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The city of Durham, North Carolina, home to Duke University and once
the global center of tobacco processing, is now defined by Research Triangle Park (RTP), a massive assemblage of business campuses that draws on the academic resources of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill’s universities.

In the 1990s, 42 new companies established offices in RTP, breaking
ground on 5 million square feet of construction. The Starlite Drive-In
Theater, located just a quarter mile from I-85 (a primary southern artery), is about five miles from Duke and ten from RTP. The implications of the area’s growth were not lost on Groves. “Durham’s moving this way,” he told the Durham Herald-Sun a month before the fire. “As the city expands, the land becomes more valuable than the business.”

Still, Groves never wavered on rebuilding the screen. Business had
improved in recent years, especially since 1998, when he began playing firstrun films during the summer. With the right blockbuster—a Spiderman, say, or Pirates of the Caribbean—he would even occasionally sell out all 400 parking spots on a weekend night. Groves expected the theater to be up and running again in 30 days, but money was tight, even though he intended to build a smaller tower, made only of telephone poles, plywood, primer, and paint. So the community kicked in. Site Worx Contracting, LLC hauled away the rubble free of charge. Collection jars were put in local businesses; one patron organized a benefit Starlite Harvest Dance; RBC Centura Bank set up a free account to manage donations; Progress Energy offered support poles; more than 30 businesses donated items for a fundraising auction; and more than 100 individuals made contributions, many through the saveourstarlite.org website, set up by a volunteer.

Coming in at a cost of around $25,000, and made of insurable metal sheets instead of plywood, the rebuilt Starlite screen debuted on August 27, 2005, one year and five days after the fire. During the year the theater was dark, Groves leased out space on the lot for weekend swap meets and sold guns out of a jewelry-style, countertop case. (He eventually liquidated his gun stock as part of the fundraising process.) Without the generous outpouring of community contributions, spurred on at least as much by Groves’ avuncular good humor as by the patrons’ love of cinema, he probably would have closed for good. Though technically a for-profit business, the Starlite had effectively become a public institution, preserved as a living museum of Americana.

People Will Come

From its birth, America has been a frontier nation. Jeffersonian ideals
equated the yeoman farmer with virtue and the city with corruption, the founders’ sentiments reflecting both a sense of Americans’ rugged individualism and a sense of distinction from Europe. And while unambiguous battles between good and evil are not endemic to the Hollywood Western alone, in no other country or genre are they so inseparable from expansionist values. The classic Western showed us as good stewards of the land, protecting it from the depredations of natives and crooks.

Westerns played to packed lots during the drive-in’s heyday of the 1950s. The frontier myth continued to animate the American imagination, having compelled millions to leave the city for the open space of the suburbs. Where once industry had provided the foil to our pastoral ideals, now Americans could reap its benefits—cars, washing machines, even movies—while distancing themselves from its blight. A dedication to progress and technology was at least as significant to the national ethos as the pastoral ideal, and nowhere did these values intersect more fluidly than at the drive-in. Even given such a cultural milieu, the drive-in boom required a perfect storm of conditions that were only possible in postwar America: population, money, land, entrepreneurs, and cars, all with policy incentives mixed in.

America’s suburban population leapt from 35 to 84 million between 1950
and 1970. With postwar economic prosperity came a car for every suburban family. Zoning laws that had designated land for single-family housing also designated commercial space at intersections and industrial space on cheap land near highways, railroads, and rivers. The aspiring drive-in entrepreneur saw this cheap land and relatively small start-up construction costs and took advantage of a nearly fool-proof business model. In fact, more than half of the drive-in owners of the ‘50s had no theatrical exhibition experience.

On average, more than two new “ozoners”—the nickname for outdoor
movie theaters—opened every day in the late ‘40s, according to the National Association of Theater Owners. Importantly for these theaters’ profitability, the programming was of little consequence. Operators could book movies with low rental fees, five months old or five years old, past hits or cheap Bpictures. John Wayne, Bob Hope, and Disney films could play on the same screen as straight-to-the-drive-in sci-fi features like The She-Creature and
Attack of the Giant Leeches.

