The Enduring Appeal of the American Drive-In

[Allan Young]

All permanent drive-ins around here died a long long time ago.

I'm surprised there were ever any in the first place! Isn't the weather in your neck of the woods equally as shitty as the UK?

[Leo Enticknap]

Agreed. When I lived in the UK I heard of the occasional open-air, popup cinema (there was even one company that made inflatable screens for them, at the bottom of which was a tank containing enough water to float the Titanic, to prevent them from blowing away), but I never encountered any drive-ins before emigrating, or in any other country besides the US. I've always believed them to be an almost, if not completely, exclusively American institution. As you point out, the weather is a major part of the reason why they work well in Southern California: it probably only rains on 5-10 evenings a year, and even in the middle of the summer, it's dark enough to start a show by around 8.30. During a typical June in Northern Europe, it could easily be raining on half the evenings, and wouldn't be dark enough for shows to start until around 9.15 to 9.30.

[Ryan Gallagher]

Given reason to browse photos of drive ins, I’m also struck by the fact that they were way ahead of a screen market curve that cites “zero edge” (no masking or bezel), that is somewhat popular now in corporate settings, and also mimicked by direct view screens. Did they even file aperture plates, or just blast the rest of the frame into the sky?

I also wonder if any attempted some kind of ratio adjustable screen, part of the drive in “look” is to have the film framed by dusk night sky (or stars if you are lucky enough the be in dark sky country). Too cost prohibitive now, but might have been cool in the climax era to build a scope screen that could “roll” behind itself mechanically for 1.33 and 1.85.

Having said that, I wonder if we are not considering another factor that led to drive-in audience dwindling... the actual phenomenon of light pollution. A dimly lit sky due to a nearby metropolis with very few stars visible just doesn't have the same magic and charm that it would have before that problem got out of control.

Drive-Ins enjoyers, amateur astronomers, observatories, and folks who like camping should all be in the same anti-light pollution lobby. There are probably only a few drive-in locations left that could reasonably double bill (with expectation to have good viewing) a movie and a meteor shower!

[Ryan Gallagher]

Other tech advances beyond LED that would have served drive-ins well, ALR (ambient light rejection) screens or coatings.

[Mike Blakesley]

My first projection experience was at our now-defunct local drive-in. My best friend was the main projectionist -- his parents owned it. I never really worked there, I just hung out and eventually started helping my friend in the booth. They had the worst equipment imaginable but a lot of indelible memories were made at that place. I learned a lot of bad habits that I had to un-learn once I actually got into the business with the Roxy.

One thing I remember about the drive-in booth was, the projectors were tilted back at such an angle that the carbon drippings would fall onto the bottom edge of the reflectors. Every spring they would get new reflectors which were always cracked after the first weekend. I always wondered if there was an alternative non-glass reflector available, or some other way of avoiding that problem, but never did find out. I think they were Motiograph machines.

[Marcel Birgelen]

One solutions may be, to not tilt the projectors back and to use mirrors to angle and aim the beam onto the screen. It's not completely uncommon to use mirrors in complicated booth setups. Those mirrors will loose you quite some light though, which might have been even more of a challenge with carbon lamps.

I'm surprised there were ever any in the first place! Isn't the weather in your neck of the woods equally as shitty as the UK?

Yeah, the weather around here can be pretty... British, that obviously limits the appeal for permanent open-air installations a bit.

There were just a handful around here in the past, I'm not aware of any permanent drive-ins in the Netherlands still operating. The closest one was this one. It operated until 2003, the buildings and screen were just recently removed. The place has ever since been part of a large festival area, it hosts the pretty popular and long-running annual Pinkpop pop and rock festival among others. The screen actually was revived as "screen" during a few of those festivals.

Germany, which admittedly has more of a car culture than the Netherlands, has still quite a few operational drive-ins, they're called "Auto Kino" and they seem to be pretty popular and many of them operate in equally bad weather. Although, those located more to the south-East benefit from an earlier sunset.

