Going Attractions: The Definitive Story of the American Drive-in Movie Page #8

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as other countries have it, and it is a viable alternative to shopping at, you know,

Walmart or Target. It's cheaper,

there's more variety, and you're outdoors, and there are all these elements that make it really

a pleasant experience. -In some places,

it didn't go over so well. The skyway drive-in up in door

county tried for a short time. Just didn't go over. A lot of times,

we're just depending on how much of the surrounding

community you had to draw on. -They take about 10 years

to get off the ground, and once you get

to the 10-year mark, it's a really big,

thriving marketplace. It just establishes itself, and then it keeps growing

from there. -Actually, it has kept us going. In fact, the last 20 years, it's helped me

to subsidize development. -It's sustaining us

in hard times. To sustain us economically,

the thing is the swap meet. -We are running the typical

theater projection system. The single projector

with the platter system. -This is the lamp house. It provides the light to put

the picture on the screen with. -Most indoor theaters will use maybe a 2,500-watt,

3,000-watt lamp. Drive-ins usually use

a minimum of 4,000 watts, up to 7,000 watts, depending on the size

of the screen. -What we have here

is a platter system, where you can put

your entire movie together, spliced end to end,

and it just runs through. And as it plays,

it rewinds itself. You don't have to be

in the booth all the time. -Sound technology

pretty much stayed the same all the way into the 1970s, when they came up with

the concept of of radio sound, where they could broadcast

the soundtrack of the movie over your car radio. -With low-frequency

radio transmission as a means of delivering sound. -The power

was confined pretty much to just a quarter-mile radius

of the theater. -Radio sound caught on

very, very quickly. Sort of instantly transferred

to all the theaters, and they literally just took

the speaker boxes out but left the speaker poles

and everything else in place. -I was used to seeing them

all those years, though, and it almost looked like a chicken that you took

the feathers off of. -They would eventually take out

the speaker poles, like if they had to repave

the theater. That would be the time

that you would take it out, and you would just, like,

make it smooth. -We used to have

a thriving downtown. All the stores were downtown, and you walked on the street,

and you saw people, and you would talk. -The downtown was dying. People didn't go downtown

anymore. It wasn't safe.

It wasn't kept up. And all throughout the '70s, the issue of crime

was really significant. We started seeing these covered malls

be really important. -And when they built

the first shopping center, we had an inside thing

to walk in. We didn't really know

what to do in there. -No longer had the sort of town-meeting place

where you would go. Now it was gonna be

at a closed mall, because they were safer. And you also would see the rise

of theaters in the mall. These sort of smaller venues, sometimes 2 or 3 or as many

as 10 smaller theaters. -Hometown theaters

were always single screen. What you saw with the ascension

of mall theaters and youths going to the malls is that it really depressed

the drive-in theater business. -And the exhibitors came

upon the idea of, let's divide

these old movie palaces that could hold

maybe 500 or 600 or 1,000 people into a multiplex. -They would take

their indoor theater, just build a wall down

the middle to make two screens, and then eventually they were

just starting to build them as four screens, five screens,

and more. -They started building

10 plexes, 12 plexes, 14 plexes. -4 screens to 18. -16 and 32 and 100 screen,

whatever they were. So they didn't have

the 1,200-seat theaters till they had put it on four,

250-seat stadium seating. -Drive-ins were losing

their product. They were going

to indoor-theater screens. -And sometimes you would be

in a little screening room, an auditorium that might not be that much bigger

than your living room. -And, of course, those were the first small screens

that any of us had ever seen. -The drive-ins had to compete so they would start

adding on screens. -I believe the second screen

went up in '82. And it was probably

a couple of years after that theater 3 went up. And what we were

indeed doing is, we're competing

with the indoors. -I think they started off

with two screens and then expanded out to four, and that's pretty much

a typical story of drive-ins and their bid for survival. -When it became multi-screen,

it was kind of strange, because you could turn your head

and see the other screen. You could turn around and see

what was happening over there. -When you look

at a drive-in's layout, you can definitely see where,

at some later point in time, they added in one that maybe

wasn't originally planned. -What we find with the drive-ins is that

a three-screen drive-in theater, like the one that we're in

today, the Van Buren,

is really too small. We really feel most comfortable

having four or five screens, because that gives us

the widest range of being able

to keep current with the studios to show all the new releases, to do what we need to do

to show movies. -You cannot exist

as a single-screen theater, whether you're an indoor theater

or a drive-in theater. It just is not

economically possible. [ Techno music plays ] Cable television,

Blockbuster video -- those things all happened

in the early '80s. -And with VCRs coming out, people weren't as interested

in drive-ins anymore. They may have not gone

as often as they used to, and that, maybe, you can blame on the advent of home video

and how it took over. -First, there was the BETA tape

and the VHS tape. -I remember going

into that Blockbuster and going, "Wow, this is so amazing!" -Cable television, particularly HBO

and, later, Showtime, started in the '80s. -HBO was a really big thing. It cost a lot of money, so people who had it

tended to want to stay home. -We started distributing

our films primarily for HBO. -DVD and now blu-ray. -There's TiVo and DVRs

and everything that allows us to watch what we want,

when we want. More opportunities to kind of

control one's own destiny. Video games especially took off

in arcades. Gradually, they became enjoyed

more in private households. A major cultural force

in competition with movies, so much so that I think movies are trying to adopt some

of the logic of video games. -The land seemed

inexhaustible -- a land of quiet main streets. Today, the land

is being swallowed up at the rate

of one million acres a year. -As we had suburban sprawl,

cities expanded. Drive-ins became surrounded

by development. -Now the drive-in

was in the city. -In an area where I lived, which was just stuffed

with apartment buildings, just right behind it,

there was one. -At one point,

my father lived in a building that overlooked a drive-in. -A drive-in theater owner

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