Video: Arizona’s only ozoner might be Drive-In Heaven

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I’m not sure why two local stations decided to run stories about their year-round drive-in theater less than a week apart. But it’s always nice to celebrate any open drive-in, especially the only one that’s left in the entire state of Arizona.

Anyway, that means you get to see plenty of Travis Brown, the general manager of the Glendale 9 Drive-In along with plenty of lovely twilight shots from ABC15, Phoenix’s News Leader. And if you want a parallel dose of Brown after dark, check out the video published five days later by Fox10, Phoenix’s News Leader.

I was especially drawn to this story because the Glendale 9 was the starting point of a too-short drive-in road trip that I took 12 years ago. Back then, I described it as Drive-In Heaven, and that title probably still applies. The folks there were so nice to me, and the facility is so perfect for watching movies from your car. Then again, I haven’t tried watching a movie there during the amazing (not in a good way) central Arizona summers, which might make the experience feel a bit less like heaven.

So check out the videos for a glimpse of what I saw. If you ever get to try a July or August night at the Glendale 9, please let me know how it went.

Carload curates hundreds of historic Boxoffice magazines

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a typical issue of Boxoffice, accessible through one of Carload’s Yumpu links

Reminder: Carload hosts a list of the Boxoffice magazines that are available through Yumpu.com. I just spent the last couple of days filling a lot of the holes in the collection and extending it a few years. As I type, you can find what’s available for 1948-1968.

As I wrote three years ago about this curated Yumpu list, Boxoffice used to host an amazing archive of its old issues, which were always the gold standard of theater industry news. In parallel, Yumpu also stored a lot of individual issues, but it was and is difficult to find any particular one, let along a chronological string of them. Alas, the Boxoffice vault abruptly disappeared about four years ago, so I went to work preparing this list of what’s available on Yumpu.

I keep figuring new ways to search for issues to fill the holes in the list. My latest: When I can find a copy of a given issue elsewhere, I’ll pick a headline phrase, then search for “yumpu boxoffice (that phrase)” to see whether Google has noticed it. That’s the source of most of the new issues that I added this week.

I’m surprised at the high percentage that’s available. Even counting the odd stretches (all of 1961, for example) where there are no Boxoffice issues on Yumpu, there are probably 75% of them over the 21 years I’ve listed. I compiled the whole thing mainly for myself, because it’s such a great tool for drive-in theater history research, and I’m happy to share it with you. Enjoy!

Video: Watch as wind knocks down Van-Del screen

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Winds of up to 60 miles per hour knocked down one of the screens at the Van-Del Drive-In just north of Middle Point OH on the old Lincoln Highway, halfway between Van Wert and Delphos. Owner Rodney Saunders told WPTA, Fort Wayne IN’s News Leader, that the Van-Del is insured, and they plan to rebuild the second screen.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that the wind apparently spared the Van-Del’s primary, glorious old screen tower. (Besides the fact that no one was hurt, of course.) The screen that went down appears to have been built less than 20 years ago. Let me explain.

Around the turn of the millennium, film distributors began requiring longer commitments to show summer blockbusters. For example, theaters might have to promise to show a given movie for at least four weeks. Some drive-ins responded by adding auxiliary screens to help burn off “leftover” weeks while keeping the main screen available for newer releases. By 2009, the Van-Del had added two more screens, one in back of the main viewing field and one next to the Lincoln Highway. They still had all three in 2019, but by 2020, they were advertising movies on just two of them, on Screen 1 and Screen 3. Looking at old aerial photos, I’d guess that Screen 2 was the one that had been next to the highway.

As I noted in my virtual visit in 2017, the Van-Del has been through a lot of ownership changes. To summarize its CinemaTreasures listing, the drive-in was built by J.W. and C.N. Christopher, opening in June 1948 as the Star Lite. They sold it three months later to Paul Staup, who renamed it the next spring as Staup’s Auto Movie. Staup leased the theatre to Carl H. Schwyn for five years, and that’s who finally renamed it the Van-Del Auto Movie. Thomas Epps bought the drive-in from Staup at the start of the 1967 season. After the 1998 season, Epps sold it to Jim and Joyce Boyd, who added the extra screens. Saunders bought the place in 2020; maybe he was the guy who took down Screen 2.

That brings us to today. As we wait for the rebuilt, improved(?) second Van-Del screen, here’s some video of the aftermath, courtesy of WANE, Fort Wayne IN’s other News Leader.