The story of segregated movie houses is not a chapter in Hollywood history that many documentaries doting on the Golden Age of the Studio System have dwelled on. Yet the drive-in may call up a grimmer flashback for a segment of the Hollywood demographic denied access to the parking lot due to the color of their skin, still visible behind the windshield. 'The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning' Narrator Amy Poehler: "Human Life Is a Lot of Laughs As Well As a Lot of Heartbreak"įor a certain generation and caste - that is, mine - the drive-in instantly evokes misty memories of adolescent nights out with friends at $5 a carload (drive-in exhibitors figuring, rightly, that the money lost at the ticket booth would be made up at the concession stand). The upshot: many benighted souls born after say, 1990, have never watched a movie from the inside of a car or perched atop its hood. In 2019, according to the National Association of Theatre Owners, drive-ins accounted for only 559 of the 41,072 screens in America, with a mere handful operating year-round. Beginning in the 1970s, when multiscreen venues in malls became the theatrical norm, the popularity of the drive-in declined steadily and eventually cratered. Of course, catering to moviegoers encased in vehicles has the added appeal of avoiding the nightmarish protocols that theaters under roofs must abide by: socially distanced seating, masking of moviegoers, and disinfecting the premises.ĭrive-ins - or, in old trade press lingo, “ozoners” - never really went away, but the venues first proliferated in the 1950s and peaked in the 1960s when the postwar baby boom and motorized suburbs nurtured the open-air alternative to the traditional “hardtops.” In 1960, around 5,000 drive-ins operated in America, compared to 13,200 conventional theaters, a market share that contributed a hefty 23 percent of annual box office gross, Variety reported at the time. For motion picture exhibitors laid low by COVID-19, the resurrection of the drive-in theater is more an exercise in desperation than nostalgia, a back-to-the-future gambit seeking to dip into the only safe-space revenue stream for theatrical cinema.
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