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For two artists, it wasn't enough to merely display their films on a screen in a museum, so they turned 25 soon-to-be-scrapped cars into the seating for a custom-built theater that looks like a drive-in after a Soviet thermonuclear attack. More »
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I spent my senior year in high school working as the ticket-booth guy at the soon-to-be-defunct Island Auto Movie, and so I feel profound pain over the Death Of The American Drive-In Theater. But the drive-in isn't dead in Wisconsin! More »
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It was on this day, 75 years ago, that Richard Hollingshead Jr. opened his first drive-in theater in Camden, New Jersey. At its peak, there were nearly 5,000 drive-in movie theaters across the country. In the post-WWII period, the drive-in represented both the emergence of the teenage leisure class and our country's strong identification with the automobile. Also, petting. Though there are a few drive-ins left, they represent a novelty more than a primary destination for cinematic appreciation. This saddens us, because the idea of a movie you can enjoy from the confines of your personal auto appeals to us in many, many ways. See below for the top seven reasons we miss the drive-in theater. More »
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When I worked at a drive-in theater in the early 80s, we had a few of the traditional low-budget snack bar movies to show during intermission, but mostly we had even lower-budget slide-show ads. Yes, boring old still images to hawk our silverfish-infested popcorn (yes, really; silverfish like popcorn) and months-old hot dogs. The lucky drive-in customers who got to see this fine ad were no doubt inspired to smear pizza sauce all over their Ramblers' interiors, then dump Cokes into the defroster vents. We can only hope they followed up this ad with the LSD-inspired one! More »
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There was a lot of discussion about Sonic Drive-Ins on Friday and the question was posed: why would car enthusiasts care about drive-ins? First, there is the obvious &mdash that they're restaurants where you can "drive-in" and enjoy a meal in your car. But there's so much more. More »
]]> http://jalopnik.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=324307&view=rss&microfeed=true Sadly, the drive-in movie theater has all but disappeared from the American landscape (though Joe Bob Briggs is still going strong). I was fortunate enough to work at the ticket booth at Alameda's Island Auto Movie during its final year, and I became quite a fan of our snack-bar ads during intermission. However, that was 1984, and our ads probably dated from the not-so-entertaining mid-70s era; drive-in attendees of the late 1960s got to fry their brains out on such refreshment ads as the one above. Imagine seeing this thing between a couple of Russ Meyer films! More »
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