Yet, still, there seems to be an appeal to "open air" activities. This "Open Air Film Festival" did sell out on almost every evening over the last years, for example. Utrecht even has a permanent rooftop cinema installation in one of their multiplexes, which seems to be pretty popular too.

[Terry Monohan]

The SFBay Area had many outdoor theatres at one time but now we only have two left. Many were on on Hwy 101 on the SF Pennisula. One in Concord CA and the other in the San Jose area still are showing movies. Both run by the Syufy family under 'West Wind '. Ray Syufy in the 1950's owned many in the area and then the land got way to expensive so the Syufy family took down all the drive in screens and built big malls in the late 1960's and 70's on the property with some containing a indoor multiplex cinema under the Century Theatres name.

In Santa Cruz CA we have the former Encina and re named the StarView DI. The large lot was bought by a local hospital many years ago for parking. They tore down the screen fast before the locals complained and the nice neon marquee was also taken out but the projection building , snack bar, restrooms and boxoffice remain.
,
The Syufy West Wind family needs to purchase the former drive in and let the hospital park during the day run a flea market on the weekends and put back the huge CinemaScope screen for future generations to enjoy in this CA beach city.

Boulder Creek & Watsonville CA nearby also had drive In 's but they were taken down in the early1950's ,never got a CinemaScope screen put in.

[Barry Floyd]

The drive-in that I service had the claim to fame as being the one and only movie theater in LA County that was allowed to continue operating during the worst of the covid lockdowns (spring to fall 2020).

Same here. Back in 2020 while all of the local indoor theatres in the Nashville area were closed, we were allowed to remain open. The concept of "social distancing" is kinda built into our standard business model. We did get shut down for the month of April due to us being deemed a "non-essential business" by the governor. Once we reopened on May 1st, we practically sold out every single weekend from May 1st till the 2nd week of January. Since the major studios weren't releasing new movies, we played a whole summer of retros, independent films, Netfilx and Hulu premieres (licensed through the studios on DCP), and people still came out. Not only were the indoor theatres closed, but the concert venues were also closed. I got contacted by tour management from Live Nation who wanted to use our drive-in to see if "Drive-In Concerts" were a financially viable option. We worked a deal with them, and our first LIVE concert was Keith Urban in mid-May. Not a recorded thing on the screen, I'm talking full stage, lighting, speakers, the works. It was a huge success... at least for us. (I got to meet Nicole Kidman that night too.) That one concert led to a whole summer of live concerts. We worked with a local Christian concert promoter and ended up with one or two big concerts each month. We had Toby Mac, Michael W. Smith, Steven Curtis Chapman, Mac Powell, Casting Crowns, Big Daddy Weave, Zach Williams and some Americana Folk singer named Margo Price. We did a live televised album release party for Kip Moore and some other guy I don't remember. Those concerts at the drive-in opened doors for my oldest son who now works full-time in the concert industry. He and his crew are in Los Angeles tonight at the Kia Forum on tour and he'll be back in Nashville in September.

By mid-summer of 2020 this place was literally printing money. By the time we finished our run of Wonder Woman 1984 in mid-January we had grossed almost $1M in combined tickets and concessions.
The concerts are gone now, but the new faces they brought out that didn't even know we existed before still come.

I started lurking here on Film-Tech back in the late 1990's scrounging for all the information I could about projection at drive-ins. After 22 years in this business, we figured we've got about 5 years left before we're ready to sell it and go camping and play with grand babies. I bought the property the drive-in sits on in 2003 for $8K an acre. The two empty lots next to us just sold in February of this year for $175K per acre. The drive-in land was a good investment.

[Ryan Gallagher]

Speaking of Drive-In nostalgia.... we just showed Pee Wee's Big Adventure for it's 40th to a crowd of 800. I had forgotten about the Drive-in being a plot point and the final setting of the film.

