Drag racing during intermission is a bad idea

Sunset Drive-In in Ahmedabad

The Sunset Drive-In in Ahmedabad, photo by Chobist

According to The Times of India, a couple of drivers in Ahmedabad got into trouble Saturday night by racing their cars during the intermission at a drive-in. Not racing their motors, racing each other. The story doesn’t name the theater, but it was probably the Sunset Drive-In Cinema there. (That theater’s index page suggests that its “auditorium” looks amazingly like a classic 1958 Life magazine photo of a Utah drive-in. But I digress.)

According to Chobist, the Flickr contributor who took the photo that’s next to these words, the Sunset opened in 1973 and is “one of the most popular hang-outs in the city.” It claims to have the largest screen in Asia, and it holds over 600 cars, plus a covered “sitting facility” for the carless.

Back to the Times story. The security officer working at the theater said that the two drivers started racing during intermission. “Soon, other spectators gave way to the car drivers for safety as the drivers were determined to perform stunts.” Five minutes later, one of the cars overturned, one car rammed another (kind of fuzzy on whether those two events were related), and other theater patrons then beat up the two occupants of the ramming car before handing them over to police. Sounds like another night where the in-car entertainment was even better than the movie. Whew!

 

Please add your photos to our Flickr pool

old Valley Drive-In in Fort Morgan, Colorado

photo by Neon Michael

Carload.com, America’s finest drive-in news source, has started its own Flickr pool to collect great (and just okay) photos of drive-ins. To get things started, I’ve added a few pictures of my own, such as this shot of the old Valley Drive-In in Fort Morgan, Colorado.

If you’ve got some drive-in photos, please join the Carload group and share them with the rest of Carload’s readers. If we use your photo to illustrate a story, we’ll give you credit and link back to your photo’s Flickr page, as demonstrated by the caption under this Valley photo. You retain all your rights to your photos; you’d just be giving Carload permission to use them here.

Please consider adding your drive-in experience to our collective celebration of all the great fun of drive-ins by uploading to the Carload group today. And thanks for visiting Carload.com.

Saco Drive-In plight featured on TV

Inside the projection room at the Saco Drive-InThe News Leader of Auburn ME, WMTW, recently ran a story about the Saco Drive-In of Saco ME. We mentioned the Saco here at Carload a month ago, and there isn’t a lot of new information in this new report, but there’s some nice video of the Saco marquee and from inside its projection booth.

According to the report, “At least two other theaters in Maine, one in Boothbay (maybe the Harbor Theatre in Boothbay Harbor) and the other in Damrascotta (probably the Lincoln) are both open thanks to the public pitching in to buy the new projectors.” But those are both indoor theaters, so we don’t really follow them on Carload. Never mind.

I would have loved to embed the video, even with its preroll advertising, but the best I can do is show you a screen grab and suggest that you head to WMTW’s site to check it out for yourself.