Drive-in movie memories

Cafe Society
1

Just the other day, I was browsing through the DVDs at Best Buy, and I saw an old Peter Sellers movie, After The Fox, a title that evoked a Proustian rush of memory of seeing it as a wee tot in the late 60s at the Moonlit Drive-in in Clarksville, TN.

When I was very young, we had little money, so my mom would take the kids to the drive-in, where admission was $5.00 a carload. We would pop popcorn and make lemonade in a giant thermos, although Mom would let us buy hamburgers and candy at the concession stand, too.

I rmeber seeing Mash; True Grit; They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?; Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; Jesus Christ Superstar; A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum; and** The Omega Man** at the drive-in.

I remember pulling into a spot and hooking the heavy metal speaker on the car window. I remember playing on the playground in front of the giant screen before the movies started. Usually, a Pink Panther or Tom and Jerry cartoon would play first, then there would be trailers, and then the first feature.

Too bad that the drive-in is dead.

Anybody else go to the drive-in back in the day?

2

I saw one of the Airports at a drive-in when I was little. All I remember was eating popcorn balls and watchig for shooting stars.

I saw a bunch of porn at a drive-in a couple of towns over in college. The only title I remember is Driller, which oddly combined a Michael Jackson spoof with a Richard Nixon spoof.

3

I saw, God help me, Dragonslayer at the local drive-in (of course, now defunct and a storage facility next to a graveyard). I don’t remember that much about the movie, but I do remember that there was a kids’ playground with one of those merry-go-round things. I was playing on it, and put my bare foot down to stop, and dragged my foot quite a brisk distance over the gravel. When the infernal machine stopped I discovered I had ripped off my the nail on my left second toe. I still watched the movie, though, after my mom cleaned me up. It was also rumored that you could do the whole “Bloody Mary” thing in the women’s bathroom, but I never tried it.

4

I saw The Rocketeer in the last drive-in theater in Hudson, New York when I was little. It closed down soon after.

5

Went to plenty of movies at the old drive through- but missed most of the movies because my friends and I were goofing around instead of watching the movie or (later in high school) because the windows were all steamed up somehow. . . :wink:

-me

6

I live in NE, which has most of the few drive-ins still left. One memory-a bunch of us would hide in a friend’s car trunk, then re-emerge past the ticket window-we saved a few bucks this way!
-the food was generally horrible-stale popcorn, and hot dogs that looked like they had spent years rotating on that spindle thing!
-one drive in on Cape Cod was built near a dump! It was swarming with skunks, raccoons and squirrels, who came by for a free lunch. A friend of mine tossed a beer at a skunk, which promptly discharged! the car smelled for weeks!
All in all, drive-ins were a mixed bag-they were cheap, but evening fog could block your view, and those metal speakers were tinny!:slight_smile:

7

There are still a couple drive-in’s left in the Kansas City area, IIRC. Drive-in-Movies are too much fun, too bad they have not made a come back.

Best things about the Drive In:

Bringing lawn chairs and sticking the speaker to the back of the chair

Piling a big group of people in the back of the pickup and watching the movies from there

The Swap N Shop on Saturday and Sunday afternoons

The cartoons they showed before and in between movies (That was when I was little)

The swingset, merry-go-round and teeter totter that they had for the kids right up close to the screen. (Remember John Travolta sitting on the swingset singing “Sandy” in Grease?)

Bringing home-popped popcorn slathered with butter along with us. My mom put it in empty bread bags in those days.

I just drove through my hometown this weekend, and noticed that there is now a gas station where our Drive In used to be. It was the Skylark Drive In, and was right across the street from the cemetary!! Scary movies were even scarier at that drive in!

8

I saw “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” in a drive-in more than twenty-five years ago with my wife (or soon-to-be-wife) and our son (or her-but-soon-to-be-our son).

I saw “Casino Royale” in a drive-in at least thirty-five years ago with friends while we were all attending the University of Arizona.

For reasons that escape me now (but I’ll bet my sister pestered him into it), my father took my sister and me to a drive-in many miles from home to see “Lady and the Tramp.” It was showing there before it came to the indoor theatres in our town. (That tells you how slowly movies came to our town.)

And I know I saw a few movies at the local drive-in as a kid, but I don’t remember what any of them were.

9

Remember the two types of sound systems? Some places you hung a speaker on the car door (or window?). You had to remember to remove the speaker before you drove away. Other places, you tuned the car radio to a particular station.

