The sun, I’ve recently learned, is always setting on a drive-in theater somewhere.

A friend who studied abroad in India some time ago happened to mention the other night over turkey and cranberries that she’d been to a drive-in in the sub-continent. Drive-ins not in the U.S? Who knew? 
“When I was staying with a local family, we packed poori and dhal and beer and chutney and other edibles and went off to catch a little Bollywood....”  Amazing! While I was struggling to run a 2,672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, she was sitting under the Indian stars, eating Tandoori and knocking back a couple of Taj Mahals, Ali Baba playing on screen. 

I’d always assumed drive-ins were a strictly American phenom. We’re the car culture of the world; only in America would a man — whose (obese?) mother couldn’t fit comfortably into a standard movie house seat — think to invent a theater where she could stay in the family car, eat popcorn and watch the flick in private. The man whose mother that was, Richard Hollingshead, was a movie fan and  sales manager at his father’s company, Whiz Auto Products, in Camden, New Jersey. He patented his idea, which became Park-In Theaters in 1933. 

Back to Thanksgiving. While I was deep in conversation with my friend about the plots of Indian films, my husband, at the other end of the table, was having a parallel conversation with another friend, a British ex-pat, who noted that there are two drive-ins in the U.K., and he’s been to neither. He’d like to go to a drive-in anywhere, soon. Perhaps this will happen for him, with more than ten drive-ins within two hours of New York City. 

As to their number in the U.K., he’s close to right; there are actually three drive-ins there, one in Manchester, one in Liverpool and one in London. The one in London sounds like a real send-off of all things American; according to the London TimesDriving column, “As we pull up at the ticket office an usherette on roller skates slides up to our door. Dressed in classic American-style garb, she explains how the screening works: attendants will guide us to a space; we should switch off the headlights to avoid dazzling or flattening the battery; we may run the engine, if necessary; be sure to tune in to the film’s FM frequency on your stereo; flash the hazard lights if you need any refreshments…”

The Drive-In Film Club in Brent Cross Shopping Centre in North London has something on the drive-ins of my youth, the Oakley and the Montgomery, in Cincinnati, (both long gone). Who could imagine car-hops with food? or usherettes on roller skates? We hoofed it to the snack stand in my day, and, from what I’ve seen of revived American drive-ins, people still make their way there on foot — or send the kids. How else to get them out of your hair for a minute? Other drive-in theaters in the U.K., which would include the Route 66 (yes!) chain, are owned by the same outfit. Route 66 has screens in Manchester, Liverpool and, soon, in Leeds. Don’t miss the previous link if you want to read about how insane Brits are these days on the subject of remaining in their cars. The Liverpool Route 66 is only one feature of a 24-hour attempt on the part of one London Timesreporter to remain in his car for a whole day, eating, stopping for coffee, going to a bank and a dry cleaners, and, yes, a movie, followed by napping in a tony part of London. He even profiles a type of disposable urinal. 

The reason drive-in theaters are on the rise in Britain is so is gridlock; which is a clue to why India, with its growing population of drivers, has four drive-in theaters. The largest one, which happens to be larger than any other drive-in theater I know of, is the Sunset Drive-In in Ahmedabad, with, they claim, space to play to 6000 people for a single showing (665 very crowded cars). Screening mainly home-grown fare from Bollywood, the Sunset doesn’t actually require a car for admission. Pedestrians stand under a special covered area despite winter temperatures as high as 30 degrees Celsius (86F).The world’s only beach-side drive-in, the Prarthana, is located in Southern India, and includes “on-site dining.”  The STBL, on the coast in Northeast India, got four stars from UdaY, who noted, three weeks ago, “You can visit here with your four wheeler directly to the outdoor theatre to watch the movies. Both indoor & outdoor also available here. For outdoor they also provide chairs and fans just beside to your four wheeler. Food zone; snacks ; other amusements for kids are also available here. They also provide a free cab from highway to the theatre. Try to visit this place at least once for a different chill outs.” There’s apparently a brand-new drive-in in Mumbai. Which theater did my Thanksgiving guest have the pleasure of visiting? And was she in a car?

