Someone asked me what the first movie I can remember seeing in the theater that was rated R. I had to think pretty hard, trying to remember if I actually saw the movie in the theater or at home on VHS.
Blue Thunder released in 1983 starring Roy Scheider and Malcolm McDowell. I don’t remember much about the movie, but it’s about a new police helicopter with advanced technology and some conspiracy to use it for bad things. I was seven years old when I saw it.
I lived in Munich, Germany at the time where a local theater was right right across the street from our apartment and they’d let me in with no questions asked so long as I bought a ticket. .50 cent matinees and a buck for an evening show with popcorn at .25 cents and a Coca-Cola .35 cents. Good times.
My dad watched it and was awestruck. So much so that he phoned the theater to instruct them that two of his sons, aged 13 and 15, could be expected to present themselves at the box office and should be granted access with his full permission nay insistence to this profound masterpiece.
Summer of 1982, when I was 17, I saw Class of 1984 (kind of a thriller, I guess) in the theater with some friends, and two bad horror movies, one of which was called Inseminoid (basically, an exploitation-style rip-off of Alien; I don’t remember the name of the other one), at a drive-in with some other friends.
I was 16 in 1969 when Midnight Cowboy was released. It was given an ‘X’ rating, probably the equivalent of NC-17 today. The minimum age for X-rated movies at the time was 16. I saw the film at a drive-in with two buddies that summer.
ETA: Technically this doesn’t qualify for this thread.
My mother was a rather prudish individual, note. My folks failed to note in the newspaper WHY it was rated R. So off they dragged my sister (14) and myself (18) to a showing.
Turns out it had full frontal female nudity, albeit in a rather unalluring scene. My mother giggled nervously in mortification throughout the entire scene, and I myself was beyond embarrassment.
I forget what the first one was that I could go to alone (or with peers who were also of age).
I was actually going to answer with Airplane! (1980), but despite the language, large amount of sexual innuendo, drug use (Lloyd Bridges using amphetamines and sniffing glue), and a brief shot of a pair of naked female breasts bouncing directly in front of the camera, it somehow was only rated PG.
Rating-wise, yeah, as the MPA doesn’t issue “X” any longer, and NC-17 (which is an exceptionally rare rating for a film that makes it into theaters) serves the similar role of preventing any minors from attending.
But, that said, from what I’ve read, if Midnight Cowboy came out today, given how the ratings are applied today, it’d likely get no worse than an R.
Revenge of the Nerds when I was not quite 14, for a friends birthday. I know the mom was supposed to get us tickets for something else, but it wasn’t playing anymore. Based on releases at the time, possible The Last Starfighter. She thought a movie about nerds would be fine. The mom didn’t stay for the movie, so we just decided to not mention exactly how fun that movie was for a bunch of 13 year old boys.
The only time I ever got carded for a movie was a few years later when I took a date to see something R rated in 1987 or 88, and she was rejected because she was only 16. I remember we ended up seeing something terrible that was PG.
I was a very well behaved kid. I didn’t break any rules. I’m pretty sure my parents let me see some R rated movies at home but only after they watched them first. I went to see a movie with a friend and his parents in the theater. I got upset when I found out it was rated R and I didn’t get permission from my parents. My friend’s parents assured me it would be ok. I was 12 or 13. The movie was The Big Red One. I didn’t get in trouble.