The call of the drive-in never gets old
Last weekend, my colleague Charles Williams took his family to the Skyview Drive-In in Belleville. It was his first visit to an ozoner in two decades. Now he says he understands why I won’t shut up about outdoor movie screenings.
I go to drive-ins almost every weekend, and on Saturday my wife and I were at the other Skyview, the one on old Route 66 in Litchfield, Ill., for classic-car night. We brought a 12-year-old family friend who had never been to a drive-in, heard of Route 66 or seen a ‘57 Chevy. The experience blew her mind, in a good way.
At the Skyview, I ran into Kirk Johnson, a drive-in and old-car aficionado whom I’ve seen at similar events in the past few years. Like me, Kirk goes to drive-ins all over the country. He told me that there’s an ozoner for sale on eBay right now. It’s in Transfer, Pa. north of Pittsburgh and just across the state line from Youngstown, Ohio. The price is $349,000–which has me daydreaming about a second career as a theater operator.
On June 6th, which is National Drive-In Theater Day, I drove through a tornado warning to visit the Salem Drive-in in Central Illinois. I met the owner, a guy named Joe Smith who bought it from the gent who had built it in a cornfield a couple years earlier. Now Joe commutes to Salem from northern Kentucky, and for much of the week, he sleeps in the projection booth. That’s how much he loves drive-ins. He’s renovated a couple of them, including one in Jefferson, Wisc., that a deep-pocketed fellow named Lee Burgess opened as a hobby about eight years ago. Lee installed window speakers (a rarity at modern drive-ins, where the sound is sent directly to your car radio), and both Lee and Joe show vintage cartoons and snack-bar commercials at their respective establishments.
I’ve often wondered why a corporation like Disney doesn’t open a drive-in to play its latest movies. But I imagine that if they did, they’d cover it with images of tail fins and poodle skirts–and for me, phony-old gets old real fast.
Sure, I like ’50s iconography as much as the next Boomer–my favorite scene in the new “Indiana Jones” is Indy’s excursion to atomic-age suburbia–but I don’t go to drive-ins to feel nostalgic. There are still 400 open drive-ins across the country, including about a dozen each in Missouri and Illinois. New outdoor theaters, such as the ones in Salem, Springfield and Galva, Ill., continue to be built. Outdoor movie screenings are held in parks, on cruise ships and even in cemeteries. And there are now drive-ins in places like Hong Kong and Beijing where car culture is taking root. Families with bawling children and lovers with raging hormones appreciate the mix of private space and public spectacle that you get at a drive-in. Me, I like the look on a kid’s face when they see a screen that’s twice the size of the one at the multiplex and they realize that Americans have this thing called freedom of choice.
Belleville’s Skyview Drive-in is awesome. I have been taking the family there at least once or twice a year for the last 5 or so years since I found out about it. I was born here in the StL area, however raised in SW Mo, and we had a few good old-fashioned ozoners in the greater Joplin area where I grew up, and got to enjoy. I sacrificed my fee to get in the original Star Wars back in 1977 so my brother could go instead to the regular theatre. I first saw that film in the back seat of my mom’s car at a drive in back then in its 30+ week of release (needless to say the print was in bad shape, however, nothing could hold back that amazing film…) All but one of the drive ins down that way are closed now, the old 66 Drive in theatre in Carthage/Webb City is still operational, and does a pretty brisk business I have heard. I can only hope that Belleville doesn’t allow for the loss of Skyview. I have heard that its been sold and may go the way of the dodo as it were. That would be the saddest of days if that happened…