BusinessWeek features Mesa Drive-In

Exit sign from the Mesa Drive-In

Exit sign from the Mesa Drive-In. Photo by mrdrivein, from the Carload Flickr pool.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek picked up Honda’s Project Drive-In renovation story, and its article this week focused mainly on one of my favorites. The Mesa (Pueblo CO) serves hamburgers that could be the featured dish at any restaurant, and they keep a good selection of movies showing at a pretty good location on the east side of town.

The article is great, but it isn’t perfect. It implies that Chuck and Marianne James added a couple of new screens right after they bought the Mesa in 1993, but that didn’t happen until 2000, when they recycled the screens from two closed Colorado drive-ins – the Pines near Loveland and the Estes in Estes Park.

Under the James’ careful stewardship, the place has done really well. The article describes a scene from 1994 when “3,427 people showed up for a double feature of Jurassic Park and The Flintstones, hanging out car windows and climbing trees to get a good view. A traffic jam stretched two miles down Highway 50.” After the Pueblo police intervened, the Mesa restricted the number of cars to 750, for an attendance of about 1800.

As with so many other drive-ins, the Mesa is scrambling to pay for new digital projectors. Although they’ve been saving up for the purchase, the Jameses don’t yet have the $210,000 necessary to convert three screens. Chuck said he’s really hoping that winning a free projector from Honda will put a big dent in that figure, but even if he loses, he hopes to stay open next year. “We’ll take our good credit and equity to the bank and start begging for money,” he said. “Please give me a loan for a projector! I promise I’ll pay!”

For a broader background on the national plight of drive-ins and more about the Mesa, go read the article! (Update: The Apache in Globe AZ was added to the Project Drive-In list after this post.) By the way, I was a little surprised that the Mesa is the only one of only two contest entrants in the Carload coverage area of 16 or 17 drive-ins (depending on whether we can still count the burnt Sunset in Vernal UT). If you’re a Colorado drive-in fan, you might want to set yourself a daily reminder to vote for the Mesa. I want to eat those hamburgers for years to come.

Shankweiler’s gets some national attention

Shankweilers_URLOne of the great things about Honda’s Project Drive-In campaign has been the number of national media outlets that have picked up the story of the need to switch to digital projectors and how that affects the fragile economics of drive-in theaters. MSN was a recent example, running a short summary a couple of days ago. Almost hidden on that page is a link to a much longer sidebar article by Erik Sofge of MSN Autos. Sofge profiles Shankweiler’s (Orefield PA) and frames it as the perfect example of the whole history of drive-in theaters. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but Sofge is right.

I already knew that Shankweiler’s was America’s second drive-in theater, opening in April 1934. Its first screen was a sheet and two poles, showing a movie from a 16mm projector on a table, near a single large speaker for sound. It started small (that speaker only carried so far) and stayed small, with room for about 320 cars. The sound system improved, of course, with in-car speakers in the 1940s, then FM radio in 1986 “when co-owner Paul Geissinger built the first such broadcast unit for use in a drive-in.”

Meanwhile, the drive-in boom rolled across the country. Some 1950s and 60s drive-ins held 3000 cars. Then came the bust. “There were many times, even in the ’70s, when there more employees at the theater than customers,” Geissinger said. “That was the start of VCRs. And we couldn’t pay for new prints. We didn’t play ‘Star Wars’ until it had been out for a year.”

Sofge writes that the spread of indoor multiplex theaters helped the drive-ins hang on. The extra indoor theaters needed more prints, so there were more copies of second-run movies for drive-ins to book. Attendance stabilized.

Then came the need to switch to digital projection, which Geissinger installed after the end of the 2012 season. There are more great quotes about that, but I don’t want to spoil it for you. For more great anecdotes about America’s oldest surviving drive-in, plus a few photos, go read it!

Kansas City’s I-70 faces uncertain future

I-70 Drive-In Theater signThe Kansas City (MO) Business Journal ran a nice long article yesterday talking about the drive-in theater situation in the KC metropolitan area. Business is booming at all three surviving drive-ins, but two of them are facing the decision on whether to go digital or close when film runs out. Those two, Kansas City’s I-70 and the Twin in Independence MO, are both owned by Darryl Smith.

The article doesn’t mention this, but before Smith’s time, the I-70 was one of the first drive-ins to carve up its lot to add extra screens to give patrons more choices. Now they’re seeing the downside of having so many projectors; to replace the four at the I-70 plus the pair at the Twin will cost the better part of a half million dollars.

That decision would be easy if business was drying up, but instead, “July sales for the I-70 Drive-In were close to twice what they’d averaged over the last five years.” But will that be enough to cover such a huge expense? Smith is hoping that Honda’s Project Drive-In will tip the answer his way; the I-70 is one of the drive-ins competing for votes to win a new digital projector.

The KC Business Journal story included a fun side note about the Boulevard across the border in Kansas City KS. Not only was it an early converter to digital, the Boulevard claims to be the first drive-in to install a 4K projector. Since it was installed over a year ago, “attendance has shot through the roof, similar to the figures drive-in theaters reached in the 1960s. … The projector has more than paid for itself, even though the theater operates only Thursday through Sunday from April to October.” Let’s hope that Smith reads that part of the story and finds the cash to keep his drive-ins running for decades to come.