It was a low period for Hollywood revenues, but not for outdoor exhibition. Owners would change the program three or four times a week, and crowds would flock indiscriminately. These audiences tended to make a whole evening of an outing, showing up early so the kids could play on the jungle gym at the base of the screen while adults engaged in neighborly socializing, babysitter- free. As the night’s first stars grew visible, families noshed the concession stand hot dogs and hamburgers on which drive-in profits depended, then settled in for a double- feature. From ’48 to ’58, the number of ozoners nearly quintupled, from about 800 to over 4,000. The drive-in had become a definitive suburban institution.

 

Dark Days

Wilson Shankweiler loved movies. He opened Shankweiler’s Drive-In on
four acres of land in Orefield, Pennsylvania—a former iron mining town
some six miles north of Allentown—in 1934. But even before he opened
the drive-in, he would set up a table on his property and show movies on a canvas strung up between two posts. Paul Geissinger, who now owns Shankweiler’s, says Shankweiler traveled to Pennsauken, New Jersey, in 1933, where he saw the first drive-in theater in the country, invented by Camden native and manufacturing entrepreneur Richard Hollingshead. Shankweiler’s opened in 1934 as the second drive-in theater in the world. Today, landlocked by subdivisions on three sides, the theater is open for its 74th consecutive summer.

Another half-dozen miles north, in Walnutport, Pennsylvania, Becky’s
Drive-In also endures. Founder William Beck started the theater in 1946. According to his daughter, Cindy Deppe, now the theater’s co-owner with her brothers, Beck had lost an eye to an errant scrap of metal while working in a factory, endowing him with a handsome insurance payoff. He had also been a traveling salve salesman and was rewarded for his success with a movie projector. With equipment and start-up funds, in 1936 he began screening movies at Uncle Charlie’s restaurant. Ten years later, he bought the nearby parcel that Becky’s has called home for over 60 years.

The area around Allentown once supported fourteen drive-ins, Geissinger says. When Shankweiler’s opened, “they could show movies that were eight or ten years old. It didn’t matter. There was no TV. There was no video.” During the Eisenhower-Kennedy-era peak, Becky’s showed second-run and B-pictures and never lacked business, doing especially well with Elvis Presley films. And yet, by the early ‘70s, William Beck had resorted to screening X-rated films to survive, while Shankweiler’s was bleeding money showing trashy R-rated fare to near-empty lots. Only a decade removed from prosperity, gone was the family-friendly drive-in and teenage escape of Boomer lore, replaced instead by a second enduring image—the seedy lot beyond the fringe of polite society.

If the rise of the drive-in depended on a perfect storm of circumstances, then only minor shifts in the weather patterns were necessary to hasten its fall. Jennifer Sherer Janisch, CEO of drive-ins.com, says the standardization of daylight savings time, in 1967, forced summer double-features to run too late and hit concession revenues especially hard, as showtime moved away from dinnertime. Patrick Corcoran, of the National Association of Theater Owners, theorizes that television grew more widespread and less of a novelty in the ‘60s, and movie attendance overall suffered.

Perhaps cultural shifts caught up with the drive-in, too, as the Baby Boomers who had grown up with it grew out of it. The ‘60s counterculture surged and left such emblems of conservative ‘50s Americana in its wake. As drive-in audiences dwindled, investing in repairs and better audio and video technology seemed a foolhardy choice. Meanwhile, construction of single-screen “hardtop” theaters all but ceased, replaced by twin theaters—and, later, their ten- and twenty-plus-screen descendants. Multiplexes boasted technical qualities far superior to drive-ins, and were typically built in the shopping centers and indoor malls that began to define suburban shopping patterns, a development trend inchoate in the late ‘60s
and cemented by the ‘80s.

