Sensation Cinema

“Obscenity? They haven’t put clothes on the statues in art museums, have they?” - Louis Sher In 1954,

Louis Sher took over a modest neighborhood movie theater in Ohio. Within a decade, he was running the largest independent cinema chain in America—and fighting some of the most consequential battles over what Americans were allowed to see on a screen. Police raided his theaters, seized his prints, arrested his managers, and dragged him into court. Sher fought back, taking one censorship battle all the way to the Supreme Court and helping produce Justice Potter Stewart’s immortal definition of obscenity: “I know it when I see it.” But that was only the beginning. Sher’s Art Theatre Guild brought foreign films, underground cinema, gay and lesbian films, avant-garde transmissions, and other cinematic provocations to audiences across the country, helping transform the American moviegoing landscape.

Sensation Cinema is the rollicking, astonishing story of the man behind it all: a soft-spoken World War II veteran and unlikely cultural outlaw who distributed Andy Warhol, helped invent the midnight movie, gave early support to filmmakers including Shirley Clarke, D.A. Pennebaker and John Waters, built an empire of dozens of art houses—and then plunged headlong into sexploitation, 3-D movies, and some of the wildest corners of American independent cinema. Sher’s theaters became film schools for future filmmakers and critics, while his refusal to surrender to the censors helped enlarge the boundaries of what could be shown in America. Extensively researched and packed with extraordinary stories and images, Mike Plante’s Sensation Cinema restores Louis Sher to his rightful place in film history: as one of the great forgotten showmen, risk-takers, and freedom fighters of the American screen.

Mike Plante has made films, worked at movie theaters, run projectors and programmed film festivals since 1993. From 1998 to 2002, he wrote and published the film zine Cinemad, which continues today as a website and podcast. His short film The Polaroid Job (2018) was acquired by The New York Times Op-Docs series. His feature-length essay film And With Him Came the West premiered at MoMA Doc Fortnight in 2019. From 2001 to 2025, he worked at the Sundance Film Festival where he was Senior Programmer for Short Films. Today he books movies for The Beverly Theater in Las Vegas.