I don't know if it's the fact that I'm an immigrant to this country, but I have a general love affair with Americana, particularly...let's say the period of the 1950s to the 1970s. My house is full of mid-century modern furniture and clocks; I love pop art and comic books; I'm a sucker for neon; one day I would love to own a classic car with tail fins; and although I've generally abandoned it, I would eat American fast food every day if I thought it was good for me. I could keep going but I won't. I crave all-American experiences tied to a certain period of American history. That's all there is to say there.
Except it isn't. Because when I reached my 52nd birthday a couple of months ago, I'd never been to a drive-in movie, which I consider a touchstone experience to that period of American history. That changed last month in Vermont.
It seems like credit for creation of the first drive-in movie theater is generally given to Richard Hollingshead, who opened the Automobile Movie Theater in Camden, New Jersey in June of 1933. While it seems like the idea (and even the practice) of watching a film outdoors while sitting in a car had been around before then, Hollingshead was perhaps the first one to turn that idea into a bonafide business concern. Or maybe he just gets all the credit because he patented the idea. Whatever the reason, he's generally seen as the inventor of the concept.
Hollingshead's idea didn't catch fire right away, maybe because of the patent and the royalties that would be due Hollingshead for copying his idea. Shankweiler's became the second ever drive-in theater when it opened the very next year in nearby Orefield, PA, and by the 1940s there were some more scattered across the country here and there, but it seems like maybe fewer than 50 or 100 total.
Shankweiler's, by the way, is still in business today some 87 years later, making it the oldest of its kind.
The golden age of the drive-in theater arrived in the 1950s, when the economic boom following the end of World War II put a car in every American family's driveway and the country found new ways to spend time in Detroit's finest machines. New roads and personal automobiles connected people to destinations they couldn't have imagined visiting before the '50s. Drive-in restaurants popped up so that families didn't even need to leave their car while eating and the drive-in theater was poised to take off, especially after Hollingshead's patent was ruled invalid early in the same decade. By 1958, there were more than 4,000 of them in the United States.
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| Sunset Drive-In screen 2. Waiting for the light to disappear... |
If you could make a go of all that in the 1950s, pretty soon there were other economic pressures on the drive-in theater owner. The drive-in movie theater experience is made for the kind of automobiles manufactured in the post-WWII boom: wide sedans with comfy bench seats stretching across the entire width of the car, sometimes with convertible tops that when down completed the nighttime viewing experience just perfectly. Then in the 1970s we had a little fuel crisis in this country. Goodbye large spacious gas-guzzling cars; hello compact fuel-efficient hatchbacks. It's not so comfortable sitting in a small car with bucket seats for a couple of hours watching a movie. Or doing whatever else you might be prone to do in a parked car at night under the stars.
Two other things happened in the 1960s and 1970s that further sounded the death knell for drive-ins. First, people started moving out of urban areas and into suburban areas where drive-in theaters were located. That wide open tract of land built to hold nothing more than a parking lot for nighttime use now became a lot more valuable, and holding onto that property now worth way more all of a sudden became too much for some theater owners to resist selling. And then the VCR was invented and became affordable. Why pay for a night out at a drive-in when you could do it a lot cheaper in front of your own TV?
The 4,000 plus drive-in theaters in 1958 have been reduced to about 400 today. They likely are mostly labors of love at this point for their owners. Fortunately for this Americana-loving immigrant, one of the 400 or so is in Colchester, Vermont which was about a 10 minute drive from where we were staying in downtown Burlington. Movie time!!
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| Screen 1. Getting closer to showtime. |
Colchester's Sunset Drive-In was opened in 1948 and it's been owned by the same family since it opened in that year. It's a legit throwback. This place is the real deal. For 32 years, the Sunset operated with just a single screen. Then in 1980 they added two more and a fourth followed 14 years later. I guess four screens brings in a lot more revenue than selling tickets for a single movie each night.
Four screens has one more advantage for the movie-goer: choice. Most of the movies shown at the Sunset are years old, bringing in middle-aged folks looking to re-watch movies that they grew up with in a new and different theater experience. We'd been tracking the movies playing there for a few weeks before we visited: Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back, The Karate Kid, Back to the Future. Classics that I grew up with, all in double feature arrangements. Our choices the night we went? Some horror flicks that I don't remember; Grown Ups / Ferris Bueller's Day Off; The Goonies / Stand By Me; and Grease / Dirty Dancing.
Of course, we opted for Grease. We also opted out of Dirty Dancing. Past our bedtime, I guess.
A quick drive out of Burlington, scanned our pre-purchased on line ticket at the box office, picked a spot we liked facing backwards, grabbed some food from the snack bar, tuned the radio to 99.3 and we're ready for one of 1978's finest movies.
Two things to explain here I guess. First, there's no requirement to "front in" and watch the flick from the driver's seat (which has a steering wheel all too close to you) and the front passenger seat; probably makes way more sense to tailgate it a bit. Second, no more speaker boxes delivered to your car; just use the FM radio.
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| The Sunset's Snack Bar. Get the fries. They were seriously awesome. Crispy and salty. |
Sounds awesome and easy, right? It was awesome. I mean it really was cool to do this. It just wasn't so easy. Let's talk lessons learned, shall we?
Today's automobiles are far, far more complicated than they were in the 1950s. We own a Jeep Renegade. We've had it for less than two years and before we drove it to Vermont, the mileage on that car was below 5,000 miles. Meaning we don't drive it a lot. And when we do, we just turn it on and drive it like a normal car. We don't tend to park it a lot at night when it's dark (and when it needs to be dark) and just leave the radio on.