During the ‘70s, second-run exhibition also grew anachronistic, a victim
of the evolution toward pay television and home video. Hollywood
adapted its release strategies to compete with the small screen. Where
once films were premiered at downtown movie palaces before slowly
proceeding through neighborhood theaters and out to non-urban areas, the surfeit of multiplex screens enabled simultaneous wide releases. The industry began to recognize its cash cow in blockbusters. With 1975’s Jaws, an unprecedented number of prints were distributed around the country, and advertising was front-loaded to attract nationwide audiences for the first few weekends. The release strategy worked, to say the least.

Outmoded and stigmatized, drive-ins still scraped by in the ‘70s, their
numbers not yet substantially falling off. Pornography worked for some, while others diversified by hosting daytime swap meets—though it certainly was not a model for great profits. “Shankweiler’s survived because Wilson Shankweiler and Robert Malkames were millionaires,” Geissinger says of the theater’s founding housing developer/hotelier and his successor, a temp agency executive. “They didn’t need the business. It was their hobby. It was for enjoyment… And there were some lean Saturday nights out there,” he says, with a trace of an underdog’s pride.

More than any other factor, though, the one that most suffocated the drivein was the same one that gave rise to it: suburban expansion. Drive-ins once straddled the border between developed and pastoral regions, but by the ‘80s, most were hemmed in by matrices of highways, subdivisions, shopping centers, and corporate campuses. With the growing dominance of the inter-suburban commute, the original asterisk-pattern development corridors that jutted out from the city center no longer defined metro area travel. Instead, suburban travel routes came to form intricate webs, and drive-ins were trapped.

For owners, this was often more reward than punishment. As effective land speculators, their lots were worth substantially more than they had paid, and much more than they were making in revenue. To sell was nearly incontestable for most. The land for the Morris Plains Drive-in near Parsippany, New Jersey, for instance, had been purchased in 1947 for $10,750; it sold to a developer in 1981 for $1.25 million. “We didn’t buy the drive-in just for the sake of it being a drive-in,” one modern owner acknowledged matter-of-factly. “There’s a consideration, obviously, in the land value as an investment value.”

In the mid-‘80s, with drive-in admission prices at three or four dollars per adult, a family could see a bargain double-feature and have an inexpensive meal for the same amount it would cost just to see one new release at the multiplex. Still, attendance was modest in most areas, affected by home-viewing technologies and the pall cast by outdoor exhibitors of cheap, bloody, exploitation and “slasher” fare, and, increasingly, pornography. (X-rated films usually boosted attendance, but at a cost to concessions: the material was not exactly what critics call “popcorn movies.”) In rural areas, a few theaters, like Becky’s, survived this way, albeit anemically; most conceded defeat.

Through the ‘70s, the number of drive-ins nationwide held steady at about 3,600. By 1983 there were 3,000. That number halved by 1988, and halved again over the next ten years. Where the pioneer ethos of the classic cowboy film reflected its audience’s spirit during the drive-in’s boom, during the bust years many theaters came to resemble ghost towns.

A New Hope

Today there are about 650 drive-in screens on just over 400 sites around the country. Most theaters were, in a sense, created by suburban sprawl, then crushed by it; and since sprawl shows no signs of slowing, a resurgence of drive-ins would seem unlikely. But in fact, business is better for many remaining drive-ins than it has been in 40 years, and the number of new-builds over the last few years has roughly equaled the number of closings. Challenging the seedy recent past, a couple chains even run modern multiplex ozoners. While some surviving and new theaters are located in remote areas, the most successful ones tend to be found outside college towns and small cities like Allentown.

In all regions, the sine qua non of the drive-in’s turnaround has been the decision to show first-run films. More than anything else, outdoor theaters were in need of an image makeover, and cleaning up programming was the first step. This transition happened for most theaters in the early ‘90s. “I actually thank the multiplex theaters for helping us,” Geissinger told me. As he explains it, a film like Jaws played in one 1,200-seat theater, for five shows per day, in the Allentown area in 1975. Conversely, in 2005, the final Star Wars prequel started a new showing virtually every five minutes somewhere in the area. With such a release, after two weeks, a new blockbuster would come out and usurp some screenings, so the theater would drop a print (movie lingo for getting rid of a copy). “[The studio] doesn’t want that print sitting on the floor not making a penny,” Geissinger says. So, in the early ‘90s, the extra prints started going to drive-ins. “‘Hey I’ve got a print coming off this week, it’s after only two weeks release. Do you want to play it?’ Two weeks old? Well, of course you want to play it,” he says.

