Project Drive-In roundup 4: The list that wouldn’t die

In the third installment of our roundup of candidates for Honda’s Project Drive-In, I predicted that Honda would choose more than five lucky recipients of digital projectors. What I really didn’t anticipate was that Honda would reopen voting for the second set of winners.

With another round of voting comes another round of candidates that we haven’t mentioned so far, along with some (marked with an asterisk) who saw new stories about them after voting was extended. If you’re reading this, you’re already online, so go vote for your favorite!

* This drive-in was in a previous roundup, but a new story has been published about it after Honda extended voting for Project Drive-In.

Project Drive-In roundup


I’ll admit it. I’ve been so overwhelmed by the local media coverage of Honda’s Project Drive-In that it’s been hard to write. On one hand, I don’t especially want you to vote for some Florida drive-in over one on Ohio or vice versa. Heck, I’ve even noticed that Honda has added at least a couple drive-ins (such as the Apache) that weren’t there when voting started.

There are only so many ways I can spin the local news when it says that nearby drive-in X needs to convert to digital projection, and its best / only hope is if it is one of the Project Drive-In winners. So I’m just going to gather them all a bunch of them in this list. There are probably lots of interesting, fresh details here and there about each drive-in, but I’m going to let you discover them. If you find something sufficiently cool, post a comment about it, will you please?

Your candidates, alphabetized by state:

Whew! That’s 20 theaters so far. I’ll see how many more I can round up for our next installment.

Big Mo is “squirreling away” for conversion

Big Mo marqueeThe Aiken (SC) Standard ran a nice story this weekend about The Big Mo Drive-In in Monetta. Richard and Lisa Boaz, co-owners of The Big Mo are taking a standard, optimistic approach to the movie industry’s transition to digital projection – they’re hanging on to their film projectors for a long as they can while they’re “squirreling away” money to pay for the necessary new equipment.

The Big Mo has been open since 1951, and the current owners bought the place in 1999. Richard has a day job, yet he still finds the time to knit the film from each movie’s reels onto one huge reel, then take them back apart to return them. According to the Standard, the movie trailers come separately, and Richard often keeps them. “Maybe (I’ll) throw up a trailer festival,” he said. That sounds like fun!

So go check out the story with its small gallery of nice photos. Then visit The Big Mo’s Facebook page, where there’s a lot more information, history, and photos, including the photo I grabbed for this note.