I found only one mention of a drive-in in Europe, in Cadiz, Spain, but it’s in Fort Mitchell, a naval base, so I imagine, from the name (Flix Cinema) that it must be American. Doesn’t count. There are lots of outdoor cinemas in Paris, Barcelona, Locarno, Vienna, and other European locales, but all of them are for pedestrians. If you want to experience outdoor movies from an individual hot tub, check out hot tub cinemas in London, Liverpool, New York, Ontario, Los Angeles and elsewhere; but you can’t drive a hot tub, and the screen-size sucks. 

Where else are drive-ins on the rise? China, of course.  With a burgeoning car culture, you can bet that the two drive-ins I could find evidence of that are available to Chinese movie patrons, are likely to spawn more. For a trip to the Maple Motor Theatre in Beijing, check out this YouTube video, which includes an interview with Wang Qishun the owner and founder. He always loved movies, and then he loved cars. It became his life’s dream to “...let our friends and other car owners watch movies in their cars like Americans.” He’s done that, and now he’s going for a chain; there may already be as many as ten drive-ins throughout China, he speculates. 

I love drive-ins. There are currently only around 333 in the U.S., which still makes us the drive-in theater Mecca of the world; but nothing compared to the 4,000 that squeezed in cars in the late 1950’s. Currently, there is at least one drive-in in every state but Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Louisiana and North Dakota. Find one near you.

Despite the fact that drive-ins world-wide are likely indicators of global warming on the rise, I understand why people in India, China and the U.K. are warming (no pun intended) to them. As Nick Frow, Director of the Drive-In Film Club in London, observes, “Your car is your kingdom, basically. You can do exactly what you want when you want to do it in your car. You want to rustle your sweet packets? Want to talk to your missus, or the family in the back? Brought a baby and it wants to cry or needs a feed? No problem. It’s perfect.” 
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I gather that rustling sweet packets has to do with candy, though it has a slightly sexy sound to it; but then drive-ins have always been great places to fool around. The steamed-up windows provide perfect sanctuary. Here’s to the Oakley in Cincinnati, scene, in my life, of several passionate dates, and these days the site of a retirement home. I wonder if any of the residents upstairs revisit nights they recall having in cars, down on ground level, half a century ago?

Amateur archaeologists that we were, and brief as our stay was, we never ran out of things to discover in our movie palace. A half-level beneath the St. George Theatre stage, a group of us discovered a cramped area Dean likened to the “under-gun deck” of a frigate ship. Low-ceilinged, crowded, musty,  and full of junk, it seemed to be some kind of pit. "Over here," a friend called, gesturing with a flashlight. I could just make out the word ELEVATOR and a set of what appeared to be controls, below which lay a hydraulic mechanism riveted to the floor. An elevator? To where? Hell?  
 
“It’s not very deep,” Dean observed.  “There’s only one way, and that’s up!  
 
But nothing is stored down here,” he pointed out, “that anyone would want on-stage. What’s it for?”  
 
Having just read a little way into the movie palace enthusiast’s scouting manual, The Best Remaining Seats, I thought I had the answer, “It’s for the organ,” I said.
 
The St. George had once had a pipe organ, a 3/30 (3 manual, 30 rank) Wurlitzer which, like other organs of the era, rose from the depths on an elevated platform, stage right (left, as you face the proscenium). I recalled hearing something about a sale a few years back, when the owner of the building — our landlord with whom we’d already begun to have issues — got quick cash for a number of items — lamps, rugs and what-not. The Wurlitzer (1929 cost: $25,000.00) was probably the last to go. Silent since 1935 — when its last full-time organist, Andy Anderson, was fired to trim theater expenses — its new destination, according to local sources, had been Pipe Organ Pizza (see the menu above) in Memorial City, Houston, Texas, where it entertained pizza-eating patrons for at least a decade.
 
