Conner and Johnson, Starlit Screens; Southern Spaces

2008 marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of the drive-in theater. In 1932, Richard Hollingshead, an auto parts sales manager, began to experiment with sound, car angle, and weather conditions for showing movies in his Riverton, New Jersey, driveway. The following year, Hollingshead obtained a patent for his drive-in theater plan and opened the Automobile Movie Theater (later the Camden Drive-In), with a capacity of four hundred cars, in neighboring Pennsauken. On opening night, May 16, 1933, the theater featured a second-run film, Wives Beware. The novelty of the experience, "Sit in your car, see and hear movies," may have surpassed the quality of the movies themselves, for Hollingshead and his partners struggled to obtain first-run films from distributors. Hollingshead's drive-in, where patrons "could dress as they please, smoke, talk, and eat supper at the same time" lasted three years.1

Hollingshead's drive-in established some basic parameters for subsequent theaters. In addition to technical requirements and internal spatial organization, Hollingshead's theater set a precedent for geographic location. Like the Automobile Movie Theater, located just outside Camden and just over the Delaware River from Philadelphia, subsequent drive-ins were constructed on large tracts of land on the outskirts of residential and commercial development. As Bruce Lonnee, a senior development planner for Athens/Clarke County, Georgia, points out, drive-in theaters were designed "to accommodate the automobile first and the customer second," and were usually located with access to major transportation routes. Drive-ins predated shopping malls and suburban subdivisions, but their spatial organization "typif[ies] the features of all suburban commercial development." Indeed, many drive-in theaters were ultimately leveled to make way for shopping malls or residential developments.2

During the Depression few people were willing to spring for the price of tickets, and drive-ins slowly appeared on the outskirts of other urban areas, such as Galveston, Texas, Los Angeles, California, and Allentown, Pennsylvania. Gasoline rationing and rubber shortages accompanied the war years, further reducing patronage. By 1945, barely one hundred drive-ins existed in the United States.3

The postwar years witnessed an astounding upswing in drive-in popularity. By 1950, over two thousand drive-in theaters were in operation, and by 1956, more than four thousand. According to one estimate, "the public [spent] more at drive-ins. . . than at live theatre, opera, and professional and college football combined."4 The drive-in's sudden popularity was due in large part to the postwar baby boom. Drive-in theaters, which offered affordable, family entertainment, catered particularly to young suburbanites with children. Most theaters boasted playgrounds; some offered miniature golf, pony rides, and fireworks exhibitions. Drive-ins appealed to the emerging teen culture, as couples sought the privacy of darkened cars.5

The drive-in's popularity was short-lived. By the 1960s, their numbers began to decline. In the 1970s, many fell victim to suburbanization. Land on which theaters stood became more valuable for commercial development. Theaters resorted to screening exploitation films and adult-only fare. In the 1980s, the advent of cable television and the expanding video rental market brought the drive-in industry to its knees. At the beginning of the decade, there were nearly 2,500 active theaters, but by 1989, less than one thousand remained. The numbers continued to decline throughout the 1990s; by century's end, fewer than 450 theaters survived.6

In the 2000s, the number of theaters stabilized at around four hundred, but their geographical distribution shifted. California, with its rapidly expanding suburbs, lost seventeen theaters — nearly half its 1998 total — in the subsequent ten years. Tennessee, Texas, and Alabama added theaters as part of a growing interest not just in maintaining existing theaters, but in constructing new ones.7 Six of Alabama's ten drive-ins opened since 1996.8 New theaters are planned for Virginia and possibly Atlanta's northernmost suburbs.9

Screen of Starlite Drive-In with Starlite Mobile Home Park in the foreground. Christiansburg, VA, 2008.

