Drive-In Theaters

In the past, I’ve written about the importance of attending actual movie theaters instead of just watching at home, the luxurious delight of old fashioned single screen movie theaters, as well as the lovely, grimy humanity of video stores. 

 Today, I’d like to say a few things about another underappreciated movie-going venue: the drive-in. Eighty four years ago this summer, a guy named Richard Hollingshead patented the first drive-in movie theater in Camden, New Jersey. As the story goes, Hollingshead devised the idea because his mother didn’t enjoy movies because she found theater seats uncomfortable but he noticed she was able to rest easy when going for drives in the car. Hollingshead experimented in his own driveway, pinning a sheet to nearby trees and strapping a projector to the hood of his car. He sketched out ideal parking arrangements to maximize the number of cars with an ideal view of a screen. He tried to come up with shelters to protect movie goers from bad weather. Ultimately, in June of 1933, Hollingshead opened Park-In Theaters, Inc. He charged 25 cents per person and 25 cents per car up to one dollar, and his first film was the Adolphe Menjou starrer Wife Beware. Even though he was the one to patent an idea that eventually became a national phenomenon, he didn’t have great success with it. His Camden drive-in failed to make a profit after three years and so he sold it to another theater owner. In 1949, Hollingshead’s patent was overturned and by the late 1950s, there were over four thousand drive-ins across the country. All the post-war couples who now had kids and a family car could pay a few bucks and spend a warm summer night out among friends but still comfortably seated in their own vehicle. What could be more American than getting together with people from your community but never having to get out of your own car? Parents liked drive-ins for the easy, relatively cheap family entertainment, kids liked them because it meant they got to stay up extra late and enjoy the playground usually located right below the glowing, multi-story screen, and teenagers – well, they had their own reasons for liking the drive-in.

At the height of drive-in popularity, there was one, The Johnny All-Weather Drive-In in on Long Island, that was 29 acres with parking for 2500 cars, a full service restaurant with screen-viewing seating on the roof, and a trolley to transport people around the lot.

Nothing gold can stay, of course. The advent of affordable color television and the eventual development of the VCR took a toll on all movie-going attendance, and the oil shortage crisis of the 1970s hit drive-ins especially hard. Many of them closed or became swap meets by day and theaters by night. At their zenith, drive ins accounted for a quarter of all movie screens in the country, but now they represent less than two percent.

 However, not only are there still ten operating drive-ins here in Michigan, including one just down the road in Flint, but I found in my research that with the advent of portable digital technology, the outdoor theater is making a bit of a come back. Beginning in the early 2000s, groups armed with portable LCD projectors and micro-radio transmitters have taken over parking lots, warehouses, and bridge pillars for guerilla drive-in movie screenings. Happening primarily on the west coast, these pop-up theaters mostly show cult, art house, and experimental films. While that kind of film is a far cry from what somebody may have seen at a drive-in in 1959, I have a sense that the impulse is the same. Whether you’re a family with six kids watching the latest Disney offering or a bearded hipster watching a Jodorowsky retrospective, sitting out under the stars in your car on a warm summer night with a movie screen glowing in the darkness is a universal pleasure, one that everyone should try to enjoy at least once while the weather’s warm.