Eventually the pizza joint itself became an object of reverie, evoking this nostalgic query on a website of historic interest to Houstonians: Does anyone remember the pipe organ pizza at memorial city mall? It had the huge pipe organ and the 20's and 30's theme inside with pictures of all the old movie stars on the walls. 
 
It becomes impossible to trace the whereabouts of our Wurlitzer at this point. Like an aging Chevy in a junkyard, it may have been sold for parts, cannibalized to keep several other pipe organs going, a sad ending, far from home.  
 
With the theater’s exquisite acoustics, I can only imagine what all those pipes would have done to the place. 
 
To placate myself, I’m going to Suffern New York this winter, to the Lafayette Theatre to take in a flick and listen to Wurlitzer Opus 2095 installed there by the American Theater Organ Society.  Although it isn’t the original house organ (removed in 1933 to accommodate an “air cooling system”), the organ currently residing in the Lafayette has a venerable history. It began its travels from its original home, the Lawler Theatre in Greenfield, Massachusetts, to the Rainbow Roller Rink in South Deerfield, Mass. Then it journeyed  on to a New York City Duplex owned by a noted theater historian, Ben M. Hall (the author, coincidentally of the previously-mentioned and much-revered tome, The Best Remaining Seats).  It remained at his home until his death some three years later, passing at that point safely into the hands of the American Theater Organ Society. Traveling briefly to California, ostensibly to become part of a museum on the estate of Harold Lloyd, it returned back to New York City after that deal fell through. There you may have heard it if you went to the Carnegie Hall Cinema during its decade there. When the Cinema was twinned, it enjoyed a few years in storage, but came out of retirement in 1992, to what may be its permanent home in the newly restored Lafayette Theatre — where it has entertained weekend audiences ever since. Such are the life and travels of a theater organ lucky enough not to be cannibalized. Hats off to the American Theater Organ Society! 
 
Afterthought 1:  I have the vaguest memories of the theater organ that once graced my favorite childhood movie palace, the Albee Theatre, in downtown Cincinnati. It was a Mighty Wurlitzer, built for the silents, whose day was nearly done by the time the Albee opened in 1927. No problem, the Wurlitzer played on for special performances up into the sixties, when downtown stopped being the place to be and rumblings of demolition began. You guessed it, the Albee met its date with the architectural equivalent of the guillotine (a giant wrecker’s ball) in 1977, coincidentally the year after I went bust running another movie palace, the St. George Theatre, in New York. But the Albee’s organ suffered a better fate than the St. George’s instrument: removed prior to demolition, it spent a few benign years at Emery Theatre, thanks to the Ohio chapter of the ATOS, then recently, thanks to an anonymous donation, was rebuilt and re-installed in Cincinnati’s historic Music Hall, where it is doted on and lovingly played for concerts and other events. On a recent trip home to Cincy, I was lucky to be warmly received by Holly Brians, who could have got me involved in a tour of the organ, if I had had more time: here’s to next time! Meanwhile, hats off to Holly, Brett Stover, Ron Wehmeier and Scott Santangelo, each of whom is, in one way or another, involved in the Albee Organ’s post-millennial life, in its new Music Hall digs.
 
Afterthought 2:  As you may have guessed, this post is a re-worked version of an earlier blog post; you can never write too much about theater organs. And why is it that Thanksgiving is just the right time for their warm round tones? Here’s a little taste of the Albee’s organ at Music Hall.

