What was the Cinema Portofino?
For twenty-five years Main Street had two art houses facing each other. The bigger one was the Kiva. The smaller one, on the north side at 7242 E. Main, was the Cinema Portofino, about 100 seats of rocking-chair loges billed as the “World’s Most Intimate Theatre.”
Its building had a history before the movies. A mid-1960s photograph shows the theater inside a long portal-fronted, tile-roofed block, under a hanging sign reading IN THE PATIO. That fits the Village Patio, which the Scottsdale Historical Society calls the town’s first shopping center, opened on the north side of Main in 1947 with three stores.
Louis Leithold opened a coffee house there in September 1958 and turned it into the cinema, which opened on October 21, 1960 with Peter Sellers. In 1963 he sold it, along with the Kiva’s lease, to Louis K. Sher’s Art Theatre Guild. The Portofino followed the chain’s path from foreign films to sex comedies to X-rated features, and closed in September 1985.
The art house and the Woman’s Club
The Leithold years. The coffee house came first, in September 1958, and ran two years. The opening bill in October 1960 was the British comedy Man in a Cocked Hat with a short, Glass. A 1961 ad paired A Cold Wind in August with The Savage Eye, which is serious art-house programming for a farm town turned resort town of ten thousand people. The ads gave the old-style address “46 D East Main,” phone WHitehall 6-0111.
Sher. Louis K. Sher ran the Art Theatre Guild, a national chain of art houses that had taken obscenity cases to court, and he “retired” to Scottsdale in 1962, by Phoenix New Times’s account. He bought the Portofino’s lease the next year. In November 1963 Jayne Mansfield’s Promises! Promises! took $3,480 in its first week, when No Exit had taken $498 and A Taste of Honey $304. Scottsdale noticed. In January 1964 the Scottsdale Junior Woman’s Club asked for the posters to come down, and Sher switched to text-only advertising.
The end. By 1976 the “Portofino Theatre at 7242 E. Main St.” was advertising Behind the Green Door. It closed in September 1985. The Kiva across the street kept going until the early 1990s.
See it now
The block is part of the Main Street arts district now, mostly galleries. Stand outside the Rusty Spur at 7245 and the Portofino’s address is directly across the street. The Kiva’s surviving front is a few doors west on the Rusty Spur’s side.
The sources, and the gaps
Cinema Treasures carries the opening ad (October 1960), the 1961 “rocking chair loges” ad, the 1963 sale, the Mansfield grosses, the Woman’s Club episode, the 1976 ad with the 7242 address, and the mid-1960s “In the Patio” photograph. Phoenix New Times (Dewey Webb, November 7, 1990) profiles Sher and confirms the 100 seats and the closing. The Scottsdale Historical Society’s key-events timeline is the source for the Village Patio.
What’s unsettled:
- Leithold. The coffee-house and lease details come from one well-informed Cinema Treasures commenter. Whether he is Louis Leithold the calculus author, who taught at Phoenix College from 1955 and dealt in movie posters, is unconfirmed.
- The Village Patio. The tie rests on the “In the Patio” sign and the Historical Society’s “north side of Main.” We haven’t found the Village Patio’s builder, its three stores, or when the shops gave way to the coffee house.
- The building after 1985, and what occupies 7242 today. The county assessor’s parcel records would answer both.
Where exactly. The Kiva and the Portofino are often described as facing each other. They were on opposite sides of Main and a few doors apart; the building directly opposite 7242 is the Rusty Spur.
Why it matters
A hundred seats isn’t much, but the Portofino says something about 1960s Scottsdale. A town that sold itself on cowboys also supported two art houses on its main street, run by the head of a national chain who had moved there. And the argument over what belonged on that street started almost at once, with the Junior Woman’s Club and the posters.