I always wanted to know. How long have they been around? When did they start disappearing? Why did all drive-in movie theaters was closed down anyway? I was born in 85, I'm 16 now, so I never seen one. I would had liked to watch movies from a car.

We still have a Drive-In theater here in town.  It only operates during the summer, but it is fun, especially for the kids.  

Hey there is a drive in movie theatre about 40 minutes from my house.  I think it operates all year round.  To tell you the truth Willie I don't know why they did away with them...they were awesome!!

All of the drive-ins in my town went out of business in the early 90s >:(.

They all went to dollar type showings in the early 80's and were gone by the late 80's.  Apartment buildings and condos in there place now.
There are still a few around in the more rural areas where not a great need to develop the property.

There is one less than a mile from me.  It is open year round.  Movies play for about 7 months and there is an indoor/outdoor swapmeet that is every weekend.

I don't know where the nearest one is to me anymore.  A recent newspaper article lists 11 remaining drive-ins in West Virginia and the nearest one to me is in Calhoun County.  What happened to the ones nearest me:  two became lumberyards (one has since been abandoned), one became a Kmart, one became a supermarket, one became a car dealership that later went under and is now a car auction; and speaking from a line in a Lonestar song, one in Huntington is now a Wal-Mart!

They all disappeared in Brisbane (I think by the end of the 90's)

The land was obviously more valuable for Housing, as that's what they all are now....

I recall a few in my area a few years back...during the daytime they are used as flea markets.  I have no idea if they still operate though.

We have one here in my town.  They show movies every Th, FR and SA for 6 month and then close for winter.  I remember as a kid, you would have to listen to the movie from a portable box (like a radio) that hung on your window.  Now we just tune in to a certain radio frequency and listen to it on your car stereo.  Much better sound especially if you have good sound system in the car.

We have one here too.  It's open pretty much all year long (though it gets pretty darned cold!).  They're open 7 nights during the summer and 3 nights during the winter.
They close for a few weeks from December through January, but we still go nearly every weekend.  Not positive when it opened, but it's been here ever since I was a kid, and that was over 30 years ago, so ??

I read once there aren't a bunch still operating--but on this board it appears there are more than a few!  :)

Hi Willie

In Australia Drive-Ins started appearing in the early 50's - bear in mind Australia didnt get television until 1956.  Prior to that - due to climate - we also had a lot more outdoor cinemas than ones insides buildings (these outdoor picnic style ones have made a comeback in the past 4 years in Perth).
Western Australia - also due to climate - had more drive-ins in one state than the rest of the entire country - and still does.  Basically every little country town had one and many still keeps theirs running.

For those of us who actually owned drive-ins - the crumble started to occur around mid 84 onwards.  In Aus this was about when VCRs became an affordable item and Rental Shops started appearing everywhere.  For some reason people actually preferred to stay home and watch a movie on a teeny tv screen rather than on the big screen and with all the fun social interaction at interval.

We closed ours in late 84 and pulled the screen down in 87.  We still own the land and the projection box is still there etc.

Hi Hairspray.

Our Drive In is/was in a little country town 2 hours from Perth in the wheatbelt.  Its population is getting on in years - suffering from the typical country problem where the younguns have to move to the city for work.  

We never actually lived in the town - we just drove up on weekends to run the movies - we had a caravan parked on the land and stayed there every weekend.

My mum eventually moved to the town with her new man.  The towns population in only about a 1000 or so and that includes the neighboring farms.

Unfortunately due to drought most farmers and townsfolk dont have spending money.  The only cafe recently closed and even the only 2nd hand store closed down.  Pretty dire.

The country towns that have started to renovate their existing drive ins and run them again are the bigger towns with populations around 10 or 20 thousand.

So our poor ole huge block of land with a projection box in the middle just sits there all forlorn.  Mum runs sheep on it occassionaly just to de-weed it !!!

Oh I could just sob - maybe I could write a script about a lonely forlorn drive in !!!!

There is only one left standing here in the St. Louis area, actually on the Illinois side.  It was recently closed for the season.  The last weekend they played the Scream trilogy.  It will reopen on April 4.

They had a drive-in where I grew up in California. It was still operating when I lasted visited there in 2000. Of course, it will probably never close because even if they DO stop showing movies, people will still need a place to hold their swapmeets. :D

I went to one once when I was little, I beleive it was ET that we watched..  there's a few that I know of in our State and it only runs during the summer months.

I remember my dad taking us to one in the late 1970's.  I'm not sure exactly when it closed, but it had to be sometime in the early 1980's because when I got an afterschool job in 1986, one of the fellas I worked with lived in an apartment complex where the theater used to be.

