurth shrugged. "You've got to remember these aren't professional actresses." Other customers who wandered out of the theatre that night were more interested in checking the score on a football game Kurth was watching or perusing the racks of X-rated rental videos that fill the lobby.
"It's hard to pinpoint exactly who our audience is," says Kurth. "We get everyone from the guy who comes down here on his 21st birthday to see his first adult movie to 86-year-old men who bring in their wives."
During the winter season, the theatre reportedly enjoys a brisk matinee trade with male snowbirds. "I've seen it happen time and again," says Kurth. "The husband and wife are here on vacation. The wife wants to shop; the husband doesn't. The husband pulls out his wallet, hands his wife the credit card, looks at our time schedule, then tells her he'll meet her out front at, say, 3:30." Conventioneers from backwater burgs where blue movies are taboo also keep the Kiva's turnstiles spinning. "We generally don't get the kind of customers most people would find offensive," says Kurth, who refers to the Kiva as "the Cadillac of adult theatres." "This is not the [porno] bookstore crowd, the guy who's looking to watch a movie in a booth or looking to strike up a conversation with some couple he sees sitting in the theatre." To ensure that newcomers keep their hands to themselves, a Kiva employee regularly prowls the theatre with a flashlight. "People who don't know better assume he's just looking for someone sneaking a smoke," Kurth explains.
"Yeah," Sher interjects thoughtfully. "Our customers are the cream of the crop."
Sher transformed the folksy Main Street of the West's Most Western Town into a cinema paradiso.
"The scenes in this film are real--too real for the immature!" screeched an ad for one mid-Sixties shockeroo.
"Frank!" cropped up in ads so frequently that casual readers might have assumed the theatre was running a perpetual Sinatra festival.
"I can still see it," Sher chortles. "BANNED IN CLEVELAND!"
Conventioneers from backwater burgs where blue movies are taboo also keep the Kiva's turnstiles spinning.
