Waye Braver

Drive-in theaters were like the very first home theaters…in a way.  Drive-in theaters were closer to being a home theater than a traditional type of movie theater because you were able to watch from the comfort of something that belonged to you. Instead of watching from the comfort of your living room, you were able to watch from the comfort of the seat of your car.  In those days some cars were so big that it was kind of like sitting on a sofa in a living room that you could take for a drive.  The drive-in theater was a wonderful experience.  It’s hard to believe that they are, for the most part, gone.

When I was young it seemed like drive-in theaters were everywhere and they were unmistakable when you saw one.  When you drove by one there was little doubt that you were looking at the back of a drive-in screen.  I remember being very young and driving past drive-in theaters while riding with my parents.  I remember thinking how cool it would be to watch a movie at one.  These days I think young children would start to cry if they saw the hulking silhouette of a drive-in screen, looming on the horizon.  My parents weren’t the type who would go to the movies and therefore I never had a chance to go to the drive-in as a young child. My first experience at a drive-in was actually in the daytime.  My brother worked for a food distribution company and I would help him make deliveries in the summer.  One of our stops was our local drive-in theater.  In broad daylight, the drive-in was a creepy looking, vacant wasteland full of spindly speaker poles that pointed upward at skewed angles due to being hit by countless cars over the years.  The poles were planted on top of rows of mounded gravel.  The mounds were there so that you could pull the front wheels of your car up on top of them and doing so would allow a better screen viewing angle.  It kind of made it feel like you were sitting on a recliner…a reclining sofa…in your drivable living room.  The mounds and the speaker poles and the lack of any life in the daytime made the drive-in look like some kind of a surreal cemetery.  The projection house was also the location of the concession stand.  Inside it was dark and cool.  It felt great to go in there during the heat of the summer.  Posters for all of the upcoming films lined the walls of the concession area.  Only one sticks in my mind to this day.  The poster was for a movie called “Blood Beach”.  It showed a girl in a bikini being swallowed up by the sand on the beach.  It had a tag line that read “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…you can’t get there”, which was a play on the tag line from the second film in the Jaws series; Jaws 2.  My brother told me that we should come here and check out a movie sometime.  That sounded great to me.

Our local drive-in theater usually showed two films per night. The first film, or the “A” movie, more often than not was a second-run feature film which was usually followed by relatively obscure films for the second feature; this is the origin of the term “B movie” (now sometimes called “straight-to-video” movies).  My brother was and is a science-fiction movie fan.  I was just a movie fan, period. The 1981 version of Flash Gordon had been making its second or third tour of the country and it happened to be playing one weekend at the drive-in.  Neither my brother nor I had seen it yet and we decided to have a look.  I really didn’t care what the film was, I was just glad to be going to the drive-in. I thought that it was so cool to pull up onto one of the mounds and take a speaker off of the tree and hang it on the inside of the window.  The speakers were made of cast aluminum and had wonderful art-deco styling to them.  They had a volume control knob and there may have been a tone control knob on them as well. How things have changed.  These days, indoor theaters brag of their various versions of Dolby surround sound.  Back then it was perfectly acceptable to listen to a movie on a ten-cent speaker in an aluminum box, hanging on the drivers window.  I was twelve or thirteen when I first experienced the drive-in and for a good portion of the following decade the drive-in would play an important role in my summertime activities.

At the start of the 1980’s there were nearly 2500 drive-in theaters in the U.S., according to information found at www.drive-ins.com.   The number had been steadily declining over the previous two decades falling from an all-time high of 4063 in 1958.  That trend would change from a decline to a screaming cliff-dive through the 80’s.  VCR’s, cable and satellite TV brought the movies home and effectively relegated the drive-in’s to novelty status.  Over 1500 drive-ins ceased operation during that 10 year period, including my local drive-in.  By the time the decade was over there would be fewer than 1000 screens left open, the fewest since 1948.  The 90’s weren’t much better for the drive-in’s, while the decline wasn’t as great as in the 80’s, the number of outdoor screens continued to fall.  The turn of the century saw a bit of stabilization in the drive-in business.  While the number of screens has dropped slightly since 2000, the number of open drive-in theaters holding fairly steady.  Currently there are approximately 400 drive-in theaters operating in the U.S.