First, the interior lights turn on when the engine is off but the electrical systems (to power the radio) are not. There are lights up front, in the back seat and in the trunk and all of them are on. Frantic paging through the owner's manual and pressing buttons and rotating dials got this one mostly solved for a while, although we never managed to turn off the trunk lights.
Next issue: after a while without the engine running, the radio shuts off. Not so good when that's the soundtrack for the movie. It's an easy fix. Just push the ignition button without turning on the engine, but doing that five or so times during a movie is annoying. And, it somehow reset the interior lights that we had managed to turn off. Eventually, we just gave up on the interior lights and left them on.
So we finally have both those issues solved when some dude from the theater walks by. Our fog lights are on. Fog lights? Who even knew we had fog lights? Back to the owner's manual. We followed those directions and I swear, they did nothing. We got them off at one point only to have them come back on after, yep you guessed it, the radio went off and we pushed the ignition button. Eventually another dude came by and told us (again) that our fog lights were on. Dude no. 2 got some tape and some foil and solved that for us.
While all that was going on, we were trying to watch the movie while relaxing in the hatchback of our Renegade, which is not so comfortable for a 5-11-ish, 190 lb-ish man to sit in. We don't have any sort of camping chairs because we don't camp so the hatchback (or trunk, if you prefer) was it. Truth be told here we do have one chair which I picked up on a long weekend watching cars circle a track in Talladega, Alabama but I wasn't about to relax comfortably while my wife sat in the trunk. Not a good look.
So...lessons learned: bring two chairs and buy a battery operated radio. Or figure out how to use all the features of your car. Radio seems easier.
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| Projection booth built into the side of the Snack Bar. These things have to project a good distance. |
Would I have preferred things to go seamlessly? Of course. But I know Grease. I've seen it before multiple times, I have the soundtrack and I'm pretty intimately familiar with the plot, although I'm maybe not crystal clear on the past relationship between Danny and Cha Cha. I could stand to be away from the movie for a couple of minutes or so while I'm trying to turn off the lights of our car and not lose track of what's going on.
As a side note here, can I put a question out there? What's with the whole "Beauty School Drop-Out" song? I get the point of the song that Frenchie is looking for a guardian angel to point her in the right direction for her life but how down on women is her Frankie Avalon angel? "You've got the dream but not the drive"? "You're not cut out to hold a job"?? "If you go for your diploma you could join the steno pool"??? I get that this movie was made in the 1970s and it's set in the 1950s but COME ON!! Seriously? That's the guardian angel you want? I'm not sold.
That rant aside, the important thing here was spending time with the person I love most on an August night in Vermont and seeing the best scenes in the movie (namely the Thunder Road scene and "You're The One That I Want" in its entirety) without distractions caused by our car. I got all that. Next time: two chairs and a radio. I got that. Totally got that lesson down.
I could argue Grease was the perfect movie to see at the drive-in. I mean it's set in the 1950s for crying out loud. Heck, it was soooo perfect that there's even a drive-in scene in the movie itself. What more could we want? Other than two chairs and having committed the Renegade owner's manual to memory in advance.
Now I feel I'm one step closer to being immersed in mid-20th century American culture, even if it happened to be a simulation of an experience that was in its heyday 70 or so years ago. I'm sure this was a bit of a tame imitation of that experience all those decades ago and I'm pretty sure that the jet airplanes flying overhead to and from Burlington airport wouldn't have obscured the soundtrack back in the day. But how often do you get the chance when you live where I live to go to a drive-in movie easily and conveniently. I'm glad we did this. Now about that classic car with those fins...and without the fancy radio and light controls.
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| Getting Edward Hopper-esque at the Sunset Drive-In. |
Just to be completely transparent here, despite the title of this post we didn't go on a Saturday. Grease was ending its four week run at the Sunset on Thursday night so we had to go on that night. But no way was I writing a blog post about a drive-in movie without naming this thing after David Bowie's "Drive-In Saturday". I've tried to use song or album titles as much as I can in this blog (The Rolling Stones, The Police, U2, Foreigner, Buckner & Garcia...) and there's no way I wasn't using Bowie on this one. Heck, this whole blog is named after a Bowie song!
How We Did It
Sunset Drive-In is located at 155 Pointers Point Road in Colchester. It's open in the summer seven days a week weather dependent. All tickets are double features. While we assumed we had to stay at one screen for both movies on a bill, there's probably nothing preventing you from moving your car to an adjacent screen for the second flick. Don't tell them I told you it was possible to do that because I totally don't know that. Check out their website for what movies are playing when.
Showtimes vary during the season with the setting of the sun. When we were there in mid-August, gates to the property opened weeknights at 7:45 with first movie showtimes staggered by screen about a half an hour later. We got there maybe five minutes after the gates opened for an 8:20 Grease start.
There is a snack bar on premises with typical movie theater fare as well as fast food-y meals. If you plan on eating a meal and seeing the whole first movie you bought tickets to, you might want to hustle a bit. The time on a hamburger, some chicken tenders and some fries ran about 15-20 minutes. With just 35 minutes between the gates opening and showtime, that wasn't much time to be a bit late and to walk to get the food. The fries were seriously awesome by the way.
Finally, if you don't take my advice about chairs and the radio, don't complain to me when things go wrong. Enjoy the movie and hope it doesn't rain.
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