Customers arriving by car at a 'fly-in drive-in' theater, New Jersey, 1949 Most drive-in theaters that still survive in the states that endure all four seasons are in their dormant phase right now. What better time to think about them, as their screens go dark? It wasn’t so once upon a time, when there were thousands of outdoor viewing opportunities, coast-to-coast, all year long; you could see a movie at one of them most any night it didn’t snow, at least in Cincinnati, where I grew up.
It has been almost fifty years since I met the man I went broke running a movie palace with. New Year’s Eve, 1965, the Oakley Drive-In in Cincinnati: What’s New Pussycat was on-screen — a blur— it was raining. We talked until midnight, the first of many amazing conversations. Four years later we left together for New York City, where we settled into Staten Island, and, ten years after our first date, tried our luck at running the St. George Theatre. What was it about movies in the century of their supremacy? Indoors, outdoors, film demanded a specialized viewing space.
My mother, who grew up with the movies, remembered seeing her first silents projected on a bed sheet in a vacant lot in Toledo, Ohio. Oddly, the first drive-in involved a bed sheet: Richard Hollingshead, who invented this variation on movie-going, was said to have had an obese mother who wanted to go to the movies. Accordingly, he put a 1928 projector on the hood of his car, settled her in the front seat, and tied a sheet between two trees. Five years later, he opened the first drive-in in Camden, New Jersey, charging 25 cents a head to watch movies under the stars, with the slogan, "The whole family is welcome, regardless of how noisy the children are.” Shankweiler's Drive-In Theater, opened a year later in Orefields, Pennsylvania, followed by the Drive-In Short Reel Theater in Galveston, Texas, and the Pico at Pico and Westwood boulevards in Los Angeles.
With RCA’s invention of car speakers in 1941, the novelty of outdoor viewing became a commonplace (before that time, speakers on towers near the screen blasted cars in the front row). By the time I was in fourth grade (1958), there were better than 4,000 open-air theaters in the U.S. That year, in the back seat of my best friend’s mother’s boyfriend’s Buick Elektra, I waited until 1 A.M. to watch the “adult” films (The Long Hot Summer, Desire Under the Elms, Vertigo), while everybody else slept. Management programmed family fare for early in the evening, then showed the arty flicks after most people had either left or gone to sleep.
Time for a trivia question: What caused the decline, in the 1960’s, of drive-in movie theaters? Answer: shopping malls; land was just too valuable. Take the previously mentioned Pico, at the corner of Pico and Westwood Boulevards in Los Angeles. It survived as a drive-in until 1947, after which the Picwood, an indoor theater rose on that spot. Today at that same corner the Landmarks Theater in the Westside Pavilion, a shopping plaza, boasts twelve screens with a wine bar and reserved stadium seating. Indoor or outdoor, it’s been all about movies at that street corner for better than 80 years. In Staten Island, where I live, Fabian Theaters, the same chain that originally owned and operated our movie palace, the St. George Theatre, also owned NYC’s first drive-in on Staten Island, in 1948, which closed in the 1960’s, to make way for Staten Island’s first shopping mall.
Sometimes drive-ins just closed, their screens blank as tombstones until somebody bought the land. As of 2008 in Cincinnati, the Oakley Drive-In’s screen still stood, in a field of weeds. Dean and I had planned to visit that hallowed spot on the last day of 2015, the fiftieth anniversary of our first date. But alas, the newly-built Barrington of Oakley, a retirement community currently stands on the spot.
Afterthoughts:
It has been almost fifty years since I met the man I went broke running a movie palace with. New Year’s Eve, 1965, the Oakley Drive-In in Cincinnati: What’s New Pussycat was on-screen — a blur— it was raining. We talked until midnight, the first of many amazing conversations. Four years later we left together for New York City, where we settled into Staten Island, and, ten years after our first date, tried our luck at running the St. George Theatre. What was it about movies in the century of their supremacy? Indoors, outdoors, film demanded a specialized viewing space.
My mother, who grew up with the movies, remembered seeing her first silents projected on a bed sheet in a vacant lot in Toledo, Ohio. Oddly, the first drive-in involved a bed sheet: Richard Hollingshead, who invented this variation on movie-going, was said to have had an obese mother who wanted to go to the movies. Accordingly, he put a 1928 projector on the hood of his car, settled her in the front seat, and tied a sheet between two trees. Five years later, he opened the first drive-in in Camden, New Jersey, charging 25 cents a head to watch movies under the stars, with the slogan, "The whole family is welcome, regardless of how noisy the children are.” Shankweiler's Drive-In Theater, opened a year later in Orefields, Pennsylvania, followed by the Drive-In Short Reel Theater in Galveston, Texas, and the Pico at Pico and Westwood boulevards in Los Angeles.
With RCA’s invention of car speakers in 1941, the novelty of outdoor viewing became a commonplace (before that time, speakers on towers near the screen blasted cars in the front row). By the time I was in fourth grade (1958), there were better than 4,000 open-air theaters in the U.S. That year, in the back seat of my best friend’s mother’s boyfriend’s Buick Elektra, I waited until 1 A.M. to watch the “adult” films (The Long Hot Summer, Desire Under the Elms, Vertigo), while everybody else slept. Management programmed family fare for early in the evening, then showed the arty flicks after most people had either left or gone to sleep.
Time for a trivia question: What caused the decline, in the 1960’s, of drive-in movie theaters? Answer: shopping malls; land was just too valuable. Take the previously mentioned Pico, at the corner of Pico and Westwood Boulevards in Los Angeles. It survived as a drive-in until 1947, after which the Picwood, an indoor theater rose on that spot. Today at that same corner the Landmarks Theater in the Westside Pavilion, a shopping plaza, boasts twelve screens with a wine bar and reserved stadium seating. Indoor or outdoor, it’s been all about movies at that street corner for better than 80 years. In Staten Island, where I live, Fabian Theaters, the same chain that originally owned and operated our movie palace, the St. George Theatre, also owned NYC’s first drive-in on Staten Island, in 1948, which closed in the 1960’s, to make way for Staten Island’s first shopping mall.
Sometimes drive-ins just closed, their screens blank as tombstones until somebody bought the land. As of 2008 in Cincinnati, the Oakley Drive-In’s screen still stood, in a field of weeds. Dean and I had planned to visit that hallowed spot on the last day of 2015, the fiftieth anniversary of our first date. But alas, the newly-built Barrington of Oakley, a retirement community currently stands on the spot.
Afterthoughts:
- If you, dear reader, get the wanderlust, bear in mind that there may be as few as 330 active drive-ins left in the U.S.A, as of this writing. Two years ago, there were around four hundred, but the advent of digital movie projection cut the ranks of these mom-and-pop businesses (it costs around $70,000.00 to convert to digital projection). One of the surviving locations, thankfully, appears to be the second such theater to open, the historic Mahoning, in Lehighton, Pennsylvania, mentioned in a recent post. It has survived thanks to the heroic efforts of local movie buffs and a vigilant owner, who got around the problem of digital projection by embracing original technology: the theater’s existing projection set-up and film, which is still available, if you air mostly classics and cult films. Check it out, it’s the subject of a marvelous documentary, At the Drive-In.
- I remember when drive-ins charged by the carload, a dollar twenty. If only I’d known Dean when he and his buddies hung out at the Oakley’s rival, the Montgomery Drive-In. One of his friends had a dad who was a mortician. Just how many teenagers can you pack into a hearse?
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