Shortly after my first drive-in experience my brother moved into a house that was near the drive-in.  If you took a short walk through the woods in back of his house you, would end up on a small hill that was higher than the fence at the back of the drive-in.  You could see the screen from there with no trouble at all.  It was very comfortable because you were high enough on the hill that you just looked straight out to see the screen.  You didn’t have to look up.  The only problem was that there was no way to hear the sound of the movie.  We could tolerate a ten-cent speaker but no sound at all was out of the question.  I don’t think we ever went and watched an entire film without sound from the hill.  It was just too boring trying to imagine what was being said and we gave up on watching films from the backyard…but that would change.

The drive-in made a big announcement that it was no longer necessary to use the speakers to hear the movie.  They had installed a low-power transmitter that would broadcast the sound to the AM radio of your car.  If you weren’t fortunate enough to have a radio in your car that worked, there were still speakers up near the front that could be used to listen to the movie.  Upon hearing this news we decided to revisit the hill behind my brothers house but this time we brought a portable radio, a couple of lawn chairs and a six-pack of beer.  We set up our gear and waited for the movie to start.  We flipped the switch on the radio to the AM band and started turning the dial to tune in the station.  Suddenly it was there! Clear as a bell.  We were in free-movie heaven – with beer!  I am not entirely sure of what movie was playing, oddly, it may have been the soft-porn equivalent of Flash Gordon titled Flesh Gordon.  I’m fairly positive that we had  seen Flesh Gordon from the hill but I am not sure if it was the first movie we saw from that vantage point.

I don’t know how many movies we watched from lawn-chair hill but in retrospect, I don’t think we watched nearly enough.  My brother had started subscribing to  HBO and the need to see second and third run movies in the great outdoors was supplanted by the ability to see second and third run movies from the comfort of the couch.  Not long after that my brother moved to a different place and our hilltop film festivals were over.

Time went on and some of my friends had gotten their drivers licenses and going to the drive-in became an almost weekly affair. Over the years that would follow I would see countless movies at the drive-in but aside from the two I have mentioned earlier, I can only recall the name of one other film and that was The Company of Wolves with Angela Lansbury.  It was basically a werewolf film with a bit of  Little Red Ridinghood mixed in.  The story was strange but the visuals and the beautiful way the film was shot are probably the reasons it sticks in my mind.

The drive-in was located between two cities in my area.  It was several miles from the city that I lived nearest to and it was even further from my home.  This distance did prove to be a bit of a financial burden because even though gasoline was cheaper then, as teenagers the cars that we could afford to buy were far from economical to operate.  They were gas guzzling behemoths so huge that some of them had their own zip codes.  At the time the drive-in charged for each person in the car, it wasn’t until years later that they would charge a flat rate per vehicle.  Our incomes were rather low as well.  Frequently we had enough money for either admission to the drive-in or the gas to get there, but not enough for both. Sometimes we would have to siphon gasoline out of unattended vehicles in town to allow us to get to the drive-in.   On other occasions, when finances were tight, we would end up parking in a nearby parking lot that had an adequate view of the screen and we could tune our radios in to hear the show.  This was fine for watching the movie but it just wasn’t the same as being there.  We would do our best to save our money during the week so we could go to the drive-in on Friday night.  On one occasion we wanted to go to the drive-in but were short on cash as usual.  My friend Pete had an enormous 1972 Chrysler Newport.  It was so big that you could fit four people, comfortably…in the trunk.  We decided that we could sneak our girlfriends and ourselves into the drive-in by  riding in the trunk.  We knew that the staff at the drive-in would watch for people getting out of the trunks of cars so we needed to figure out a better way of making the transfer.  The back seats of the Newport popped out very easily and while most cars of the time had a metal wall between the trunk and the passenger compartment, many Chrysler cars, on the other hand, had only an x-brace that we could climb through once the seat-back was removed. The problem that we now faced was the issue of who would drive the car? Neither Pete nor I wanted to be seen driving into the drive-in alone.  No self-respecting teen would be caught dead going into the drive-in alone.  I don’t know why, it just wasn’t done.  Our girlfriends didn’t want to do it either.  Fortunately Pete’s younger sister had just gotten her learners permit to drive and was desperate to sit behind the wheel of a car for any reason.  We told her that she could drive into the theater and we would pay for her ticket.  She was more than willing. We pulled into a parking lot near the drive-in.  We left the back seat sitting loosely in place so that Pete’s sister wouldn’t have to try and figure out how to remove it. The trunk would easily accommodate the both of us (we were both over six feet tall) and our girlfriends, like I said, the car was huge.  The ride in the trunk felt a little strange but it was just a short trip to the main gate of the drive-in.  Pete’s sister was so happy to be behind the wheel that she wasn’t concerned in the least about pulling in alone. She paid for her admission and found a place to park.  Once the car was stopped, we pushed the back seat out of the way and climbed into the passenger compartment, which could hold six people with room to spare.

