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The movie exhibition business has always been extremely volatile. The public's taste in movies and the product available were fated to be always in flux, and theatres that weren't at the top of the food chain had to constantly struggle to eke out a living in this fiercely competitive arena where a "sure thing" was as rare as Haley's comet. It was a tough way to make a living, and the world of movie exhibition was full of desperate people. This was true for arthouse, grindhouse and even first-run. Since the glory days of movie-going in the '40s when everybody went to the flicks and every neighbourhood had a theatre, it's been one crisis after another, and this has forced many a theatre on hard times. This is the story of how some of those troubled theatres ended their lives.

The big Hollywood studios started having problems back in the early '50s when competition from TV was keeping people on their sofas. Conversely, arthouses and drive-ins, which can be considered rural grindhouses, flourished. Only here could deeply repressed American audiences see nudity and sex, or at least allusions to such, as theatres carved out a niche rebelling against the Production Code, in active enforcement since 1934. These were in fact the only two growth segments of the movie business during that decade and constituted what could be termed speciality cinema.

A film like Bergman's Summer with Monika, with its glimpses of nudity, packed them in on both circuits through the '50s where it screened in radically different versions. Grindhouse mogul Kroger Babb flogged a dubbed, condensed and re-scored version through the drive-ins of the Midwest, while Cy Harvey's Janus Films, located in Cambridge, Mass., distributed a full-length subtitled version to the arthouses, often located in the university districts of big cities. Here in tasteful low-key settings, patrons were served espresso and small cakes while debating the relative merits of the European masters like Fellini, Truffaut, Antonioni and Godard. In the meantime, high ticket prices kept "the man in the street" out in the street.

The crisis caught up with arthouse cinema by the end of the decade, and bookers could no longer afford to be so stuffy and elitist. In 1959, for example, bookers on the grindhouse circuit expressed moral qualms about screening Russ Meyer's pioneering "nudie-cutie" The Immoral Mr. Teas, so instead he opened it at second-run arthouses that were looking for product, and it took off from there and became a huge hit.

In the mid-'60s Hollywood began to defy the Production Code and explore the kind of provocative subject matter that had long been the province of foreign films — or to make those foreign films themselves. Having financed Antonioni's Blow Up in 1966, MGM refused to cut out controversial scenes and still managed to release it without a Code certificate. Hollywood was by various means beginning to co-opt arthouse cinema, and by 1967 producers were ignoring the Code and films were getting more risqué. Arthouse, as a distinct form of exhibition, was coming to an end. No longer would viewers have to suffer through bleak fare like Bergman's The Silence to get a whiff of sex. In the early '70s many a failing arthouse began to book porn, bringing a snicker to the lips of those who had always seen a dubious double message in the phrase "art cinema." Gindhouse — porn being a form of it — had moved in to possess the corpse of arthouse, the final and most ironic disfigurement of its precious memory.

To illustrate the transitory nature of the movie theatre business in an immediate and personal manner that eschews dry theory, I have chosen to (1) sketch out a brief overview of the dynamics at play in that key moment when pornography reshaped speciality exhibition, and (2) profile a select handful of urban theatres in a no-holds-barred fashion, theatres at the end of their lives after they had passed through innumerable booking policy changes, from arthouse, foreign-language or commercial second-run to grindhouse and then finally to "adult theatres" or "porno grinders" — an ignominious fate, as we shall see. It was, to borrow a phrase from Celine, a journey to the end of the night.

Nothing could be more mysterious or forbidding to the uninitiated than an old movie palace laid waste by years or even decades of neglect at the hands of absentee landlords and mercenary owners determined to suck every last dime out of a joint and then torch it for the insurance money. And once a theatre slipped into the twilight of exhibiting XXX hardcore porn, it rarely slipped out again. In most cases nothing was ever upgraded, and even the most basic repairs were a rarity. Broken chairs were left where they collapsed, burned-out light bulbs were never replaced, and even the life-blood of the enterprise, the movie projectors, turned into rat's nests of filth, while up in the restrooms a witches' brew of slime bubbled away in plugged-up toilets. This attitude of radical laissez faire imbued these environments with a certain frozen-in-time ambiance as the architectural remnants of Depression-era grandeur slowly sank into appalling decay and unimaginable things took place in the darkness.

This aura of lurking malice informs depictions of such theatres in mainstream movies like Midnight Cowboy, Taxi Driver and Hardcore. To respectable citizens, inner-city porn theatres (and grindhouses that originally served the same social function) were dens of menace, criminality and unspeakable perversion. They might more easily be persuaded to gate-crash a leper colony than push through the battered doors and clanking turnstiles of these establishments and shuffle into the pitch-black darkness where faceless urban misfits sought sexual solace in theory as well as practice.

In Midnight Cowboy, where a 24-hour grindhouse doubles for the genuine XXX article that wouldn't appear for another year or two, protagonist Joe Buck gets a blow job from a queer kid in black-frame glasses while an outer space horror movie plays. To average folks, it was an apt metaphor: these theatres represented alien territory, another world. Joe later beats the kid bloody in the toilet and takes his money in a scene that is one of the most wrenching in '60s cinema. He is shocked by what he has done. Here in this creepy movie theatre he has turned into another kind of person.

In these films the atmosphere of the porn theatre is conveyed by a focus on the flickering beam of light from the projector and the small scattered audiences staring straight ahead in almost petrified silence. Almost imperceptibly someone slides into the next seat . . . It was an atmosphere and a ritual charged with all the fear and excitement of meeting (or just wordlessly encountering) a stranger in the big city. On evidence of viewing environment alone (since we rarely get to see the actual films, or if so just in the briefest glimpses), the porn theatre was depicted as a cultish forbidden urban experience.

In the 1968 underground film The Meatrack, sometimes referred to as "the poor man's Midnight Cowboy," the main character flees from the mean streets of San Francisco's Tenderloin to the sanctuary of a porn theatre. He finds no safe refuge there, however. As if caught in the clutches of a surrealist nightmare he is groped and savaged by five pairs of disembodied arms before bolting out onto the fire escape. Even this comparatively more knowing take on the porn theatre experience couldn't resist a clichéd and over-dramatic interpretation. It seemed to be everybody's favourite nightmare.