Some (most?) drive-ins had parking spaces that were angled up toward the screen so the screen was easier to see (and you didn’t hurt your neck. Whenever someone arrived late to the movie and pulled into one of those spaces with their headlights still on, the picture was washed out.

Ah, the good old days.

10

Couple of different memories. One of the most vivid was watching Ride the Wild Surf through a driving rain that made the movie almost invisible, but I was with “my girl” so it didn’t matter what was on the screen anyway. I remember another time I borrowed (or was stuck with - I’m not entirely clear on that) my mother’s station wagon and we backed the thing into the parking spot and my girl and I lowered the tail gate and back seat and we climbed into a sleeping bag in the bed of the wagon and watched (or pretended to watch) something about skiing by American International Pictures that starred Annette and Dwayne Hickman and featured the songs of Leslie Gore and (in ski togs no less) James Brown and His Famous Flames (He wasn’t the only one that was saying “I feel good” by the end of that movie).

A few years later they tore down the drive-in (the Vista View, I think it was) and to remember the “passion pit,” a bunch of us each bought a speaker pole and set of speakers. Mine stands (reminding me of my misspent youth) about six feet from where I sit typing.

When I went away to college, I had an apartment that faced a drive-in movie and for just under two semesters I watched movies and never knew what they were saying on them. So my roommate and I would get drunk, sit on our veranda and make up lines to the action on the screen. Some of our friends contended that our lines were better than those of the the actual films. Years later I would see the film on television and say to myself, “Oh, that’s what that was about!” To this day, I want to watch Southern Fried Movie just to try to understand that film. It made no sense without sound.

The really fun thing for inventing lines though was for “Mexican Movie Night” (that’s what they called it then). I think it was on the second Wednesday of every month. About half the times the films would include cowboys, vampires, airplanes and some professional wrestler with a mask on. We would always drink tequilla for those movies and seldom made it through to the end (at least we didn’t have to drive home). I contend that one of the reasons that most of my friends never made it through college was that the drive-in started showing Spanish-language films four times a month.

11

I miss drive-in movies. I don’t remember many movies that I saw in them, but I do miss the experience. For one thing, it was generally something that the whole family did together. I enjoyed them as a kid, and later, as a parent, and even alone a time or two.

When my parents took us out to the drive-ins, they’d sometimes insist that the youngest kids (there were three of us, over an 8 year spread) be dressed in pajamas and a robe, so as to just be able to carry snoozer right into bed when we got home. This was generally on summer nights, when the movies started and ran quite late into the night, well past our normal bedtimes.

When I was a parent of a young child myself, I simply dressed my daughter in shorts and a tshirt, so that SHE could go right to bed when we got home. We spent a lot of time on those little playgrounds, too, socializing with other families. It was a good way to get out of the house without completely blowing the budget, which was REALLY important as we were living in Las Vegas then. Of course, when my daughter was still an infant, I had another reason to be glad to go to a drive-in…I breastfed her until she was a little over a year old, and I could do this easily in the car, and also deal with messy diapers without missing much of the movie.

I think that a lot of the kids-in-movies rants would be lessened if we still had a lot of drive-ins.

I miss the video games at the snack bar, and even the crappy snack bar food.

I DON’T miss being the Mosquito Buffet. Mosquitoes love the way I taste, and will zoom in on ME while everyone else is bite-free. I used to have to spread a lot of insect repellant on myself before going to the drive-in, or I’d regret it soon afterwards.

The first time I saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show was in a drive-in.

I’ve always considered The Last Starfighter to be a perfect drive-in movie.

12

The first movie I can remember seeing at a drive-in was Young Frankenstein. My parents brought us. I think I was 10-ish or thereabouts.

But most of my drive-in memories are slightly more twisted.
I grew up in a rural part of Maine. We had one regular movie theater and two drive-ins. One drive-in (up on the hill)showed your mainstream movies. The other one (on the outskirts of town) showed double feature pornos all summer long.

It was like a gathering place for we young horny guys. Christ, one time we managed to bring in a keg.

13

Hmmmm…the first time I saw a porno was at a drive-in.

There is a drive-in porno theater in Georgetown, Ma., a couple of towns over from where I went to high school. It was the summer that I was 17, and my ex-boyfriend dared me to go with him.

Never one to turn down a dare, I went.

