TLA Entertainment Group

TLA Entertainment Group is a privately held corporation based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1981.

Originally formed to operate a repertory movie theater, the company subsequently moved into catalog and online sales, retail stores, film festivals and film distribution. The catalog began as a pornographic mail order business and grew to include also gay and lesbian non-pornographic films and books and mainstream films.

TLA stands for Theater of the Living Arts. Now a concert venue, it was originally founded as an experimental theater group in the 1960s under the direction of Andre Gregory (of My Dinner with Andre fame). The group included Danny DeVito, Judd Hirsch, Sally Kirkland and Ron Leibman who performed exclusively in the Theater of the Living Arts on South Street in Philadelphia. By the mid- to late-60s, funding for the Theater was running out and the theater was converted to a movie house showing an eclectic mix of classic and foreign films.

In 1981, the founding partners of TLA Entertainment Group met and subsequently ran the theater. For the next six years the TLA was a repertory art movie theater. In addition, for four of those six years, the partners ran a small, first-run art house, the Roxy Screening Room, also located in Center City Philadelphia.

The Theater of the Living Arts is no longer affiliated with TLA Entertainment Group.

In 1985, the first video store was opened next door to Theater of the Living Arts. The stores expanded into a chain, and by 2005 there were four stores in Philadelphia and one in New York. (The NYC store was in a building previously occupied by the 8th St. Playhouse.) Starting in 2007, the stores began closing, with the New York store closing first, followed by the Chestnut Hill and Society Hill locations in 2009, and the Rittenhouse Square location in 2011. The final store, TLA Bryn Mawr remained open until October 2012.

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