Proponents of drive-in theaters cite a nostalgia factor: a desire for "family-oriented" entertainment. Drive-ins owe much of their recent resurgence to the "retro" aesthetic and perhaps to middle-class, white Americans' search for some imagined, idyllic past and place. In many cases, this past is located — like the hey-day of drive-ins — in the 1950s. Drive-in owners, many of them baby boomers, have tapped into this nostalgia. Theaters tout G- and PG-rated films and highlight their "family-friendly" atmosphere. A theater under construction in Moneta, Virginia, near the resort community of Smith Mountain Lake, explicitly claims this heritage and will be named the Mayberry Drive-In, after the fictional town in The Andy Griffith Show. The Mayberry will include a 1950s-style diner, and movies with PG- or PG-13 ratings.10

The reinvention of the drive-in theater as an imagined space of a supposedly more moral, wholesome era obscures and ignores the tensions and repressions of that period, tensions which shaped drive-ins and other forms of popular entertainment.11 Contemporary hipsters and rockabilly fans also claim drive-in nostalgia, through a past evocative of James Dean, Elvis Presley, and Marlon Brando — icons of 1950s teenage rebellion. Drive-ins first achieved reputations as "passion pits" where unsupervised teens inaugurated the sexual revolution.

Drive-in nostalgia does not acknowledge the white racism that characterized the drive-in's glory years. Like most other public establishments in the South prior to the 1960s, indoor movie theaters were legally segregated. As Douglas Gomery explains, de facto racial segregation in movie theaters was common outside the South as well, but was dictated more by "residential patterns of use." Some southern locales contained black-only movie houses, but these were often poorly equipped and maintained, and usually only screened first-run films after white theaters had shown them. Other forms of segregation included designated viewing times for African-Americans, usually after movie houses had closed for whites; restricted balcony seating areas; and separate entrances, concessions, and toilet facilities for whites and blacks.12

Despite many studies of discrimination in other entertainment venues, scholarship on segregation at the drive-in is almost nonexistent. There are indications that such segregation may have been the norm in Dixie. Robert Weyeneth notes that the "general pattern [of segregation] was exclusion."13 While venues like the Olympic Theater in Los Angeles served patrons of all races, black-only drive-ins such as the Booker T. in Roanoke, Virginia, or the Star-Lite in Dallas, Texas, appeared below the Mason-Dixon Line.14 Drive-ins that admitted both races sometimes attempted to segregate through partitioning. When Richmond, Virginia's Bellwood Theater opened in 1948, it contained "segregated motor entrances defined by a wall in between. African Americans entered the drive-in from the back. . . and parked in the walled-off northeastern corner of the theater lot. Separate concession stands and restrooms were provided in the vicinity."15

The sit-ins and civil rights legislation of the early 1960s that ultimately brought desegregation to indoor movie theaters may have had the same effect on outdoor theaters. However, by the end of the 1960s, drive-in theaters were past their prime, and integration may have become a moot point as theaters gradually closed.

This history of segregation raises other questions: whose nostalgia is driving the new drive-in movement? What notions of "family" does the "family-oriented" marketing apply to? As many of the theaters documented in this essay demonstrate, the drive-in theater can represent an imagined past characterized by older, often unexamined, ideologies of family and community; but it can also testify to new, emerging patterns of social togetherness. Drive-in fans exhibit pride in the theaters they patronize and an awareness of the drive-ins' power as spaces of pleasure. This spirit takes a variety of forms, including contributing time and resources to revive ebbing drive-ins and sometimes pushing for their historic recognition.16

The drive-in theaters featured in this essay are located in the Valley of Virginia, the Appalachian foothills, and the eastern edge of the North Carolina piedmont. Each suggests how people in different rural and urban places relate to the drive-in: from the bustling Starlight Six in Atlanta to the defunct Starlite in Durham; the rebirth of the Tiger Drive-in and the all-but-disappeared Commerce Drive-In in northern Georgia.

Interactive Map of Featured Drive-In Theaters

Most of the theaters in this essay were visited during a one-week period in June 2008 as part of a trip from Atlanta to northern Virginia. The route extended northeast along Interstate 85 to Petersburg, Virginia, then over to Interstate 95. The return trip originated in Winchester, Virginia, and traveled through the Shenandoah Valley on Interstate 81 and U.S. Route 11, then turned south on Interstate 77, picking up I-85 at Charlotte.

We identified possible theaters and theater sites by surveying www.drive-ins.com. The theaters we chose were close to our route, had addresses that could be located, and seemed relatively easy to find. Also their aerial views on Google Earth contained recognizable drive-in ramps. Even though there were a number of other active theaters in southwestern Virginia — including the Moonlite, the Park Place, and the Hiland — and northeastern Tennessee, time and route constraints prevented us from visiting them.