Category Archives: Carload-related

Happy 80th Birthday to Hollingshead’s invention

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In honor of the 80th anniversary of the drive-in theater, I present the Google doodle from last year (why didn’t they wait for a round number?) and the following excerpt from Drive-in Theaters: A History from Their Inception in 1933 by Kerry Segrave. This little bit is about the invention of the drive-in by Richard M. Hollingshead, Jr. You can find the full review of this book elsewhere on Carload.

In the driveway of his Riverton NJ home at 212 Thomas Avenue, Hollingshead experimented. Setting a 1928 Kodak projector on the hood of the family car, he projected the film onto a screen he had nailed to a tree. He tested foul-weather potential by turning on the lawn sprinkler to simulate a rainstorm. …

Sitting in his vehicle, Hollingshead realized that a car parked in front of his would obscure the view. For many weeks, he continued his experiments, placing one car behind another, 40 feet apart. Blocks were put under the front wheels of both cars until he got the proper angle to allow the driver in the second vehicle to see over the car ahead. …

(The problem of sound) was turned over to the RCA Victor Company, next-door neighbors in Camden to the Hollingshead company plant. … RCA came up with what they called controlled directional sound. It meant, they claimed, that everyone in the theater received the same volume of sound – delivered, in this case, by three central speakers. …

Construction of the project did not begin until May 16, when the patent was officially granted. … (Despite serious) labor problems, construction was completed in less than three weeks.

The world’s first drive-in opened on Tuesday, June 6, 1933. Most sources give the location as Admiral Wilson Boulevard, Camden NJ. Actually, the theater was just over the Camden town line, from which point outward the street was called Crescent Boulevard. The location was Pennsauken Township. The theater was called the Automobile Movie Theatre; the marquee simply read “Drive-In Theatre.”

That’s just one small, snipped sample of the best drive-in history book I’ve read so far, and I encourage you to find a copy to read the rest of the account.

The drive-in theater started with baby steps, sprouted in its teenage years (1946-1952), then became a national success as a young adult. It slowed down as a relatively young middle-aged adult, but it’s staying in shape and modern technology could keep it alive for 100 years or more. Make it a Happy Drive-In weekend by visiting a theater near you!

Is this the best online virtual drive-in?

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In general, I don’t get too caught up in drive-ins of the past or virtual drive-ins of the present. Carload is meant to celebrate and promote real, living drive-in theaters, where you can go to form real memories of snack bars, gravel parking lots, cool summer breezes, and movies under the stars. But I know that some of the visitors here can’t make it to a real drive-in as often as you’d like.

For the folks without a nearby drive-in, and for folks who want to remember what they were like 40-50 years ago, the best virtual drive-in experiences I’ve found are the Shocker Internet Drive-In series of videos hosted at the Internet Archive.

In the episode embedded here, the Shocker folks run an unusual double feature of two US movies that reused footage from the Soviet sci-fi movie Planeta Bur. Roger Corman went first with 1965’s Voyage To The Prehistoric Planet, followed here by the 1968 Peter Bogdanovich remake Voyage To The Planet Of Prehistoric Women. Add in a Droopy cartoon plus plenty of movie trailers and drive-in interstitials, and you’ve got three hours of nostalgia at the click of a mouse.

Most of the Shocker series are a little more gory or R-rated than I’d want to embed here, but this episode is pretty tame. To stream or download more of them, go to Archive.org and search for “Shocker Internet Drive-In”.

Finally, I ask you readers for help with two questions. Do you know of any other virtual drive-in sites or videos? And I’m also curious whatever happened to the folks who lovingly assembled these Shocker episodes; their web sites all appear to be dead now. If you know something, please share it with us by leaving a message. Thanks!

Shortest double feature ever?

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Ad for Epic and 42, showing at the Redwood Drive-InHere’s a tiny anecdote that doesn’t really mean anything. I noticed that over at the Redwood Drive-In (West Valley City UT), they’re showing Epic followed by 42 as one of their double features. That’s six characters. Has there ever been an actual drive-in movie double feature with fewer than six characters in the titles?

(And another thing, why does the Redwood 6’s web site show just four screens active without mentioning the number 6? Google’s aerial view clearly shows six screens, and its Street View shows six double features on its understated sign as of August 2011. Did the Redwood take down a couple of screens? Will it ramp back up to six shows later in the summer? But I digress.)

Now don’t just send me any two titles or speculate that somebody somewhere showed Mud with 42. (For some reason, Mud didn’t show up on a lot of drive-in screens I keep track of.) Earlier this year, we had Argo and Mama at drive-ins but no one-character movies to go with them. If you want to research some old newspapers or some old page at the Internet Archive, you might try to find something to go with:

  • Pi (released July 1998), not last year’s Life of Pi, this was an oddball film about a math genius.
  • 54 (released August 1998), the disco-era retrospective with Ryan Phillippe.
  • O (released August 2001), the modernized version of Shakespeare’s Othello with Julia Styles.
  • P (released February 2005), an art-house horror movie directed by Paul Spurrier.
  • R (released June 2011), an art-house prison drama starring Pilou Asbaek.

Were there any three-character titles in the summer of 1998? Did some drive-in show a short-titled film with O or one of those art-house movies with ozone-friendly themes? If you find a shorter double feature, leave a comment here with a link to the proof. Start digging!