It wasn’t too long after that when the owners of the drive-in changed the rate to a flat admission for each vehicle, regardless of the amount of passengers.  This made it easier for us to afford to go.  Daylight savings time had also been playing a role in the drive-in attendance decline over the past twenty years.  Films would start at dusk and in the northern U.S. where I lived, dusk wasn’t until 10:30 PM in the summer.  I’m sure it was tough to convince people to drive out to the theater watch two movies and drive home again at 2:00 AM.  The theater owners’ rationale must have been  that whatever money they lost at the gate would be made up for by an increase in concession sales. The more people at the drive-in meant more people to buy goodies.  I know that we spent more money at the concession stand since we didn’t have to spend as much at the gate.

It was around that time when we found out that fifteen minutes into the start of the show they would close the main gate but would allow you to drive in the exit gate at no charge.  We discovered that fact one night when we arrived at the drive-in to late to get in.  We pulled up to the main gate only to find it locked.  We decided that we could see the screen just fine from where we were parked in front of the gate.  After watching the movie for some time we saw a flashlight coming toward us down the driveway.  We thought for sure we would be told to leave and we were ready to do that.  Much to our delight and surprise the flashlight wielding drive-in employee informed us that we needed to move but after the main gate closes it’s okay to drive in through the exit gate.  From that day on, if a film was playing that we didn’t care about or that we had already seen, we didn’t mind missing the first few minutes.  After all, it was the whole drive-in experience that drew us there, not just the movies.

The first thing that usually appeared on the screen was advertisements for Pic mosquito coils, which were available at the concession stand.  They were spiral shaped things that looked like little green electric stove burners.  You would light the end of it and it would burn like incense and the smoke that they emitted was supposed to repel mosquitoes.  I have no idea if the things actually worked or not.  I don’t think we ever needed one, even though we spent much of the time outside of our cars when the weather was nice.  I had a 1965 Buick Skylark that had the perfect windshield to lean your back on and watch the screen.  The hood was made of thick steel and could easily support me and whoever else came along.  I had constructed a pair of indestructible speakers that I kept in the trunk and had wired to the car stereo.  With the flip of a switch I could change between the speakers inside the car to the speakers outside.  They each had fifty feet of wire on them, so I could place them just about anywhere I wanted.  Since everyone at the drive-in was listening to the same thing, there was no problem with me turning the volume up a little bit.

In 1987 it seemed that the party was at an end for us.  It was announced in the local paper that the drive-in would be closing and not just for the season.  It was closing for good.  I would like to say that I was devastated but it wasn’t true.  I wasn’t happy about it but life goes on.  I guess I may have thought that someone would surely buy it and reopen it soon.  It didn’t happen.

In the spring of 1988 my older sister and I were talking about the fate of the drive-in and we had the idea that maybe, somehow we could buy it and re-open it or move it closer to the population center of our area.  The big question was where would we get the money?  We didn’t even know how much money we’d need or if it was even for sale.  We knew that it wouldn’t be cheap but how much value could there be in something that was a dying industry?  We decided that if we could start some sort of campaign that would play on the sentiments of former drive-in attendees from all over the country we might have a shot at saving the drive-in.  In 1987 Premier magazine premiered (pardon the pun).  It was a magazine that was devoted to movies and film.  Through a series of events involving the destruction of my copy of the very first issue of the magazine by my niece, I had become a subscriber and as a result, I knew that the magazine had a classified advertising section. It seemed like the timing was  perfect, we could take out a classified ad in Premier to try and raise funds for the purchase of the drive-in.  The idea was that we could offer merchandise that people who were nostalgic for the drive-in would want to buy.  We thought that it would be a good idea to offer t-shirts for sale.  We had decided that the shirts would read “Save the Drive-in” and the name of our company would be Save Our Screen (SOS if you missed that), and with those ideas in mind we started working on the artwork for the shirts.  The local screen printing shop would fill orders as small as 250 units and could have them ready in a week.  Instead of designing the shirts and having them printed ahead of time, we decided that we could run the ad first and when we had our first 250 orders we could have the shirts made and send them out.  This would keep our overhead low and it would give us a little more time to come up with a great design.  We rented a post office box to operate out of and we placed the ad.  Now all we had to do was come up with the shirt design …and wait.  The July 1988 issue of the magazine arrived at my house.  Cocktail was the movie of the moment and Tom Cruise was on the cover. I quickly turned to the classifieds.  There we were.  Our ad in a national magazine!  It read:

