On Frozen Blog

Are you aware that there is a revival of drive-in movie theaters taking place nationwide? I wasn’t either. But on Monday, ambling up congestion-free roads toward a business appointment and enjoying the pastoral beauty of Rt. 15 toward Harrisburg, Pa., I passed a still-operating drive-in movie theater in Dillsburg. It advertised a current playing of ‘Get Smart.’ Were it not nearly 90 minutes from my home I’d be there this Friday night.
I was stunned. How could VCRs, DVDs, cinema-replicating, massively sized modern televisions, and NetFlix have failed to vanquish our ‘Happy Days’-style of theater experience? How could high-tech, high definition America embrace cinema in surrounded-by-woods sound — in analog un-crispness?
Maybe what goes around actually comes back around in American culture. Who for instance would have thought that American teens would re-embrace skateboards?
Returned home Monday evening, I resolved to research my run-in with this sliver of seemingly archaic Americana. Two excellent web sites chronicling both drive-ins’ history and current status are found with driveinmovie.com and driveintheater.com. One thing seems certain: America’s perception that the theaters had vanquished entirely from our landscape is undermined by the largely rural reality of their staying power. It’s true that you aren’t going to find 50 acres in Fairfax or Montgomery County devoted today to the theaters. It’s also true that the theater numbers nationally are about one-tenth what they were in the experience’s heyday: from a peak of about 4,000 in the early 1960s to around 400 today.
But new ones are being built. Maryland once had 42 such theaters, according to driveinmovie.com. Today she is home to just two, but three new ones (all in Carroll County) are in the planning or construction stages. Virginia has eight of the theaters in operation today. Pennsylvania is a veritable hotbed of throwback cinema: 35 illuminating today’s Friday and Saturday night skies.
But what can possibly account for both the theaters’ residual existence out in the American hinterland as well as its sudden if modest resurgence this decade? NetFlix, after all, mails its movies to Dillsburg.
Perhaps it’s because the theaters are a marvelous confluence of enduring American pastimes: the great symbol of liberty, the automobile; our never-out-of-vogue love affair with big screen film; and teenagers in heat desperate for isolation. Those plots of land, their darkness so enveloping save the screen on the horizon, were the great liberators of hormones. Wikipedia’s summary notes that at their peak popularity media labeled the sites “passion pits.”
By God, Revive, Revive I say!
It’s probably also true that in grand summer weather, like that we’ve had in D.C. early this summer, a lot of folks don’t want to go indoors to see films, especially to the cookie-cutter shopping mall holes in the corners masquerading as theaters.
Interesting to note, I think, that in and around D.C. we do rather robustly celebrate the outdoor film experience. ‘Screen on the Green’ runs on Monday nights on the Mall in July and August, and Strathmore’s outdoor film festival commands a week in August. They’re necessarily a car-less bit of culture, but they do seem to harken back to the spirit of the drive-in.
Drive-in theaters are as American as apple pie and Coca-Cola. If indeed they are on the rebound it’s cause for great celebration.
And if they’re back we’d do well to keep them around, this time for good. It would be wise, perhaps, to update their offerings. Can’t we bring more to the outdoor screens than merely contemporary Hollywood? If next summer you were given a month’s notice of ‘Slapshot’ being screened at a faraway drive-in one Friday night, an event promoted and patronized by Washington’s hockey bloggers and hundreds of their readers, even though you’ve seen the movie 63 times, wouldn’t you consider a 64th viewing then?
And wouldn’t it be swell if we found a way to beam in satellite signals upon the gatherings? And if so, the theater proprietors would appreciate knowing of events that command grand gatherings, in city after city, especially for just single nights.
Shouldn’t we galvanize the surging momentum of the NHL Entry Draft, and in particular the city-specific parties it engenders, and make appeals to the drive-in proprietors next June to host a grand evening for DraftGeeks and pucksheads? Wouldn’t a Friday draft following involving some tasty tailgating, a little tonsil hockey in the dark, and all that first-round trading frenzy super sized onscreen be just about the best-ever draft party?
Victor Hedman, next June’s likely towering top choice, would look very big there indeed.