Original Poster for Rialto Theater’s Showing of Deep Throat, 1973 (available from CinemaMasterpieces.com for the cool price of $1,195.00)

On January 18, 1973, officers with the morals division of the Minneapolis Police Department entered the Rialto Theater on Lake Street and confiscated a copy of a sixty-one-minute film called Deep Throat. They delivered the film to Hennepin County Municipal Court, where Judge Eugene Farrell had arranged for a private viewing. After watching the movie, Farrell declared that Deep Throat was hard-core pornography. He ordered the police to retain possession of the film in case prosecutors decided to file criminal obscenity charges against the owners and operators of the Rialto. But if Farrell—or anyone else for that matter—thought that a judicial finding would stop the Rialto from showing Deep Throat, he soon learned otherwise. Two days after the police seized the film from the Rialto, the theater was back in business with another print. Police confiscated that one, too. The next day the Rialto opened with yet another print. That one, too, was confiscated. When the Rialto opened the following evening with a fourth copy of the film, the police gave up. They figured that the print was in such poor condition that it would probably fall apart in a matter of days, anyhow. [Rialto owner and local pornography king] Ferris Alexander had made his point: he wasn’t going to surrender without a fight.

—From Twin Cities Picture Show, by Yours Truly

(The legal fight later moved to St. Paul when Alexander began showing Deep Throat at the Capitol Theater on Payne Avenue.)