I once (1976) helped run a theater, the 2,672-seat St. George Theatre in Staten Island, that contained, beneath its gilded proscenium, a single viewing screen arguably the size of a small playing field. What a wonder, that there ever were such behemoths, that single-screen houses had, until the 1970‘s, been the norm, or that people ever gathered together in the dark to watch a one-and-a-half-story tall Katherine Hepburn kiss an equally mammoth Spencer Tracey. The New York Times recently featured an image of a fan laughing while presumably watching Comedy Central on a cell phone. Screen size may be irrelevant these days, but it was once a subject of conversation, as when, in 1976, MGM finally released Gone With the Wind to television — first to HBO and, in November, to network television (NBC). It became (ironically) and remains, the highest-rated television program ever presented on a single network, watched — in relative miniature — by 65 percent of television viewers. I watched on a portable Sony Trinitron at a lunch counter in Florida, as Rhett carried Scarlet up what seemed, at the time, like a dollhouse staircase. 

By then TV had been eroding the habit of movie-going for a couple of decades, a back-and-forth struggle. In 1963, the fledgling American Multi Cinema (AMC) Theatres — originally Durwood Theatres owned by Stanley H. Durwood — opened the two-screen Parkway Twin in Kansas City presumably to cut overhead, but also to steal back some of the viewing audience, by offering a choice of titles. Viewers — used to their Zeniths, Sonys  and Motorolas — didn’t seem to care about the relative smallness of these screens, and the trend caught on. A very American crisis ensued:  by 1976, there were actually too many screens for the product that Hollywood offered; a sudden 7.5 percent decline in movie theater attendance sent the movie business into a panic.

The average single-screen movie theater operator — most often located in a crumbling downtown area — couldn’t hope to compete for scarce film offerings. 

We were that operator. Our unofficial anthem during the dark winter of 1977 — a parody of an American Airlines ad then running on TV — went something like this:  “With our big screen to the north and our snack-stand to the south, we’re the St. George Theatre, living from hand to mouth.” 
The St. George Theatre ended its days as a movie house with our departure in 1977, the same year Loew’s Kings in Brooklyn and a number of other great old palaces went dark. Our luminous — if grape soda-stained screen, burned up a few years after we departed, in a backstage fire that would have taken down the house if the theater’s protective asbestos fire curtain hadn’t fallen and stopped the progress of the blaze. The St. George has survived, a home, these days, for live entertainment; but, for our theater, a dedicated single screen, with its carefully-preserved curvature to allow for distortion, is probably a thing of the past.

It’s sad, but several generations have grown up never knowing the effect of films like Ben Hur, The Wizard of Oz, or The King and Iin widescreen processes such as Cinerama, CinemaScope, VistaVision or Todd-AO. William Paul argues that “Both the architectural screen and the technological screen have changed...in ways that directly affect our perception of the movie image.”  He also notes, “The screen itself might have influenced the development of film style.” [1] 

In an age when more and more households don’t even own a TV (the final irony!) hardly anybody knows what watching an epic on a giant screen actually feels like. Still, there are exceptions! In New York City, the venerable Paris (with balcony seating!) still boasts a pristine single screen, not a palace, but hey. And, Lordy, you can always go to L.A.:  they have so many restored single screen or older theaters in that town, you should plan to stay for a year. Check out The Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Blvd., and the Vista on Sunset Drive, just for starters. Seattle’s Cinerama Theater is, I’m told, a wonder.
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There are scads of single-screen houses listed in Cinema Treasures. How many of them boast a screen big enough to do justice to Lawrence of Arabia (Super Panavision 70) is anybody’s guess, but I remain, as always, optimistic.

Note: I wrote this post several years ago (yes, I confess, this is mostly a re-run), and interestingly, it seemed to predict something that has come to pass. Lawrence of Arabia was reissued this year on actual film in, of course, 70 mm and, thanks to Tarantino and Nolan and others, has appeared on wide screens nationwide, including — and for me especially — the United Palace in upper upper Manhattan, where I was privileged recently to see it, and enjoy an upward-at-the-dome gaze during intermission. There is nothing, I repeat nothing, quite like an epic of that caliber in a pristine palace. 
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[1] Paul, William, 1996, Screening Space: Architecture, Technology and the Motion Picture Screen, 
in The Movies: Texts, Receptions and Exposures, eds. Laurence Goldstein and Ira Konigsburg, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 245-6.

