Indy's last porn house owner can't capitalize on retro-raunch

Valentine's Day is a sad reminder for a lot of people but especially for Charles R. Chulchian.

It was on Valentine's Day, 1992 that Chulchian was forced by the city of Indianapolis to shut down his business. He ran porno movies at the Rivoli Theater on East 10th Street. He had rock concerts there, too, occasionally, but his chief revenue source was dirty movies. He'd screened them since 1975, since the advent of the genre's so-called "golden age," when the films began to have actual story lines and their stars, like Linda Lovelace and John C. Holmes, came close to being mainstream celebrities.

At first Chulchian showed gay porn 24 hours a day but later switched to man/woman and cut back his hours to just 15 hours a day during the week (18 on weekends). Customers paid $10 and could stay as long as they wanted. Chulchian manned the projection booth. It was not a bad living — Chulchian had a wife and three young children, and on top of that he could afford a Jaguar sedan, one with 12 cylinders. "And I paid my taxes, and everyone was happy," he said the other day in his kitchen, still wounded nearly a quarter century after the shut-down.

Chulchian lives in a big, old, partially dilapidated frame house on East 10th Street that's painted a bold blue and would surely be drafty were its windows not covered with sheets of thick, basically transparent plastic. He keeps the thermostat at 80 so that his dozen-some cats stay warm and so that he can get by without a shirt.

Chulchian is 82, has male-pattern baldness and bushy silver sideburns to below his ears, lambchops they were called in the '70s. He has on his wall a framed black-and-white photograph of Marilyn Monroe tangled up in bed sheets

"People say she's sexy, but what I find appealing is her femininity," Chulchian said. "There's a difference." The cats look well cared for and have names. Frisbee and Sneakers are two. He's married to his third wife (she was the secretary to one of the many lawyers Chulchian hired over the years), but most nights she stays in her own house in Franklin. He has four grown children from two previous marriages. They live in Las Vegas and Sacramento. Two of them visit him about once a year.

Chulchian may have paid his taxes, but everyone was not happy with his films. The Rivoli is, after all, directly across the street from an Brookside Elementary School. Some neighbors picketed.

"I and other community leaders would be in front of the marquee saying: 'No porn,'" said Tim Harmon, who was in the awkward position of renting a storefront in the Rivoli from Chulchian; Harmon operated a restaurant there called the Forest Flower Coffee House, which did not have a liquor license, but did have good, clean entertainment - frequently a dwarf named Terry wearing a blue velvet tuxedo, playing keyboards and singing John Denver songs for tips. "We'd give away coffee and donuts to people who'd protest with us," Harmon said.

More importantly, an anti-smut spirit was growing in the halls of power. It was led by conservatives like the Rev. Greg Dixon, a fiery Baptist who headed the local Moral Majority branch and worried about moral corruption; and embraced by a Republican city government whose mayor, William Hudnut, had been a Presbyterian minister. It was fueled further by a consortium of extremist liberals led by nationally known feminist Andrea Dworkin. (Dworkin, who died in 2005, once said: "Romantic love, in pornography as in life, is the mythic celebration of female negation. For the woman, love is always self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of identity, will, and bodily integrity, in order to fulfill and redeem the masculinity of her lover.")

Charles Chulchian was doomed.

So were the other X-rated theater operators and most of the adult bookstores and massage parlors. By the time Chulchian went out of business, the Indiana Indecent Nuisance Act of 1983 had been used to shutter about 50 such businesses in Marion County.

Chulchian was the last theater operator standing. He agreed on Dec. 27, 1991, to throw in the towel, and prosecutors allowed him to stay open through Feb. 14, 1992, Valentine's Day.

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"The city hated my guts," he said. "They told me, 'Midnight. Valentine's Day. You're through. Close down or you go to jail!' This is a miserable city government with its cruel, restrictive ideas about controlling peoples' lives."

"I like Charlie," said John Loflin, but his films "made everyone feel weird and self-conscious, And Charlie never associated with other people in the neighborhood. He kept to himself. I don't think anybody has ever figured out Charlie Chulchian."

