Here's an e-mail from a reader here named Lloyd Fein…
Your item about the Jerry Lewis mini cinema chain brought back painful memories. My uncle (with whom I was living at the time) pretty much blew the family fortune investing in one. Back at my other place, I think I still have some of the literature they sent out. As I recall, they promised a lot of guaranteed profit and you didn't have to know anything about running a movie theater because Jerry Lewis was behind the venture and he knew everything and his name was magic. A lot of the magic seemed to be that you and one other person could run your own movie theater all by yourself without unions. My uncle was very anti-union and that was part of the appeal for him. He was fearlessly confident that the projectionist union was going to bankrupt the traditional movie theater and the future of the business would be in little places like the one he opened. He wanted to get in on the ground floor.
The trouble was that he went into a mall in New Jersey that was itself in trouble. The only time it did any business was during the day. It was like a ghost town in the evening and you can't support a movie theater on matinees. Even when there were people at the mall, they didn't go to see movies. They went to the Montgomery Ward store, bought blankets and went home. I also thought the name hurt the business. The Jerry Lewis Theater wasn't showing Jerry Lewis movies but I don't think people realized that.
You're right that it's ridiculous that any theater would run a Jerry Lewis movie and Deep Throat. What's the audience for both those films? And I doubt any Jerry Lewis movie ran Deep Throat but a lot of people don't understand the difference. To them any movie with five seconds of bare tits in it is Deep Throat. So maybe some Jerry Lewis mini cinemas ran some of the popular R-rated movies from then like The Godfather and people got confused or maybe some Jerry Lewis mini cinema converted to X-rated movies and there was a week there when they didn't have Jerry's name off the marquee yet.
Thanks — and that's a good point about people not knowing the difference between adult movies and Adult Movies. At one point in the seventies, CBS acquired a package of Warner Brothers films to air in the late movie slot they had before acquiring Mr. Letterman. Now, as anyone who knows anything about the business is aware, movies are often sold in packages, and the purchaser doesn't always air everything in the package. In this particular package, WB included the TV rights to air the 1969 Luchino Visconti movie, The Damned. This film — a portrait of life in Nazi Germany between World Wars — was about as far from Deep Throat as a movie without Don Knotts in it could be, but in its initial release, it had received an "X" rating for some non-arousing kinkiness. By the time it got tossed into the TV package, it had been re-rated "R" and it probably didn't even deserve that. In any case, the mere fact that it was involved in that transaction prompted a nationwide rumor/alert that CBS was about to start running "X-rated movies" (i.e., stuff like Deep Throat) in that time slot.
This gets back to an item here not long ago about a current "family values group" that is drumming up alarm about porn stars at comic conventions, and how such groups seem to need an outrage against which to crusade. Back in the seventies, similar groups started spreading the alarm that CBS was planning to air porn and that to save mankind, that had to be stopped…and oh, by the way, that will require donations, people. Amazing quantities of cash were given in the cause of stopping CBS's supposed plan, and the network was deluged with form letters protesting their ungodly plot to make Americans watch filth. CBS issued press releases and sent back form letters that said, in pretty simple language, "No one here has ever considered airing X-rated movies," but for years, that did not end the protests. The folks drumming-up the letter-writing campaign kept right on drumming. A friend of mine who worked at CBS at the time told me she was amazed at the outpouring based on a false premise, and said that they debated internally at the network: Did the leaders of this campaign simply not believe the denials? Or had they gone so far out on a limb that they were incapable of admitting they'd been wrong? Or had it simply been so profitable for them, in terms of selling memberships and bringing in donations, that they wanted to run it as long as possible? The third option was the prevailing choice but none of them speak well of the kind of folks who run such campaigns.
CBS did finally run The Damned in its late night slot, by the way. By that time, the protests had died down and the innocuous movie was rendered even more innocuous by editing-for-television. So no one cared. But it's very true that some people who get outraged about things simply don't understand what it is they think is outraging them.
And I also agree that the Jerry Lewis chain was off to a bad start because of the name. If you didn't like Jerry Lewis, having his name and likeness out front was a negative, even if you realized that they weren't running Jerry Lewis movies inside — and some folks probably didn't. If you did like Jerry Lewis, it was like, "Huh? There's no Jerry Lewis movie playing at the Jerry Lewis Theater!" So the potential customers were moviegoers who had no opinion either way on the subject of Jerry Lewis. That's always been a pretty small group.