My oldest brother is 12 years older than I am; starting when I was 6 (1971/2), she used to pay him to take me to see whatever the current Disney re-release and stuff like *Benji *and all that.
Instead, we saw Dirty Harry, The Sting (twice), The Great Waldo Pepper, The Poseiden Adventure, and Dirty Larry and Crazy Mary, Death Race 2000, and Smokey and the Bandit (several times at the dollar theatre, among other things. He drew the line at Blazing Saddles, but primarily because he went to a midnight showing.
Oh, wow, and Westworld. That freaked me out a bit.
I was born in 1961, and when I was a “kid,” it was pretty hard to see any grossly inappropriate movies or television shows. There’s a REASON that old issues of Mad magazine had so many jokes about kids leafing through National Geographic, hoping to find topless African native girls. That was about the most “inappropriate” literature available in the Sixties and early Seventies.
I was probably 15 before I saw a rated R movie.
That said, my very conservative, old-school Catholic Dad had no objections to me seeing nudity or violence in movies, provided that the movie had some serious themes or artistic merit. He let me see the original ***Planet of the Apes ***when I was 7 or 8.
*Poltergeist *scared me - I was about 9 or 10, I think.
As far as ‘adult’ movies - when I was a young teen in the early 80’s, before cable was available in our area, we had a subscription TV movie service. It would show soft-core porn (or regular porn, with the penetration shots edited out) in the middle of the night.
Our descrambler had a lock on it with a key that had to be turned to flip the descrambler switch. One day for the hell of it I stuck a bobby pin in there to see if I could unlock it and oh my god it worked! So there were many times I would wait until the late, late hours of the night and I could hear dad snoring that I would sneak to the TV room, pick the lock, and watch unscrambled adult movies in all their glory. Always panicking with every creak of the house that my parents would walk in and discover my secret.
I used to stay overnight with my Grandmother quite a bit, and she has HBO. The list of inappropriate movies I watch is pretty long, but included Porky’s, Heavy Metal, Hollywood Nights and a slew of horror films.
And on one occasion, a neighbor took my sisters and I to a drive-in to see Candleshoe and The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again. This drive-in had two screens, and we parked (unintentionally) in an area where we could see both screens. Phantasm and Dawn of the Dead were showing on screen 2.
The same screen was visible from my high school’s football stadium. One Friday night, during a football game, the theater showed a movie called Sizzling Seniors. It was not about elderly folks cooking bacon. That movie was where I first learned about cunnilingus.
In the late 70’s, there was a porn shop locally that had a drive-in. During the summer, the tree-line usually blocked the view of the screen from the highway. But not always. There was one little patch of highway (maybe 35-50 feet, going from memory) where the trees hadn’t grown quite tall enough to block the screen all the way. My older brother and I used to pray that our car would break down right at that exact spot whenever we were travelling.
Drive-in porno theaters were actually more common than you think in the 1970s. They just usually didn’t have them near any built-up areas. I remember one that was located off I-80 between Davis and Sacramento at the end of the Yolo Causeway.
You’ll think I’m making this up but no: my dad was so blown away by the profundity of Zardoz that he believed it would be instrumental in my brother’s and my maturation, that he called the theater manager to let him know that we would be at the ticket booth with his permission nay insistence.
When I was a kid, there were no inappropriate movies; the Production Code still held sway.
I did see Dr. Strangelove when I was 12. It was clearly a movie not designed for 12 year olds, and even though I didn’t understand some of the jokes, I thought at the time that it was the best movie I’d ever seen.
I never saw a drive-in porn theater… or any other kind of drive-in theater, because they just didn’t exist in the city limits. Out on Long Island or in New Jersey, maybe.
There WAS a porn theater not far from my house: the Olympia on Steinway Street. Back in the 1970s, ***The Devil In Miss Jones ***was on the marquee for what seemed like 5 years! Every time we drove by in the family car, my younger brother would put on a soulful voice a la Billy Paul and start singing “Meeeeeee aaaaaaaaand… Mrs. Jooooones, Mrs. Jones, Mrs. Jones, Mrs. Joooooones… we got a thaaaaaaaang… goin’ oooooooon…”
But I think the video era killed off that old theater in the early Eighties.
It’s funny how times change, because there are a number of films listed that I purposely showed my daughter from 8-12yo: Alien, Aliens (don’t think it was mentioned), Jaws, Smokey and the Bandit, Poltergeist. The only one she didn’t want to see going in was SatB, but immediately fell in love with Fred and she will rewatch it whenever she can.