Well, I told my Mom we were going to see Back To the Future (yeah, that dates me), and headed to Georgetown. I don’t think we spoke once the whole ride over. We pulled up to the gate, they didn’t check my ID, and we were in.

My friend’s car was quite old and had no air conditioning, so we rolled down the windows. The cars were all parked pretty close together, and it seemed like there might actually have been more action in the neighboring cars than on the screen.

Now, this was one of the drive-ins where you had to tune in the radio to hear the movie. He was so worried that his battery would die and we’d be caught stuck at a porno drive-in that he wouldn’t turn on the radio. So, we had visual but no sound.

I was plastered to the right passenger door. (I was up for a dare, but really nothing else…I was a very innocent 17 year old.) There was a pretty hot oral sex scene on the screen, and my friend started inching across the bench seat towards me. He put an arm around me, at which point I completely froze.

Then, he leans in, and says, “Put your head in my lap. Nothing TOO bad will happen.”

I jumped out of the car. Needless to say, the people in the neighboring cars were freaked! I then proceeded to walk out of the woods. He finally coaxed me back into the car and drove me home, where my visiting grandmother was waiting up. I remember answering several questions about Back To The Future.

:o

14

Jack, how bizarre! I was composing, and didn’t see your post until mine was up. Weird!

15

Oh man, I have two sets of drive-in memories. . .

When I was a kid, Mom and Dad took me (and later my sister too) to the Tacony-Palmyra Drive In in Palmyra, NJ. We had a '68 Chevrolet station wagon and Dad would back the car in, flip down the tailgate and back seat, and we’d all stretch out in the wayback to watch the movie. I don’t remember what films I saw there, but I remember eating home made popcorn, drinking Coke and iced tea, and having a good time.

Later on, my girlfriend (later wife) and I spent a lot of time at the Bucks County Drive-In in Warrington, PA. They had a sound system that required you to tune into the soundtrack on your car radio, so we’d bring along a big boombox, some take-out for dinner, and settle in the back seat of my Mercury for the triple-feature.

Funny, I don’t remember any of the movies we saw there, either. :smiley:

My locality is blessed with not one, not two, but THREE (count 'em) drive-ins within a reasonable distance. This summer I plan on hitting them early and often. Since I have both a full-size station wagon and an old Cadillac with a big back seat, I figure I should sieze the opportunity. :cool:

Zap!

16

When I was in the third grade, my friend had slumber party, and we all piled into the back of her mom’s pickup truck with sleeping bags and popcorn and candy and went to the drive to see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at the local drive-in. I realize that this isn’t really “back in the day” and that drive-ins were already much in decline at this point, but that is one of my favorite memories and the only time I’ve been to a drive-in movie. I would love for them to come back, it was too much fun.

17

If you want to watch vintage drive-in concession ads and trailers, go to this site. You’ll need Quicktime.

It’s a shame that they don’t make drive-in movies anymore, like the American-International beach pictures or the Roger Corman horror flicks.

18

When I was in hs there were 4 drive ins within 10 miles of my house in the Chicago burbs. One of them had little electric heaters for winter viewing that looked just like the little speakers. We used to park in between two ‘stalls’ in order to get a heater on both sides and ‘stereo’ speakers.

My all time viewing record was double dating with my best friend three nights in a row with different dates each night[hey, it was the 70’s]. The movie was The French Connection and I still can’t figure out the plot;)

Anybody else go to the drive in while it was snowing?

19

Let’s see. In 2001, I saw eight movies at the drive-in:

Shrek
Spy Kids
Tomb Raider
Crocodile Dundee in LA
Jurassic Park III
Dr. Dolittle 2
The Princess Diaries
Legally Blonde

These were all perfect drive-in movies, light mindless and cheesy entertainment.

There are two drive-ins within driving distance and we go a few times each summer. I have better memories of those I’ve seen recently than the ones I saw as a kid, of course (we never really got the hang of drive-ins).

The best part is that my daughter has drive-in memories.

20

I remember (faintly ;)) being that kid in pajamas.

Then when I was a teenager a crowd of us would hit the drive-in nearly every weekend. A friend worked there for a while (“DON’T eat their popcorn!”, he said), and had the biggest closing-up job: going around after the movie knocking on steamed-up car windows with a quarter so the occupants would wake up and leave. Being pretty innocent, and gay besides, he was thoroughly embarrassed by the whole thing.