Just a few weeks ago, I got excited about a story I found about Alabama’s drive-ins. Not only was it a great round-up of the current status of the drive-ins of that state, it also made mention of a good book, Drive-in Theaters: A History from Their Inception in 1933 by Kerry Segrave. I bought a copy of it, and now I’m here to tell you all about it.

Thankfully, there’s no shortage of books about drive-ins, but most of them are more like coffee table books, heavy on beautiful photos but light on the details of drive-in history. Segrave’s book is the opposite of that. Aside from a decent cover photo for this 2006 reissue, its pictures are black and white and awful all over; they look like third-generation newspaper prints. But you’ll probably never find a better source of well-annotated facts about drive-ins from their origins till 1992, when the book was first published.

(By the way, this review uses parts of what I wrote about the book on Amazon.com. Of course, the version here is better.)

Kerry Segrave is a researcher. Reading Drive-In Theaters, I can just see him at a UCLA library back then, thumbing through old issues of Variety and taking notes on 3×5 index cards. Clearly, he poured weeks of his life into this book, which includes excellent appendices, copious footnotes, and an extensive bibliography. For the sheer volume of information about the history of drive-ins, this book is unmatched.

But when the time comes for Segrave to transfer all that information into a narrative, the results are a mixed bag. The chapters detailing the early history and growth of drive-ins often create an interesting story. Other chapters, such as “The Audience” look like a pile of index cards rewritten as one-paragraph summaries, one after another. The title should have warned you – this book can be pretty dry.

It gets even drier when statistics are involved. There are no tables in the body of the book; every instance that called for one was instead handled as descriptive sentences. Here’s one example: “Picture preference of those questioned in 1949 and 1950 were; comedies 25 percent (33 percent in 1950), 23 percent drama (23), 21 percent musicals (18), 18 percent Westerns (14), 5 percent romance (8), and 15 percent expressed no preference (4).” Whenever he wrote a few of these in a row, my eyes glazed over. There are plenty of other, longer non-tables like this, but I’ll spare you.

My favorite part of this book was its Introduction, where Segrave lays out a few themes that he sometimes uses in the body of the work. For example, he explains why drive-ins weren’t globally popular the way they were in the US. “(B)efore drive-ins could spring up all over, a country had to be wealthy; it had to have a good deal of vacant, accessible, relatively cheap land; and the country’s inhabitants had to be financially well placed, have automobiles, and enjoy an emotional relationship with their cars.”

Segrave also points to poor film quality, weak projectors and bad sound as indicators that, back then at least, the success of drive-ins was guaranteed as soon as they opened the gate. This effortless early profit made it harder for drive-ins to adapt to changing times. “Drive-ins declined in part because success came too easily at the start. Operators made little effort. When attendance declined, the cavalier way operators treated patrons came back to haunt them. It couldn’t be undone.”

The deepest thought from the book was that drive-ins were a mere symptom of society. Folks stopped going to indoor movies before drive-ins bloomed, underscoring the likelihood that drive-ins drew from a separate audience. Then beginning roughly around 1960, Hollywood produced fewer family-friendly movies. It became acceptable to wear work clothes at an indoor theater. Later, cable and VCRs brought uncut movies to every TV set. From Segrave’s perspective, the fading of the drive-in industry was inevitable.

This book is rather gloomy, understandable since it was written during the industry’s freefall period. Still, I’m glad I bought it, and if you’re a drive-in fan, I heartily recommend it for your bookshelf. But to get your friends pumped up to visit a drive-in this weekend, you’d be better off with a coffee-table book.

Kallet Drive-In, west of Syracuse NY, as captioned by Theatre Catalog, 1946-47: THE ENTRANCE, with its two box offices, is manned by four usherettes, two for each cashier, stationed in front for the purchase of admission tickets for the patrons. There are also four men to clean windshields while the purchase is being made. There is a four-lane entrance to the theatre, and a four-lane exit.

I was fortunate enough to borrow the 1946-47 edition of Theatre Catalog, published by Jay Emanuel Publications, Inc. You can buy a copy on Amazon. I don’t know if it’s worth Amazon’s hefty price tag, but it definitely provides many hours of reading and hundreds of wonderful photos.

Just one of those amazing photos is at the right. It’s the entrance of the Kallet (Camillus NY), which had a three-tier waterfall pumping 50 gallons of water a second on the highway side of the screen. Too bad there wasn’t a good photo of that!

This amazing book has almost 600 Life-magazine-sized pages covering every aspect of movie theater (I spell it -ter) operation. There’s a lengthy article from the American Automobile Association discussing how to provide enough parking for downtown theaters, and whether the theater owner or the town should provide it. An article on facades and movable letters includes six pages of discussion and 28 photos. If you love movie theater history, this book is worth almost any cost.

(What this Catalog doesn’t have is a directory of active theaters. Later editions, such as the 1950-51 listed a few weeks ago on eBay, appears to have listed them all, making them great snapshot drive-in census reports. But not 1946-47.)

This book includes features on five drive-ins under Recent Theatre Construction and tons of great pictures of post-war theaters. My favorite part is a really interesting one-page article titled Notes on Management of Drive-In Theatres by Carl Hellpen, E.M. Loew’s Theatres. Hellpen tells managers that frequent painting not only makes a drive-in’s structures look clean, “it is by far the best protection of the property.” He also suggests that a uniformed usher should walk among the ramps to police the patrons, and that every new drive-in must have a gas station, so maybe can you take it with a grain of salt. You can read the article in its entirety here.

I’ll finish with one more photo, this one of the Speedway Auto Theatre (Greenville OH). It’s not much of a picture, but it shows the huge speakers mounted below the screen of this old-style drive-in.