Chulchian grew up in New York City, in the Bronx, the son of a film projectionist who worked throughout Manhattan in mainstream theaters. When the elder Chulchian started in the business the movies were talkies, the projectors hand-cranked. His son, after a three-year stint in the air force and one unsuccessful year of college, followed him into the profession in 1956. He showed first-run movies in New York, including, in 1964, the Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night." He never saw such enthusiasm for a movie. "The people went crazy for that one," he said. "Night after night the place was packed."

He did not set out to be a pornographer and in fact is somewhat ashamed of the way things turned out. He graduated from the legendary DeWitt Clinton High School and the other day produced a list of the school's alumni. It was an impressive list: James Baldwin, Robert Altman, William Kuntsler, Lionel Trilling. "And me," Chulchian said, "what did I do? I showed screw films."

In the early 1970s, shortly after moving to Indianapolis, with his second wife, Delores, and two young children, Chulchian took projectionist jobs at several of the city's theaters, including some of the X-rated ones. There were some half dozen that specialized in adult films. Chulchian, who was in his early 40s, for two decades had been an itinerant projectionist, hauling his family from city to city — New York, Toronto, St. Louis, Muncie. In Indianapolis, he said, he saw opportunity. "These places were packed," he said.

Cinema was in transition. Suburban multi-plexes had begun springing up and with their ample parking and numerous screens they made urban, single-screen theaters less attractive to the typical movie-goer. In the scramble for survival, operators of several old theaters turned to porn, including the Irvington, the Hamilton, the Vogue and, with Chulchian's purchase in 1975, the grand, 1,500-seat Rivoli. "But don't say 'porn,' say 'skin flicks,'" Chulchian said. "'Porn sounds kind of dirty."

But there was a time it didn't. In the mid-1970s adult films were emerging from the shadows. Feature-length films like "Deep Throat" had story lines and soundtracks and higher production value than their predecessors, which tended to be straight-to-the-point shorts. The term "porn chic" was coined. Among those who went to see "Deep Throat" without bothering to conceal her identity, according to The New York Times, was the former First Lady Jacqueline Onassis.

In 1976 the porn star Andrea True recorded a song, "More, More, More" that reached No. 4 on the Billboard chart.

Chulchian rode the wave 16 years, but his enterprise probably was finished even had there been no moral outrage. "The new technology would have put him out of business if the prosecutor didn't," said Rick Kammen, an attorney who once represented Chulchian. Kammen refers to home video, which allowed people to watch in privacy and is widely considered the grind house's executioner. In 2010 the Baltimore City Paper counted just 31 porno theaters in the entire U.S.

Pendulums swing, however, and lately there has been a surge of interest in "Golden Age" porn, which is Chulchian Age porn. Last winter a new biopic called "Lovelace," about the porn star, was a hit at the Sundance Film Festival. Linda Lovelace is the focus of an exhibit at the Museum of Sex in Manhattan. And just last month in Brooklyn, you could walk into the Nitehawk Cinema and see "The Opening of Misty Beethoven" (1976).

A Bridgeport, Conn. firm called Vinegar Syndrome since 2012 has been restoring many of the old titles for release into the home video market and also to theaters. Old posters promoting such fare are fetching hundreds of dollars.

Chulchian could make some money if he'd saved his memorabilia. He did not. "I took it all to the dump," he said. "Why? I don't know. I had a tough day that day. I made a mistake. I make a lot of mistakes."

Chulchian still lives within sight of the historic Rivoli (built 1927), which on his watch fell into extreme disrepair. Through the efforts of a nonprofit group that has sparred repeatedly with Chulchian for control of the building, the Rivoli last year got a new roof and a chance at a future.

Chulchian still has his Jaguar, which is silver and has a vanity license plate that says: Shaguar.

Contact Star reporter Will Higgins at 444-6043. Follow him on Twitter @WillRHiggins.