Author Archives: mrdrivein

Virginia’s Moonlite will be back in business

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Moonlite Drive-In Theatre facade
photo by WCYB

Who would have thought that fall would be the season to announce so many drive-in theatre reopenings? The latest great news comes from Abington VA, where the Moonlite Drive-In Theatre is rapidly renovating towards a targeted reopening later this month.

The Bristol (VA) Herald Courier published a front-page story with the details. Kyle Blevins, a UPS driver from just across the border in Bristol TN, had watched movies at the Moonlite for more than 40 years before it closed three years ago for lack of a digital projector. Now Blevins has fulfilled his dream of owning a drive-in, sort of. The Herald Courier says he’s “co-owner” along with the previous owner.

The Moonlite opened in 1949 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2007. Blevins said he hopes to show at least one movie by the end of October, with a formal re-opening in Spring 2017.

Blevins invited the community to spend Oct. 8 helping get the Moonlite ready, and he has a GoFundMe page set up for donations.

The crew from WCYB, Bristol’s news leader, also dropped by to talk about Moonlite memories with folks who had visited the drive-in during past decades. It’s an extensive story that I couldn’t embed here, so you really should go watch it!

Town helps Skowhegan glow

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Skowhegan Maine logoThe Skowhegan Drive-In got some help from the town of Skowhegan ME to restore one of its original neon signs, and CentralMaine.com let us know all about it.

Theater owner Don Brown had already done a lot of restoration work since buying the place in 2012. He said he’s tried to stay as close as possible to the way the drive-in looked when it opened in 1954.

The Skowhegan community helped raise the money for a digital projector two years ago, but no one had fixed its sign. As you can see from this Google Street View, the sign was laying on the ground to the right of the entrance. This year, Skowhegan and the state offered facade grants to small businesses outside of downtown. Brown got a little over $8,000, and now the neon-lit Skowhegan Drive-In Theatre sign is back.

Jeffrey Hewett, Skowhegan’s director of economic and community development, said the sign reminds him of how it once looked. “In the daytime it doesn’t really grab you as much;” he said. “It’s the nighttime and that kind of reddish glow that comes off that gets you.”

For more information, including a fine photo of the restored sign, you really need to go read it at CentralMaine.com.

Update: You can also see a bit of video of the restored sign and how the Skowhegan looks this October at WABI, Bangor’s News Leader.

You don’t want to read this “drive-in” book

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Some people enjoy writing scathing reviews, but not me. If I find something nifty, I want to share it, but if I find something yucky, I don’t want to give it free publicity. Yet here I am to warn you about an ebook I picked up yesterday: How to Build a Drive-In Theater Business by T K Johnson.

This book reads like Volume 82 of the Build a Business Collection, the name of the entity which holds the copyright. That’s understandable, since Johnson has dozens of pages of “How to Build a (something) Business” listings on Amazon. There are a few generally helpful notes and ideas, but this book contains effectively no specifics for folks who want to start a drive-in as opposed to a convenience store or a butcher shop.

(By the way, pieces of this review appeared in my Amazon review of the book, but this version is much better.)

The drive-in passages are painful to read. Here are the first two sentences under the heading “Negatives”, verbatim: “Drive-in theaters are considered to be one of the best places to hang out with friends back in the 60s until late 80s and early 90s. However as times changed, so did the films and the famous drive-in theaters slowly faded in the background as people embraced the new technology.” You know, before word processors, it was difficult to write sentences that are this mangled, with unmatched tenses and orphaned references.

After the few sections that mention drive-ins, the rest of the book ignores them. In the section “Where to set up your business?” the author recommends running the new business online, but if you must have a brick and mortar location, you’ll need to register your business in that state. All the drive-in theaters I know are definitely brick and mortar.

The most disappointing aspect of this is that there are definitely enough real drive-in startup necessities to fill a book. Chapter topics would include finding a site, rezoning, working with neighbors, utilities, screen construction, parking lot grading, ADA-compliant restrooms, digital projection, movie distributors, and many more. Instead, Johnson’s book is about a business’s legal structure, how to hire good people, and other general topics.

There are a zillion books about how to start a business (many written by T K Johnson), and this is one of them. There are still plenty of good books about drive-ins, but this isn’t one of them. You’ll have a better time if you read one of these instead.