After studios realized that drive-ins could make them money, they started striking an extra print, first-run, and released more family-friendly summer fare through ‘90s and into the ‘00s. Drive-ins have, in a sense, come full circle as a cheap family outing. While Becky’s, in Pennsylvania, does serve some local regulars with popular PG hits—superhero action flicks, the latest bawdy Will Ferrell comedy—it draws crowds of tourists. Families travel once or twice each summer from Philadelphia and New York to make a night of the drivein.

Some nostalgic boomers show up with their grandkids. In some southern states where the weather is warm most of the year, the number of drive-ins has gone up in the last ten years. Between 1995 and 2005, according to the National Association of Theater Owners, eight new drive-ins opened in Alabama,surprisingly.

There are even some young people getting into the business. Ryan Smith, a 29-year-old law student-turned-ozoner entrepreneur says that, in Texas, a drive-in is a good business. “Nostalgia’s always tied into it,” he concedes, “but do you go to a baseball game because it’s nostalgic and because it’s America’s pastime? No. You go because you either love the team or it’s exciting or it’s something to do with friends.” His Stars and Stripes Drive-In, a three-screen new-build that opened in 2003 amidst farmland off a desolate, but well-traveled, stretch of highway outside Lubbock, Texas, is exemplary of a state showing strong drive-in growth. His theater—which screens double-features to a total capacity of over 1,000 cars—could never survive simply as a tourist niche. “I hope we’re in the very beginning of an upswing,” Smith adds, “because I certainly don’t want to be in a dying industry.”

Bob Groves got his start in drive-ins at age 13, working as a “ramp boy”— filling potholes and changing the marquee—at a theater in his hometown of Cumberland, Maryland. One night the projectionist was either drunk or delinquent (accounts vary), and young Groves was called upon to assume the job. In 1982, he became regional manager for Piedmont Theaters, a drive-in chain in central North Carolina. All three of its locations were then playing X-rated films. In 1986, the company broke up and Groves bought the Starlite, where he immediately changed the format to recent second-run films. He also started the swap meet and gun dealership, along with a video club, and upgraded the audio system to an FM transmitter. Business was never outstanding, but it had steadily improved in the years leading up to the fire, with sellouts for the right programming. But on March 9, while gearing up for the Starlite’s third post-fire season, Groves died suddenly, at age 53. The saveourstarlite.org website now features only a picture of Groves beside his projector, and a brief note: “As Bob was the sole proprietor, the Drive-In Theater is closed and will remain closed until further notice.”

When a business is less profitable than the land it occupies, only commitment to the craft can sustain it. In the Starlite’s case, at least, it wasn’t just the historical ambience that fed patrons’ nostalgia, but also Groves’ dedication and showmanship. Groves had no illusions about the region’s growth patterns, once telling a reporter for the Durham Herald-Sun that “if someone comes along with an offer I can’t refuse, I’m looking at retirement for the rest of my life.” (Though he also said his “retirement” would involve opening another theater and letting someone else run it.) While “drive-in theater owner” may never be as sexy as, say, “astronaut” as a profession, people like Ryan Smith, the Lubbock drive-in owner, may be lending it some new cache.

“I like the indoor theaters, but it took one time going to the Sky-Vue, and I was hooked,” Smith says of his grandfather’s theater, which dates to 1948. “I thought to myself, ‘This is the way to watch a movie.’ I was watching Signs on a summer night. With the clear sky, I could see all the stars, it was like I was waiting on the aliens to invade. I thought, ‘Man, this is too cool.’”

 

This article appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of Next American City magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW!