When the Oregon Theater opened its doors in 1925, the featured attraction was the silent western Steele of the Royal Mounted, which screened in the 750-seat movie palace to the accompaniment of a Wurlitzer organ. But by the time the theater suddenly went out of business, apparently for good, this week, the theater had become “a fading reminder of the seamy ’70s,” as Portland Monthly described the place.
In the 1970s, inspired as many struggling movie theaters were at the time by the success of Deep Throat—porn’s first genuine big-screen blockbuster—the Oregon Theater shifted to an all-adult format. The movie theater business had been coping with the advent of television for two decades, and smaller, independent cinemas were often hit the hardest.
But with the advent of “XXX” film, theaters such as the Oregon were now able to offer a product with which television was simply incapable of competing. At least until the advent of home video about a decade later.
Nonetheless, the Maizels family, which owned several cinemas in Portland but by the early 2000s had sold most of them off, kept the Oregon Theater chugging away, screening heterosexual porn films five days a week, with bisexual fare filling Wednesday and Saturday slots.
Until March 3, when the cinema “along gentrified Southeast Division Street,” according to Willamette Week, locked its doors, shut off its phone—and even closed its rather notorious Twitter account.
The Twitter feed, according to a separate Willamette Week report, was devoted to promoting the extracurricular activities that took place inside the porn palace—which it seems were the real attractions of the establishment.
“Most of the real action there is off-screen,” the paper reported. “The theater is a thriving, self-contained world of sex, a hall of exhibitionists, swingers, gangbangers and gangbangees.”
The paper said that a search of public records showed that the theater’s owner, Gayne Maizels, went into foreclosure on the property on February 13. Three weeks later, Portland’s last porn palace was history.
The closing follows last year’s shutdown of The Paris Theatre, a longtime adult cinema in Portland’s downtown area that once screened Deep Throat for an engagement lasting four years.
Photo by Another Believer / Wikimedia Commons