Preserve An Endangered Species – Get the original

“Save The Drive-In” T-shirt! USA made. Specify

S / M / L / XL. $10.95 PPD. Save Our Screen. P.O.

304, Marquette, MI 49855.

It was a one-inch, one column black and white print ad under the heading of “Clothing”. This was the big time!  With the ad in public view,  now all we had to do was wait…some more.  It’s a good thing too, we still hadn’t landed on a design that we were happy with.  We had drawn dozens of illustrations and we had the general idea down but the look wasn’t right.

At the time I worked across the street from the post office and every day, during my lunch break, I would walk over and check the box.  Day after day the box would be either empty or full of junk mail.  After a week or so of disappointment at the post office, the first order finally arrived. I couldn’t wait to open it and see our first check.  I hurried back across the street and down to the employee break room.  I opened the envelope and read the note that was enclosed with the check.  It read “Enclosed please find my check in the amount of $10.95 for ‘Save the Drive In’ T-shirt.  Please send my t-shirt in a large” – K.J. Beatty, Garland, TX.

Over the next couple of weeks the orders kept coming in…slowly.  A couple even had notes with them:

-         You guys have a great cause. Good Luck!

-         Yes! Yes! Save those drive-ins.  I was conceived at one.

One almost amounted to a letter: (the spelling, punctuation and grammar is that of the letter writer)

-         Dear SOS entrepenuers;

So I have a problem with sending money to post office boxes for a product I have no idea what it looks like.  I figure if you can advertise in something like the July Premiere, you gotta be on the level (even if just a little bit).  And besides that, if I get stiffed the $10.95 (ppd) for one “Save The Drive-In” T-Shirt (LARGE), I’ll bad mouth you guys fast to Joe Bob Briggs’ syndicated column and you know what THAT means!  Yeah, instand slamola in about 285 papers nationwide.

Enclosed find a check for $10.95.  Good luck. (and) Thanks.

Sincerely yours,

S. Manders

P.O. Is the t-shirt the only merchendise your organization sells for drive-in afficianados?  That’s “fans” to the non-Italian speaking crowd………

 

Eventually the orders stopped coming altogether.  All-in-all we received a grand total of seven orders and one chain letter.  They were all very enthusiastic but enthusiasm isn’t valuable enough to cover the cost of another ad in the classifieds let alone t-shirt production.  We would probably have fared better if we had the design done in advance and could have taken out a larger ad with the design in it.  It may have helped to have been able to afford to run the ad for a few months instead of just one.  We were so sure it would work that we didn’t really think about the future, we were young and without experience.  If I had it to do over again I would have saved up enough money to be able to advertise for six months or longer.  Even then I am not sure it would have worked.  With great disappointment, we returned all of the checks we had received with the following letter:

Dear faithful, patient consumer,

 

Due to circumstances way beyond our control we are unable to ship you our “Save the Drive-In” t-shirt at this time.  The future of our company, along with the nation’s drive-in’s looks dim.  Enclosed is your original check and we are extremely sorry for any inconvenience we have created.

 

May we suggest you use this money to print your own “Save the Drive-In” t-shirt at your local t-shirt store and in some small way you can further the cause, people will notice your shirt and you can explain how one-by-one our cities drive-in’s are “closing for the season and forever”.  Despite our efforts our city had lost its drive-in’s and our plans to open a new drive-in have met with insurmountable road blocks.

 

Thank you for your order, it proved to us that people are out there who understand we are losing an American treasure.

 

Sincerely,

S.O.S. 

Few people, if anyone, in our area knew of our endeavor and we had no way of knowing what others in the area had planned for drive-in theaters but as far as we were concerned the fate of the drive-in was sealed, then and there. We might have been its only hope because it never did re-open and, as far as I know, the property sits empty to this day.

