Category Archives: Carload-related

Small clues lead to another new drive-in

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Let’s put the most important news up front. In Kings Mountain NC, a local family reacted to the closing of the area’s only drive-in theater by starting its own. Hound’s Drive-In opened this year, and it’s an inspiring story of another business that’s keeping this tradition alive.

The Shelby Star ran an article in April anticipating the launch of Hound’s, complete with a bit of video showing what a brand-new drive-in theater looks like. Then in July, the newspaper printed the story of a guy who proposed marriage on the big screen there. It’s all good stuff, and you ought to read both of those articles.

Now I have to tell a story about Carload. Both of those Shelby Star articles ran before I began assembling the Carload database of active drive-ins in the US and Canada. For that task, I used three primary sources: a two-year-old list from Nerve.com, the sadly out-of-date DriveInMovie.com, and Google. Lots of Google. Search results for “(insert state) drive-in theater” were the most reliable listings, but they weren’t perfect.

Another great source for drive-in listings has been a by-product of keeping track of drive-in theater news. When a new one opens, that’s usually worthy of a newspaper article or a local TV news report. And once in a while, something in the news just mentions a drive-in I hadn’t heard of.

Which brings us to the Kings Mountain Herald. In a dusty dry article last week, the Herald listed the local construction permits issued in September. (By the way, that’s truly a core journalistic service to its readers. More papers should do the same.) Buried in that list / article was the mention that a construction company was issued “a building master commercial permit to install bathrooms for the drive-in theater at 114 Raven Circle”. That tiny note led to more searching and the discovery of the brand-new Hound’s, built adjacent to the owner’s campground. And it also implies that, if the owner is building more or better bathrooms, the drive-in must be doing pretty well.

The discovery reminded me of the early, pre-Google days of Carload, when the Comanche of Buena Vista CO wasn’t listed by anybody online. A co-worker who had family in Buena Vista said that on a weekend visit home, he saw cars filing out of the Comanche late at night. The result was a quick visit and the 19-year-old marquee photo that Carload still uses. There may be more active drive-ins that still aren’t on the Carload list. If you know of any, please let me know.

Carload’s grand re-opening

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Driving America drive-in type sign at The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn MI

This Douglas Auto Theatre sign spent over 30 years at a Kalamazoo MI drive-in. Now it hangs at The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn. Photo by PunkToad

In case you haven’t noticed, Carload.com is active again. The graphics are prettier, the news is as timely as ever, but there are a few changes.

Carload began as a way to keep track of what was showing at Colorado drive-in theaters. Way back then, there were 12 active drive-ins in the state, most of them didn’t have web pages, Facebook didn’t exist, and long-distance calls cost money. Listing the theaters and what they had planned for the weekend was helpful.

Now that’s all different. At this writing, only one drive-in in the US or Canada doesn’t have its own site or at least a Facebook page. Everybody’s got a cell phone, and long distance is free or dirt cheap. Having one more site with movie listings isn’t helpful any longer.

Instead, Carload has been redesigned as a mobile-first site. The front-page emphasis on drive-in news is still strong, but now we also keep track of every active drive-in in the US and Canada. If you’re still curious about what’s showing, just call the phone number or click through to the theater’s official web page.

Thanks for your support during this transition. If you have a great drive-in photo, please add it to the Carload Flickr Pool.

You don’t want to read this “drive-in” book

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Some people enjoy writing scathing reviews, but not me. If I find something nifty, I want to share it, but if I find something yucky, I don’t want to give it free publicity. Yet here I am to warn you about an ebook I picked up yesterday: How to Build a Drive-In Theater Business by T K Johnson.

This book reads like Volume 82 of the Build a Business Collection, the name of the entity which holds the copyright. That’s understandable, since Johnson has dozens of pages of “How to Build a (something) Business” listings on Amazon. There are a few generally helpful notes and ideas, but this book contains effectively no specifics for folks who want to start a drive-in as opposed to a convenience store or a butcher shop.

(By the way, pieces of this review appeared in my Amazon review of the book, but this version is much better.)

The drive-in passages are painful to read. Here are the first two sentences under the heading “Negatives”, verbatim: “Drive-in theaters are considered to be one of the best places to hang out with friends back in the 60s until late 80s and early 90s. However as times changed, so did the films and the famous drive-in theaters slowly faded in the background as people embraced the new technology.” You know, before word processors, it was difficult to write sentences that are this mangled, with unmatched tenses and orphaned references.

After the few sections that mention drive-ins, the rest of the book ignores them. In the section “Where to set up your business?” the author recommends running the new business online, but if you must have a brick and mortar location, you’ll need to register your business in that state. All the drive-in theaters I know are definitely brick and mortar.

The most disappointing aspect of this is that there are definitely enough real drive-in startup necessities to fill a book. Chapter topics would include finding a site, rezoning, working with neighbors, utilities, screen construction, parking lot grading, ADA-compliant restrooms, digital projection, movie distributors, and many more. Instead, Johnson’s book is about a business’s legal structure, how to hire good people, and other general topics.

There are a zillion books about how to start a business (many written by T K Johnson), and this is one of them. There are still plenty of good books about drive-ins, but this isn’t one of them. You’ll have a better time if you read one of these instead.