The projectionist at the St. George Theatre which I had a hand in running as a movie house in 1976 — was a minor god. His union contract granted him a highly lucrative $13.76 an hour, and made him more or less impossible to fire. No matter that he missed his reel changeovers more often than not distracted by Gilligan’s Island which he followed on an illicit television that was expressly forbidden in the booth. Or that he failed to tell us when (all-important, expensive) carbon rods, the source of light for our two antiquated carbon arc projectors, were about to run out. At least once I had to hop the Staten Island Ferry into the city and catch a subway to Times Square to borrow carbons from one of the porn houses, the only other theaters that still used carbon arc. My strongest memory of Abe is his backside as he hurries through the lobby, his shift over, “Take it easy now,” tossed off carelessly to no one in particular.
 
Projectionists have been on my mind lately, perhaps because I toured the Valencia Theatre in Queens a couple of weeks ago, a palace converted to a church, where the projection booth serves as a “prayer tower.” Or is it because last week in Buffalo I heard the tale of a projectionist named Norm who worked the North Park Theatre from 1966 to 2013, taking on, eventually, the duties of both projectionist and manager? He kept that theater open and functioning during lean times, fixing broken equipment nobody else had a handle on. It’s the dedicated projectionists I like to think about, for whom the job is a craft. 

Speaking of dedicated, it was Robert Endres, head projectionist at Radio City Music Hall, who strode into our lobby one day in ’76 and volunteered to take the occasional shift, announcing, “I admire old theaters — collect them in my head...” He never handled film with his bare hands, the way Abe did, even if the prints we got were already pretty badly scratched. For forty years we lost track of Bob, but, thanks to a mutual dentist, are now happily reconnected. These days, he volunteers periodically as a specialized tech advisor for this blog, on the subject of all things projection. (Check out his comments in “Afterthought 1.”)

Eight years ago, in Slate, Grady Hendrix predicted the gig was up for projectionists. He chatted up a veteran NYC projectionist named Joe Rivierzo,and the result was a lucid description of how projection evolved — and is devolving — over the course of the last century.  And I quote: 

...nowhere is technology eliminating the need for human labor faster than in motion-picture projection. From the birth of cinema until the 1960s, the system was the same: Every projection booth had two reel-to-reel projectors with carbon arc light sources.The movie would start playing on one machine, and the projectionist’s job was to watch for the changeover cues: usually a small circle or an X in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.

...Getting a lamp that was bright enough to throw a projected image onto a screen hundreds of feet away was a huge problem, and the first solution was the carbon arc. Two carbon electrodes are brought together, they touch and are then pulled apart, creating a brightly burning arc. The strong, steady light would bounce off a reflector and toward the lens.

But starting in the 1970’s, the light source — always tricky while it depended on an arc between two carbons — was gradually replaced by the xenon bulb, expensive, but steady and reliable. With the arrival of that bulb, the projectionist’s job was greatly simplified, no longer requiring trimming or changing of carbons. The bulb was a steady source of light; you could keep an extra couple of them around and dispense with rod maintenance, which had taken some finesse. Maintenance of the rods, come to think of it, was probably the only thing keeping Abe awake in our antiquated booth; changeovers certainly weren’t doing it. Speaking of reel changeovers, according to Rivierzo, when the platter system came along in the late seventies, the job  of projectionist became idiot simple. There was absolutely nothing for a projectionist to do after the reels of film had been delivered and loaded on stacked platters; and as the challenges of projection became minimal, managers saw opportunity.

Rivierzo tracks the de-fanging of Local 306, the once-powerful NYC projectionists’ union, to efforts in the Giuliani era to dumb down projectionist licensing tests. Local 306 used to have roughly 3,000 members in the 1950’s but, by 2010, was down to just 400. After xenon and platters, and simplified testing (which no longer required a projectionist to know much about electricity or master complex skills), almost anybody could staff a booth.

