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Topic: The Drive-In Experience

Steve Klare
Film Guy

Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003

posted August 16, 2009 10:22 PM

The Drive-In Experience

I’ve had the urge to go to a Drive-In Movie for a couple of years now. The very first time I went to a movie it was a Drive-In while on vacation with my parents as a little kid. I was five then, but I still remember it. I have my own son now, and I wanted him to experience this while it’s still possible.

The problem is at least where we live; the Drive-In Theater is an extinct species. Forty and fifty years ago there were many of them on Long Island including one of the world’s largest. Yet part of life on an Island is understanding finiteness: sooner or later you will reach the shore and run out of land. Especially on the New York City end of the Island, this means land and the taxes based on it are expensive and businesses that don’t do well on a dollars per square foot basis are going to wind up under a shopping mall or a housing development sooner or later. This is deadly to a weather dependent business that has to go dormant even on nice days simply because the sun is up.

Long Island’s last drive in theater closed up in 1998, and is now a multiplex next door to a Home Depot (as if we didn’t have enough of those already…). When we moved to our home in Suffolk County there was still the ticket office and screen of what had been been our own local Drive-In, but soon it became a strip of retail stores. The conventional wisdom is a nearby indoor multiplex killed it off, but I doubt it would still be there regardless.

It’s kind of sad to see places like this go. So many people had happy memories of friends they’d had there growing up, of old romances long gone, of really cool first cars now replaced by family cars (with loan payments and rugs saturated with chocolate milk). The odds are not good that the same will be said of the supermarkets, stores and fast food places there today. (“Do you still remember the first time we went to Sears? Why, yes! We bought a dishwasher!”)

So when we go on vacation in other parts of the country, I try to find a drive in movie. It hasn’t been easy, the last few years we’ve found them but not close enough to make driving there worthwhile. This year we finally hit paydirt: we went camping up in the Lake Champlain region of Vermont. I found the Sunset Drive-In in Colchester, just North of Burlington.

http://www.sunsetdrivein.com/

The theater is in nice shape: everything was either well painted, nicely landscaped or recently scrubbed. They have recently added two new screens and even though it was a week night, attendance was pretty good. It seems like a going concern operated by people that care about it.

There is a snack bar there with that traditional deadly kind of fast food these places are famous for: hot dogs, nachos, French fries: all with optional day-glo orange cheese and fried in grease that they’ve been cultivating since the 50s. It could give even a life-long vegetarian a coronary in one sitting! We held it to just popcorn and sodas: I’d like to see my grandchildren someday!

There were a lot of people there well before sunset and the place was both active and sociable. There is a playground under screen one, and miniature golf. They both bought us a couple of minutes occupying our kid! There was a scattering of restored classic cars, and a lot of people tossing Frisbees around and playing small games of soccer and softball.

The sound system is FM stereo, but there are still two speakers on poles at the back of each auditorium(?), whether for tradition or just in case an Amishman shows up who still doesn’t have FM in his wagon. I saw no cars next to them that night.

There is also WiFi, I guess so you can go on the IMDB even while you are watching the film!

The show was “Ice Age 3” with a start time of 9:30 PM. We were there early, so we had a 20th century problem: how do you keep an active six year old quiet in a motionless car that last half hour before the sun goes down and they roll the film? The 21st Century provided an answer. Our car has a DVD system for the rear seat passengers, so he got a “movie” before the Movie.

This thing of watching a movie outdoors is a different kettle of fish than sitting in an air conditioned theater. It takes a sunset to make the movie possible, but sunsets often bring out mosquitoes too. The solution is to shut the windows, which means sooner or later they fog up and you can’t see the movie. Next time we will bring repellant and leave those windows down!

It’s also a lot more interactive Cinema experience than normal. Remember: you are providing the last stage of the sound system. So just like at home with our projectors and audio systems I got to twiddle controls: bass, treble, balance, fade, reverb and some others I’d never even heard of before!. Over and over again I worked on dialing it in. I got it closer and closer to Audio Perfection, but had to stop because 15 minutes into the feature my Beloved made a motion like she was going to smack my hand if I reached for that dashboard again (I was so close!). It took my usual theatrical experience of obsessing on (other people’s) scratches and specks to a whole new level! What was the story on screen?…I’m not entirely sure!

It turns out that just because you are at the drive-in, it doesn’t mean you are confined to your car. The bunch on one side grabbed some lawn chairs and sat in front of their car with a boom box for audio. The minivan a few spots the other way parked nose away from the screen. They opened their tailgate and watched from the cargo bay. Some deployed sheets of plastic in case of rain, but structures exceeding the height of the vehicle are against the rules! We were first-timers so we just kept to the passenger compartment.

Another interesting note concerns leather seats: If you have a car with leather seats and a hyperactive kid, count on missing a lot of the dialog unless you can dress him in some sort of anti-acoustic pants!

Just about the time “Ice Age” came to a close, our kid climbed back into the third row seats, which we’d already set up with his sleeping bag and pillow, and was soon asleep. This is exactly what my parents did with me when I was little: kind of neat!

So is the Drive-In a better way of seeing a movie? No, it’s not! In a regular auditorium the sound is better and you aren’t seeing the picture through a bug splattered windshield (Note to self: bring paper towels and Windex next time.) You are also isolated from the rest of the audience and the right crowd adds to the movie. It is nice if you are a family with small kids or if you are 19 and on a date (you know…heh-heh! ) because you have your own little space. It’s kind of a compromise between sitting in your living room and watching the tube and going out to a movie. It’s almost public privacy!

Overall it was worth doing simply because it’s a unique species of movie theater and an old tradition offering an experience beyond just seeing the movie (…which was OKish, I’m not asking Derann to print it up for me.).

I liked doing it; I’ll do it again too!

[ June 16, 2010, 11:57 PM: Message edited by: Steve Klare ]

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All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...