In my area, it seems the need for housing and associated retail shops ate up most of the land.  One indoor movie house with a HUGE parking lot, sold off half the lot for an office park.  The rest they used as parking when they converted their two huge screens into 15 smaller ones.

I guess the idea being that when you can only show one film at a time, you run the risk of not selling enough tickets to cover your costs.  But with 15 screens there is something for everyone's tastes, and with fewer seats for each screen you can claim a show has "sold out"  sooner than normal, creating an artificial demand.

We still have a drive in here in Memphis. There used to be 2 in Memphis but one is just a vacant lot now. There is also one in Southaven, Mississippi, which is only about 10 minutes from Memphis....

My opinion is that companies realized they couldnt make any money off of them.You have all that car space but not as many people actually seeing the movie.They would probably make more money just being a parking lot.Its always easy to find a way to see the movie without getting in like a whole in the fence or something.But it would be a nice change of pace you could talk throughout the movie and your cell can go off(NOT ME EVER ::)But in the the cineplexes of today you can just go from one movie to the other without getting caught. ;)

There is still one about 15 minutes from where I live, and one about 15 minutes from where I used to live.  A couple others have closed down recently, but there is talk of opening one of them back up.

I was child/teen the 70's and a young adult in the 80's.  I remember going to the drive-in with my parents when I was a kid.  As a teenager with a car, my friends and I would go to drive-in but not too much.  It wasn't the 'in' anymore.  I remember talking to people who were about five year older than my age group, and they would tell us tell wild party stories about their times at the drive-in and all the crazy things that happened back in the 'good old days'.  So, it appears that by the mid-70's the drive-in was in decline,and by the mid-80's all of them near my home town (there were three,serving a population of about 35,000) had closed for good.

They were a lot of fun, but times change... :-(
Buzz

We only have one left here in the Ottawa, Ont. region, there use to be a dozen or so here in the eighties. They all got leveled for the AMC 24, Silver City, etc... The one still standing is very busy all summer, not open now though, it's about -40' today. Gotta love Canada. If you come accross a drive-in check it out it's a lot of fun.

I can see both sides of the argument.  

I always liked drive-ins because you could sit out on lawn chairs and watch a movie in the open air.  

However, it sure is nice to watch a movie in a new theater with reclining stadium seating and amazing digital sound.  

Here is a great link all about drive-ins: www.drive-ins.com Oh I hope I can post it on the boards?! Sorry in advanced if we aren't allowed to

There was a drive-in across the road from my high school, and it's still there. In the mid-80s they made it a double-screen complex. It still does a good business, however due to the expansion of the suburb around it, it's really starting to suffer from light pollution, which is making it increasingly harder to actually see the pictures. It's still much cheaper than going to a regular cinema though, as they always run double features for less than the cost of a single film at an indoor movie house!

I haven't been or seen one since I saw Mission Impossable >:(

   They were turned into flea market lots or churches.

:-* The drive in Imperial ,Ca has been opened for quite sometime.I prefer to be outside than in a stuffy theatre,besides its easier to bring your own munchies.

We have an awesome drive-in theater here where I live.  They show 2 films for 5 dollars - and they're recent films too....If I were to go to the regular theater around here it costs me $7.25 per film... >:(  The only thing is, the drive-in isn't open during the winter.  :'(

- Barbara

There is still a Drive-In Theatre operating in Columbus, OH.  It's been there for as long as I can remember and still does pretty good business.

To answer your question, Richard Hollingshead opened the world's first Drive-in Theatre in Camden, New Jersey on June 6, 1933. This information and a whole lot more is available at:  http://www.drive-ins.com/

I went to a drive-in two summers ago.  The theatre was 3 hours north of here and in the middle of almost nowhere.  It was my first time.  I saw Spy Kids 2 (what a terrible movie) and Austin Powers: Goldmember.  It only cost my whole family (4 of us) $6 for both movies!  Compare that to the $95 it would have cost in a regular theatre!!

I've heard drive-in theatres are pretty popular in Quebec during the summer. Drive-ins were illegal in Quebec from the 1950's until sometime recently because of all the "kissing" that went on in the cars.  Now everyone wants to experience what they missed 50 years ago.

There was an old Drive-In theatre about a 15 minutes from where I live. The old sign is still up, but now it's a big storage facility.  :(

During the late 80's, I used to go to a local drive-in called the Corral-4 , with a bunch of pals.  We used to back his 1/2 ton truck into the stall and place an old couch across the rails on the back box, and drag a couple of house stereo speakers and hook it to the radio.  We also had a small cooler filled with some ice cold ones discreetly hidden away..  ;)

The first and last show of the season was called the "Dusk 2 Dawn" and they would play movies back to back.  It was a pretty good time.  Cost about $15 Canadian each.

