I’m back from a weekend drive-in theater road trip, and the blog post I wrote about it is too big for a blog post. I gave the report its own page here on Carload, so if you want to find out what the active drive-ins of Arizona and New Mexico are like, you’ll need to go read it!
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Here’s the opposite of a coffee-table book
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.
The story behind THE classic drive-in photo
photo by J.R. Eyerman — Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Take a look at the 200-pixel photo thumbnail I’ve embedded here. Look familiar? That might be because it’s been used as a “generic” drive-in photo for several theater sites, including one in India, and I just spotted it in an otherwise well-researched book, Drive-in Theaters by Kerry Segrave.
That photo was taken in 1958 at a drive-in in Salt Lake City by J.R. Eyerman and published in Life magazine. (The drive-in isn’t named. Based on the city lights, I’d say it was the Motor-Vu, but it could have been the Highland or the Park-Vu, all long dead by now.) You can see the full-sized photo and the story behind it at the Life web site.
Ben Cosgrove, editor of Life.com, writes “Despite how familiar and recognizably universal an experience it might be, however, it turns out that it’s remarkably difficult to really capture in a single, still photograph what it feels like to go to the moving pictures.” Amen to that! In fact, the more I look at that photo, the more I wonder whether it was doctored or partially staged.
I’ve got no problem with the magnificent mountainous sunset, reflected by rows of hardtops. That right there is a superb photo, probably taken from the projection booth. But look at the ambient twilight. It’s hard to imagine a projectionist even starting a feature with that much light in the sky, but we’re supposed to believe that The Ten Commandments had been running long enough to have reached Charlton Heston’s Red Sea scene?
It’s easier for me to believe that the photo was doctored or staged. Eyerman could have started with that photo of the cars pointed at a blank screen, waiting for the movie to start. Then he could have superimposed that frame from the film, resulting in “Charlton Heston as Moses, arms outstretched, looming over what appears to be, if one looks at it just right, a congregation of rapt, immobile automobiles at prayer,” as Cosgrove elegantly describes it. The low-tech alternative would be to stage it by projecting just that frame, even as a slide, well before the film was shown to the audience, then taking the photo. Although it wasn’t so easy to do in 1958, superimposing wins my uninformed vote.
Got a better idea? Know more about this than I do? (That’s not difficult.) Leave a comment and tell us more.
Update: The Salt Lake Tribune just mentioned this photo in a sidebar for a drive-in story. According to the note, Eyerman showed the Brigitte Bardot film And God Created Woman to an invited audience of college students. “For the photo that was actually published, Everman (sic) swapped Heston’s image for Bardot’s.” See, I was right this time!