What other films featured drive-ins within the storyline? I can picture a couple but the names are escaping me. Here is what ChatGPT hive-mind could rattle off:

I was probably thinking of "Explorers", "Grease", and "The Outsiders" myself. I'm sure drive-in operators have a more complete list in their rotation.

Here’s a list of notable films that feature drive-in theaters as a key scene or plot point:

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? Films with Memorable Drive-In Moments

? Classic Americana / Coming-of-Age

• Grease (1978)
  Danny and Sandy have an emotional falling-out during a date at the drive-in — it’s a turning point for their relationship.
• The Outsiders (1983)
  The drive-in is where Ponyboy, Johnny, and Dally meet Cherry and Marcia — sparking the social tensions that fuel the story.
• American Graffiti (1973)
  Though more focused on cruising, the film captures the feel of small-town teenage life, and drive-ins are a backdrop of that culture.
• Dazed and Confused (1993)
  While the drive-in isn’t the focal point, the film is soaked in 70s nostalgia, and it uses those kinds of spaces as cultural landmarks.

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? Horror, Sci-Fi & Camp

• Twister (1996)
  A drive-in is torn apart by a tornado in a visually iconic sequence — while The Shining plays on screen.
• Targets (1968)
  A chilling climax takes place at a drive-in where a sniper attacks the audience — blurring real horror with on-screen fiction.
• The Blob (1988 remake)
  The monster attacks a drive-in movie theater, creating mayhem mid-screening — a delicious B-movie moment.
• Matinee (1993)
  A love letter to 1960s B-movies, it centers around a theatrical gimmick-filled screening at a drive-in during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
• Dead End Drive-In (1986)
  An Aussie dystopian film where teens are trapped in a drive-in turned prison. Pure grindhouse chaos.

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? Drive-In As Metafiction / Media Commentary

• Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)
  Features Sharon Tate watching her own film at a theater, and while not a drive-in, it captures the same nostalgic cinephile spirit.
• Joe Dirt (2001)
  Includes a drive-in as part of its Southern-fried road trip and homage to Americana.
• Cry-Baby (1990)
  John Waters’ stylized rockabilly musical includes drive-in culture as a key backdrop for its teen rebellion vibe.
• Explorers (1985)
  A dream sequence takes place inside a drive-in where the screen characters seem sentient — a surreal nod to the magic of movies.

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? Other Unique Mentions

• Cinema Paradiso (1988)
  Though not a drive-in, it contains some of the most poignant tributes to outdoor movie screenings.
• Cars (2006)
  The Radiator Springs gang watches a movie at a drive-in built for autos — Pixar’s loving twist on the tradition.

[Mark Ogden]

Riddled with errors, as is most AI. Both Matinee and The Blob take place in indoor theaters. In the case of The Blob remake, it's an homage to the original film, where the projectionist gets swallowed by the blob just as a reel ends. The theatre where the original was shot at, the Colonial in Phoenixville, PA, has an annual festival where they restage the scene. It looks like a lot of fun. (https://thecolonialtheatre.com/blobfest/)

Targets, on the other hand, was shot at an actual drive-in, the Reseda DI in Reseda CA, where the real projectionist was game enough to play himself even though he winds up getting his brains launched by the shooter in the screen tower. It's a grotesque scene, but up to that point there is a kind of old time drive-in romance to it; how cool it would have been to be a drive-in projectionist on a summer night in southern California, back in the late sixties.

bb2.jpg

[Ryan Gallagher]

Riddled with errors, as is most AI.

For sure, as with most AI queries, if you are an actual subject matter expert you will quickly spot the hallucinations stated as authoritative facts.

