Catalog provides look back at 1947

Posted on Oct 11, 2012 by mrdrivein

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.

Things that are not drive-ins

Posted on Oct 10, 2012 by mrdrivein

By now, you’ve probably got a pretty good idea about the what kind of news items you’ll see on Carload. This week, I found a couple of examples of news you won’t find here. Except this one time, to explain why.

3M supplied the photo on the right of its new Streaming Projector, which several sources promote as a way to “recreate the drive-in experience”. Now that’s a nice little device with some fun possibilites, and I hope my son’s 3M stock does well enough for him to have college textbook money one of these years. But that projector recreates the drive-in experience the way baking a Totino’s pizza recreates the Italian restaurant experience. The drive-in experience is sitting in your car surrounded by a bunch of other cars full of people wanting to have a good time. It’s walking in the dark across a hilly gravel lot to the concession stand for a hamburger. You can squint your eyes and pretend your back yard is like that, but you know better.

The second, more common, type of story comes from the Lebanon (MO) Daily Record, which notes that the local Kiwanis Club is hosting a “drive-in movie” night at the local civic center, probably in the parking lot. Hey, Lebanon, you used to have two drive-in theaters. A long time ago, I saw “The Goodbye Girl” at one of them. The way to hold more drive-in nights is to build a new drive-in. Or to go drive somewhere to a drive-in that’s still showing movies.

There are any number of well-intentioned groups that have the idea of a cute, nostalgic drive-in night. Probably a lot of those folks don’t know that real drive-in theaters still exist. But you won’t read any more about them here, because they’re just not doing it right. And the same goes for any new invention, gadget, or business model that tries to “recreate” being at a drive-in. No thanks, we prefer the real thing.