The place had 4 movie screens at each compass point.  Great thing was if you didn't like one movie, you could drive over to the other ones.  Had lots of good times there and only went about 2 or 3 times a year.

Unfortunately, on Monday August 9th, 1999 it was all destroyed when an oil refinery next door exploded in a spectacular disaster.  :(  I was about 30 km west of it and heard the explosion.  I found a few images of it with the Google image search.

http://www.driveinmovie.com/Canada/

I remember a lot of drive-in theatres in Los Angeles in the 1960's through the 1980's.  Sadly though, they are ALL gone now.

THe first to go that I remember was the one in Sherman Oakes.  It vanished in the mid 1970's to become the SHerman Oaks Galeria.

When I returned to California in 1982, I used to go to several with my friends.  One was the Van Nuys Drive-In, right near the Budweiser plant.  This was a single screen at the time, with the classic 1950-60's era painted screen.  This changed around 1984 when it went multi-screen.  THis one was open until around 1996.  It is still there, but just a vacant lot now, overgrown and abandoned.

Another was on Sepulveda Blvd just south of Victory.  This one was a single screen, and closed around 1984.

Yet another was the Winetka Drive-in.  THis was 4-5 screens, and was in Canoga Park.  This one was closed in 1984 also.  Right before it was torn down, they shot "Blue Thunder" at it.  That is the drive-in where the film is hid in and recovered near the end of the movie.

There were others I remember, including the Simi Valley, which closed around 1994/5.  When I moved to the Antelope Valley just north of LA in 1993, there were 3 closed theatres in town, and none open.  There were dozens of them in the LA area once, but I believe they are all gone now.

I think it is a combination of several things that lead to their closure.  For one, I think it is the threat of law suits from teenagers getting "to busy", in addition to the threat from date rapes and the like.  Not to mention the busy-bodies that thought it was their business what people did in their own cars.

As a kid growing up in LA, the only movies my parents and I went to were drive-ins.  This is because they let them watch 2 movies for the price of one, and also let us bring in our own food, for much less then they charged.  And while I was a good kid, I have often been interrupted in movies by screaming kids.  When I went to the Van Nuys with my wife and 2 kids before it closed, we liked the ability to turn on a light to let them play and not disturb anybody else.  Plus they could lie down and sleap very easily, something you can't do in a conventional theatre.

One of my "Lottery Dreams" is to try and bring back the Drive in theatre.  I think it is something a lot of people did not appreciate until they were all gone.  Plus I think the worry about people "getting busy" is largely gone now.  I mean, in 1981 it was one thing to go in your parents Ford with large bench seats.  Can you imagine trying that now in a Corolla with tiny back seats and bucket seats in front?  :D

I went to a country drive-in in north Georgia in a grassy field.  You could sit out under the stars, and once a rabbit ran accross the field.  Don't know if that drive-in is still there, probably a Wallmart by now.

There is still on in the next town, North. Closed for the Winter but I seem to remember that some had small car heaters and I remember that this was about the time that coil insect repellents came out and burning one in the car kept the mosquitos from coming in the open windows. It was great for a family with kids, except when you had to take them to the bathroom. You could bring a lot of snacks and of course, the "making out" was a given. All quilty say aye!
I remember going to one and stepping into a hill of red ants when I stepped out to get a coke.
I remember when a girlfriend of mine had an aurgument with her boyfriend and threw her engagement ring out the window. They never did find it.

Sigh - my favourte subject resurrected ................

all my reminscing is on page one of the thread - but I thought I would post a link to my old drive in programs for you all to wander thru and hopefully some of the pics that you had long forgotten bring you back a fond drive in moment :)  which of course - if its printable - you can tell us here !!!!

the pics are big A4 size so the page will take a while to open.

www.libranmonkey.homestead.com/drivein

In the 90s I went to a drive in for the first and only time, because they closed it!  It was really cool!  I'm not sure how long ago that was, but the movie I watched there was Men in Black.

we still have a couple floating around our ohio area, but they are in bad neighborhoods or way out in nowhere!  I still remeber my first drive-in movie, The Fox and The Hound!

There is still one in Granbury, Texas near fort worth. Its great, alot of people still go to it and its like 10 bucks for a car load, however many you can fit...and you get to see two new movies, or somtimes old ones too....its great!!!