About the only thing I actually use AI chatbots for is to bounce ideas off of when crafting a walkin mustic playlists. It's handy for identifying things outside my music wheelhouse that are appropriate, but I do pay enough attention to music to spot song name hallucinations of artists I am familiar with. And picking some music is about as harmless a task you could possibly ask an AI to perform. At least in this task it is surprisingly helpful at times, if you use it as a springboard for doing your own work, and not just using it's statements as the final solution. Sometimes if a film suits my musical tastes I'll create my own first and then ask an AI what it would include, often we are of the same "mind" on many artists or tracks. But I would not trust one to help me program critical infrastructure, craft someone's legal defense, or do really anything without baked in biases from the training dataset! lol

[Ryan Gallagher]

Considering the algorithm recently served me this 2017 feature length doc on the Mahoning Drive-In, and quite enjoyed it, any projectionist would. Sure most have seen it, but worth re-sharing in this thread. Apologies if this feature is not available or shows ads to non premium YT accounts, it appears to have become available on YT Movies recently.

They appear to still be going strong based on their website despite their original 35mm projectionist Jeff Mattox featured so heavily in the doc passing on, but now screen a combination of 35mm and alternative non-DCI formats.

Though I do hope they have improved their non-DCI digital options since the cheap triple stack depicted in the doc. I've seen 40K 4K Laser event projectors new in box go at auction for less than $3000!!

It wasn't too long ago folks trying to help them out have been in the threads asking about sound their 35mm sound processing setup, which is apparently a combination of DTS X10P and Starscope.

[Jim Cassedy]

how cool it would have been to be a drive-in projectionist on a summer night
in southern California, back in the late sixties.

In the mid/late 1970's, before I was assigned my own 'permanent' hard-top venue, The Union
sent me to work some summer shifts at several drive-ins on Long Island, NY. While I do look
back very fondly on those days, there are a couple of realities I remember about the drive-in
booths I worked at:

HEAT: Summer can be hot & humid on Long Island. Air conditioning wasn't always the best,
and was often just a single duct run from the concession building which was on the other side
of the booth wall. To light those big screens, most drive-ins were running huge Ashcraft Super
CInex or National VentArc carbon arcs lamp-houses running at 120-150amps, and even though
they had their own exhaust ducts, they still radiated a lot of heat into the booth. Also, back then,
all the drive-ins I worked at still had banks of vacuum tube amplifiers, each of which was also
pumping a plethora of BTU's into the booth.

BUGS! Since the air conditioning efficiency left something to be desired, its common practice
keep the booth door slightly ajar, or crack open a window if there was one. . this meant that
there was often a fair amount of flys, gnats, and sometimes mosquitos flying around the booth
all night. And, of course, occasionally you'd get an occasional big-friggin' moth that would land
right on one of the projection ports, which would create a big out-of-focus dark blob on screen.
Some drive-ins had a blower device which kept bugs from landing on the port glass, but some
did not.

THE WEATHER: Sometimes there were rain delays, or extreme weather that would shut down
a show or cause one to be cancelled if there were big thunderstorms heading our way. This
was more of an inconvenience to customers than to me, since, thanks to The Union, I'd usually
get paid even if the show got cancelled.

Also, the booths at two of the drive-ins I worked at were slightly below ground level. Once I
showed up for work after there had been a huge downpour that had lasted most of the day
but cleared up by nightfall. But when I arrived at the booth, there was about an inch or more
of water on the floor. I guess this was an occasional problem, since all the motor-generators,
projector pedestals and amp racks were about 4-6in above floor level either by concrete
platforms or cinder-blocks. There was a sump, and sump-pump, but I could tell it was going
to take a while to get all that water out. I called the union, and expressed my uneasiness about
running 150amp arc lamps and other equipment while standing in a pool of water. The Union
supported my assessment of the situation and convinced the drive-in management to cancel
their show that evening. (and a good deal of their field was a muddy mess that night anyway)

But, even with all these inconveniences, I'm glad I had the opportunity and fond memories
to be part of the tail-end of the "golden age of the Drive-In' and If I had the chance to do it
all over again, I certainly would do so.