The Slate blog post I’m quoting from was written long before the recent digital revolution was complete. At the time, Rivierzo predicted that, “Digital will eliminate us completely. All you have to do is load it and play it, and a lot of this stuff can be done off-site. We have theaters now running with 35 percent of the house digital. Once they go over 51 percent running digital, and they run it that way for 90 consecutive days, they can eliminate the presence of a projectionist. Our only saving grace is they can’t manufacture these digital machines fast enough.”

True? Well, this just in, from 2015, two years after the digital revolution was mostly complete. According to What It’s Like to Be a ‘Hateful Eight’ 70mm Projectionist (With Quentin Tarantino Watching),  by Adam Witner, it was easy for him to get work projecting The Hateful Eight for its well-known director, a champion of non-digital tech. The catch was, Witner had no opportunities to practice in advance before he joined the roadshow; and practice would have been a good thing. You see, he had somehow never operated a platter system before. He’d worked at UNC School of the Arts in Winston Salem, N.C., as an archivist and projectionist, a situation involving not platters, but two-projector reel-to-reel systems. Something did go terribly wrong for Witner, but Tarantino, in the audience the first night, never knew it, at least while the film was rolling, because this guy Witner is a true professional. If you haven’t by now read the link, don’t miss it; it contains a real nail-biter of a situation, deftly handled. It also proves that projection is not only not dead, but still an art, especially given the fact that, in the age of digital projection, the equipment that directors like Nolan and Tarantino ship all over the country for their roadshows has a lot in common with the old Chevys still on the road down in Cuba. 

An article in Vanity Fair in March of this year, seems to indicate that well-trained projectionists who are still alive, kicking and able to handle a reel of film, may still be quite valuable. I’ve noticed this effect in other fields. For example, my sister finally did retire at 78, from her job, traveling around the world teaching main frame, a supposedly outmoded tech that is no longer taught in schools that feature computer technology — but which governments and the military seem unable to do without. Technology moves too fast, eating up the landscape as it goes; but there are things in the landscape that we need to hold on to. One of them just may be film. 

I started with Abe, who wasn’t very good (anymore?) or very careful, at a time when projection was complicated enough, that incompetents could hide behind a strong union. From the seventies to 2010, unions weakened or died and digital projection, like compact disc technology (or e-books), seemed to be the whole future. In this period, Eastman Kodak filed for Chapter 11. Then Tarantino and Nolan and friends stepped in, in hopes that film would still be available to shoot on and project light through. 
Proving? It’s not over until the projectionist — of any size and shape — sings. 

Afterthought 1: And this just in from Bob Endres, my favorite projectionist...
I know Joe Riverzo and his comments pretty much summed it up eight years ago. The projectionist who wrote about Hateful 8 was wrong about one thing. Platters were designed to run 70mm but the problem was lack of maintenance over the years. One of our engineers had a problem on the first screening of Hateful down at the Village 8 on opening night with Tarantino in the audience. In that case they had to stop while he pulled a gear out of a spare projector and actually rebuilt the projector head in a relatively short time while Tarantino entertained the audience with stories about the film.

What isinteresting is that we have a number of theaters in Manhattan and Brooklyn that are installing two projector 35mm systems in at least one of their screens. The Metrograph and the Quad are two, and the Metrograph runs reel to reel 35mm on an almost daily basis (suppliers of 35mm prints don’t want them chopped up with leaders and tail pieces cut off when the reels are spliced together for use on a platter). Our engineer that does the tech for Dolby film screenings says he’s seen more film this last year than in a decade, and a lot of it has been 70mm.

Afterthought 2: Check out this treatment of the recent restoration of 2001, a Space Odyssey, which features another young projectionist who learned his now-obscure craft at a college campus. and is working for Alamo. Christopher Nolan is responsible for the film restoration. 

Afterthought 3: For a 2016 treatment of the emulsion vs. digitalization tug-of-war, check out an earlier post.