Down at the Drive-In

This is not about the Beach Boys, but you can listen to this while you read:




There are still drive-in movie theaters, but they're rare, vestigial remnants of a long-ago past. Regardless of what the actual dates that bracket the history of drive-ins, they are a phenomenon co-opted by the Baby Boomers (like me) as their own. My recollections are more than fond.

My family didn't own a car until I was seven years old. This was not because we lived in a city, but because cars were expensive and not everyone owned one and when you finally did, it was a big deal. People would drop by and congratulate my parents on it, and wish them luck with it. Whether they were being wished luck that it wouldn't be a lemon, or that they wouldn't drive it off a cliff, I'm not quite sure. But let me tell you, a 1955 Chevy Bel Air was a thing of beauty. It still is. (The model in the picture is a '57; same basic style. And that was our color.)

When you finally owned a car, you had to use it. We took a number of cross-country trips to visit my father's sister out west, for instance. And we also went to the drive-in movie. For families, drive-ins were a true blessing. They were cheap, for one thing, and you could pile the whole family in the car easily enough, although for us, the whole family comprised just the three of us. Still, my parents would include a blanket and pillows for the trip, and when the sun finally set, I would come back from the playground below the screen and settle in and be asleep before the credits rolled on the main feature.

Drive-ins are associated in the popular mind with exploitation pictures, but we went to see regular movies that just happened to be outdoors. You attached a speaker box to the window. It was attached to a post on the other end, and there were warnings on the screen to remember to unplug and not tear the thing out when you yourself tore out. They sounded terrible, and obviously not only monophonic but mono-directional, because it was just hanging on that one window. I understand that these were eventually replaced by broadcasting, so you could listen over your car radio, but I personally never experienced this particular marvel of modern science.

I saw movies up through my college years sitting either in the front or back seat, although obviously not with my parents after a while. I shamefully admit that I did not go to the drive-in to make out: even then I was way too interested in what was going on up on the screen. (What a jerk.) The last time I remember going, we saw a double feature that was followed—yes, followed—by a triple feature of the original Eastwood spaghetti westerns beginning with A Fistful of Dollars. We rolled out of there at around four a.m., and as I recall, we didn't make it to the end. After eight hours of sitting in the car, four of them with Clint Eastwood, let's see if you make it to the end.

One time when we went, it was for some pairing of slasher films, and when we bought our tickets, there were giveaways of packets of green blood, the same sort of packets in which they put ketchup and mustard. Yum! In this vein, I will report that the first house we owned, in the early 80s, was not far from the local drive-in, the last in the county. It ran the gamut of pictures, albeit in their third run, and occasionally they, too, showed the odd slasher film. At this point in the life of drive-ins, the common practice was to honk your horn when somebody got whacked. So for a short period of my life, off in the nocturnal distance occasionally one could hear a soft blast of car horns for no apparent reason, sounding what was, for all practical purposes, the death knell of the art form.

There are still some drive-ins around, if you've got the gas. Complex.com has a nice slideshow of them, which is what got me thinking about all of this. Enjoy it. Feel free to honk at the gory bits.