At the Drive-In
Snack-bar parking is going back; back to a time when date night meant watching a movie through the fogged-up windscreen of your car. Back to when kids watched whatever damn movie their parents were watching and when parking close to the snack-bar could make or break the night.
According to that revered etymological text, Urban Dictionary the term snack-bar parking was born out of drive-in movie theaters and refers to getting a parking spot close to the snack bar. While it sounds plausible it’s very slim evidence to base a story but... who cares? I want to talk about the drive-in because the drive-in is awesome.
My only memory of the drive-in cinema was seeing a double feature of Erik the Viking and Nuns on the Run with my brother, two sisters and my dad. Us kids stretched out in our early 80s Toyota Tarago, ate choc-tops from the snack bar, snuggled under our blankets and waited for the movie to start. Then I promptly fell asleep.
That was around 1991 and it was the last time I went to the drive-in. By then it was an hour drive to one of the few remaining drive-ins in Sydney and years away from their eventual refurbishment.
Instead, I listened enviously to my siblings’ rollicking stories from long before I was born. How they huddled in the boot and watched scary movies like Salam’s Lot or The Shining through the crack of the back seat in the beloved family Ford (which they had to sell when I was born because you couldn’t fit four kids in the back… my birth brought them all nothing but pain). I watched Grease (about a million times) and felt my life would always be less for the sheer fact no boy would ever yell after me ‘you can’t walk out of a drive-in.’
In their prime, drive-in movie theaters were the ideal form of entertainment for young families and teenagers alike. They were cheap, comfortable and you didn’t have to worry about annoying your fellow movie-goers with crying babies or serious make-out sessions. What more could you ask for?
The first drive-in movie theater was opened in 1933 by Richard Hollingshead. There are conflicting reports as to how Hollingshead got the idea for the drive-in theater. Some say his mother had difficulty fitting into regular movie theater chairs, others that he was a car and movie lover himself but in a 1965 article by Ronald DeGraw from the Philadelphia Inquirer, Hollingshead himself was quoted as saying it was part of a deluxe service station/hangout design.
I thought we could have gas pumps in the shape of palm trees, and I got the idea for outdoor movies originally as something people could do while they were waiting for their friends.
While he never got around the to service centre, Hollingshead dedicated a lot of time and effort to getting the drive-in off the ground. He experimented in his own driveway first, testing out projectors, sound systems, wet weather protections and – to our great interest here at SnackBar Parking – parking design. The patent, which was granted in May 1933, details the curvilinea parking design, angle of inclination of the parking spaces to prevent obstruction of the view of the screen and a bug guard for the projector with air nozzles to deter bugs from flying into the path of the light.
Two months later The Park-In Theaters in Camden, New Jersey opened. It cost just 25c per car and 25c per person (or US$1 for a family). Starting the tradition of questionable movies for kids, the film shown was a forgettable English movie called Wives Beware (renamed from the English title Two White Arms) which is described in the book British Film Catalogue: The Fiction Film Vol 1 as ‘Married Major fakes amnesia to flirt with younger girl.’ The movie is considered a lost film but if you want to get a taste of what it was like here’s the star, Adolphe Menjou, singing the title track.[embed] https://youtu.be/WFfl_zwmGks
According to Hollingshead, the drive-in theater was a ‘smashing success,’ and over that first summer visitors came from all over the US to enjoy his outdoor cinema. It wasn’t, however, a huge money maker. Hollingshead had problems with film distributors and found most of his profits were taken up with over-inflated costs for renting the movies. A few years later Hollingshead sold Park-In Theaters and opened another drive-in theater. Later Hollingshead licenced his design to other drive-in theaters but there were ongoing issues with collecting royalties and legal challenges to the patent. In the end Hollingshead’s patent was deemed invalid in 1950. After this drive-ins began popping up all over the US and then all over the world.
Australia's first drive-in, the Skyline located in the Melbourne suburb of Burwood, opened in 1954. It featured On the Riviera, a movie starring Danny Kaye and featuring a (not-too) family friendly plot of a nightclub singer (played by Danny Kaye) impersonating a famous aviator (also played by Danny Kaye) only to have the aviator’s wife fall in love with the singer while the singer tries to mollify his girlfriend without exposing the ruse.
According to Margaret Simpson’s fascinating blog post Remembering Australia’s Drive-ins the Skyline was a well thought-out affair. You could order your food using the speaker post and have it delivered to your car, someone would apply glycerine on your windscreen if there was rain and heaters were used to demist the windows on cold nights. There were even car hops on hand if there were mechanical problems, like flat batteries, at the end of the night.
Throughout the 1950s and 60s, drive-ins continued to be hugely popular with Australians. During their heyday there were around 330 drive-ins in operation. But by the 1970s customers stopped showing up, both in Australia and the rest of the world. The oil crisis and the rise of television and VCRs saw more people staying in. In Australia particularly, developers swooped on the slowly failing drive-ins to turn the huge blocks of land into housing estates and shopping centres. Some survived, however, and at the turn of the 21st century many were modernised and refurbished for modern audiences. Today there are about 16 drive-ins in Australia and about 400 internationally.
The appeal of the drive-in was never just the movie. It was the comfort of sitting in your own car, talking as loudly as you wanted to or not talking if it was a date-night. Kids played in the on-site playgrounds and if the movie was no good there was always the snack bar. Luckily modern drive-ins seem to know this and have kept many of those features while updating their technology. I think it’s about time I get some more drive-in memories. See you at the snack-bar!
What’s the most inappropriate movie your parents took you to at the drive-ins?