Another decade would pass before I would have another drive-in experience.  By the summer of 1998 I had moved to another town to be with my future wife.  To my delight this town still had a drive-in theater that was open on the weekends. Better yet was the fact that they played first-run movies, for both features, not that I minded the awful, campy, films that frequently played at my old drive-in, they were part of the fun.

There was little to do in this town and most weekends were spent back in my hometown at a cabin I owned or camping at one of the many campgrounds in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.  On one weekend we didn’t leave town for some unknown reason and we decided to check out the drive-in.  We bought some beer and I think we brought lawn chairs to sit in.  My feelings about being at the drive in were a bit mixed.  I was in a strange town and I didn’t know anyone there with the exception of my wife.  I was also a little older and a bit more reserved than I had been as a teen.  That combination kind of took away the party atmosphere that I remembered at the old drive-in.  There weren’t as many people at this drive-in either,  I’m not sure if it was because of the decline in popularity of drive-ins or if it was because this area had less than one-tenth the population of the area that I was from.  Regardless of the differences it was good to be back at a drive-in.

The screen lit up with the arrival of dusk and the usual advertisements for the concession stand and coming attractions ran.  Then it was  time for the first feature, the 1998 version of Godzilla, with Matthew Broderick. The MMPA rating flashed on the screen and then the opening credits.  I was a bit surprised to here the theme music to the 1978 film Grease.  There must be some mistake, it must be just an advertisement for the twentieth anniversary of Grease, I thought.  The opening credits of Grease played in their entirety and then the movie started.  My wife was not very happy with this; she doesn’t care for older movies.  I didn’t mind, somehow it seemed really appropriate to see Grease at the drive-in and I hadn’t been terribly excited to see Godzilla. I then thought perhaps I had read the marquee wrong and Godzilla would be the second feature.  I was wrong again.  The second feature was The Man in the Iron Mask, with Leonardo DeCaprio.  My wife was pleased that it was at least a new movie.  I still didn’t care; I was at the drive-in again.  At the end of the show on our way out of the theater I noticed that Godzilla was listed on the marquee as “coming soon”.

That was the last time I was ever at a drive-in.  The following year my first daughter was born (nothing to do with the drive-in, by the way), and she spent the summer of 1999 in the intensive care unit of the hospital in my hometown.  The thought of the drive-in never crossed my mind.  Parenting and the lack of a sitter we could trust with our daughter kept us from returning to the drive in and in the early part of the new millennium this drive in also closed for good.  The marquee, screen and projection booth are still there but it appears that someone put up a double-wide mobile home at the back of the parking lot and is living there.  If it were my place I’d be using it as one huge big-screen TV with the new LCD projectors that are on the market now.  Sometimes I wish it would open back up but I know that there are too few people in this area to make a go of it.

Speaking of LCD projectors, it would seem that they have breathed a small amount of new life into the idea of drive-in theaters.  I have heard about people setting up impromptu drive-ins by using LCD projectors to show movies on large garage doors or the blank white walls of some buildings.  While this isn’t a drive-in in the traditional sense, it is helping to keep the concept alive.

I am saddened a little by the fate that has befallen the drive-in theater, but it does make me happy to think that I was able to experience the drive-in before it was relinquished to little more than a nostalgic memory.  Drive-in theaters came along at just the right moment in time and I don’t think that they would have been a viable concept at any other time, past or present.  The motion picture industry was growing and at-home entertainment opportunities were limited.  Automobiles were growing too.  They had become roomy and comfortable and gasoline was cheap. Real estate wasn’t in such high demand and a chance to make money on a few vacant, suburban acres was a good idea. By contrast; today the entertainment options seem almost endless with big screen TV’s, high definition, home theater systems, broadband internet and dvd’s that are delivered right to your door.  Cars have become too small to enjoy a drive-in the way we did in years gone by and even if they were still large enough to be practical at the drive-in, who could afford to drive one with the price of gas so high. Building a new drive-in or leaving an existing one sitting on property that could be used for the construction of condominiums or strip malls  would be financial suicide.  I’m not making an argument for condominiums or strip malls, I don’t like either, but it is easy to see why investing in a drive-in would be a foolish proposition.  The drive-in will never return to it’s previous glory and future generations will look back on them with only passing curiosity.  While I am in no hurry to get any older, I am glad that I am old enough to have experienced the drive-in the way it was meant to be, ten-cent speaker and all.

In memory of Don LaFontaine 1940 – 2008

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-lafontaine3-2008sep03,0,4646300.story

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QPMvj_xejg