The Drive-In Hangout

There have been, in rapid succession, a number of references recently in my circle of friends to drive-in movie theaters. I have been made aware of several within plausible driving distance of my home. Two are well out in the suburbs, and a third of an unconventional nature is on a downtown rooftop outfitted with astroturf. That one cannot be called a drive-in, strictly speaking. Nor can the venue I went to fairly recently. It's a cemetery in Hollywood, where they periodically screen movies by projecting them onto the wall of a mausoleum. All that got me thinking about my drive-in experiences.

We had two in the Phoenix metro area, and to my knowledge, both are still there. The one I went to most was the Scottsdale 6, and it was a quintessential example. Like most, it had seen its best days before I got there. All their radios were busted, so one used their own car stereo. As a boy, I went there without a car more often than I went in one. We would have our portable radio, and lawn chairs, and just go about the grounds on foot. This made it easy to break free of the ordinarily-prescribed double features.

One bought a ticket and got one movie packaged with a second. Each screen had one such double feature, with the first movie playing again after the conclusion of the second. In a car, you couldn't move from one lot to another, but on foot you easily could. The only thing that made it tough was that they only gave you the radio frequencies for the movies you'd paid for. The way around that was simply to ask patrons who had paid for a movie you wanted to see. Either they assumed that you had paid for that one, or they didn't care that you didn't.

I had two very memorable experiences at the drive-in. One was at the Scottsdale 6. If my memory serves, we saw "Bad Boys" and "Candyman". I was immature enough to be delighted by the former and terrified by the latter (which actually remains very scary, thanks to the imposing performance of Tony Todd and the effective acting of Virginia Madsen). There were other experiences there that stayed with me, but that was the big one.

Another experience transpired back in '04, I went to a drive-in after the seasonal closing of a summer camp I had worked at. Most of the staff was there. I saw "The Village" and "King Arthur", both of which were enhanced by the beer I brought in, which I have to imagine was not allowed. That's kind of an unspoken benefit of the drive-in experience for a certain crowd, much as other stimulants were for laser light shows before my time.

Those were all great times, and I regret the further decline of drive-ins. I suspect the total adoption of 3-D could very well kill them off for good. I sort of see myself as Kevin Costner's Army soldier in "Dances With Wolves", who requests a posting out on the frontier because he wants to see it before it's all gone. Like him, I very much want to get back to the drive-in around here a good few more times before it's too late. I hope the experience will be as pleasing as it was then. It would be quite sad to discover it isn't how I remember it.