Category Archives: Illinois

Project Drive-In roundup 4: The list that wouldn’t die

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In the third installment of our roundup of candidates for Honda’s Project Drive-In, I predicted that Honda would choose more than five lucky recipients of digital projectors. What I really didn’t anticipate was that Honda would reopen voting for the second set of winners.

With another round of voting comes another round of candidates that we haven’t mentioned so far, along with some (marked with an asterisk) who saw new stories about them after voting was extended. If you’re reading this, you’re already online, so go vote for your favorite!

* This drive-in was in a previous roundup, but a new story has been published about it after Honda extended voting for Project Drive-In.

McHenry Outdoor Theatre is a winner

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photo courtesy American Honda Motor Co.

photo courtesy American Honda Motor Co., Inc.

The McHenry Outdoor Theatre (McHenry IL) is the fourth winner of a digital projector from Honda’s Project Drive-In. And today’s winner, owner Scott Dehn, has a pleasant problem – what to do with the money he’d already saved up through fundraisers.

On the McHenry’s Facebook page, Dehn wrote, “for those of you who have donated money, I am happy to tell you that not only will it help cover the installation and retrofitting of our projection booth, but the money will also help to make much needed repairs to the location. We will be painting the screen, fixing speakers and even make the route 120 sign look nice. We will be doing so much here over the next few months. You will not recognize your rejuvenated theater come next spring. I want this to continue to build upon this theater we all have loudly stated we love so much.”

Sounds like Honda was just a little cruel in the way it delivered its generous news to Dehn. First, his long Facebook post from two days ago showed that he still didn’t know about it. “First, all hope is not lost if we do not win a free projector,” he wrote. “Project Drive-In was just a fantastic opportunity to get the neccesary and expensive digital equipment for FREE. If we are not among the winners, I have a multitude of avenues to explore. I will NOT let the theater close. We WILL survive. The question is only in what capacity.” Today, according to a story in the Northwest Herald, Dehn “was in the middle of an on-camera interview with a crew he’d been told was from a film-related website.” The last interview question was “How does it feel to win a digital projector?” and only then did the crew reveal that it was from Honda.

There’s only one empty place left on the Project Drive-In page. Check tomorrow to find out who it’ll be.

Project Drive-In roundup 2, The Sequel

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In my last post, I began the task of listing every local media report of every local drive-in that’s participating in Honda’s Project Drive-In. Foolishly, I thought that I might gather up all of them in one sitting. When I hit 20 theaters, each with a similar tale of tenuous finance and this lottery-ticket hope for survival, my eyes had glazed over, and I barely had the strength to finish off the post and click Publish.

Two days later, I’m ready again to see how many more drive-in reports I can list. Again, they’re alphabetized by state. And again, if you click through and find a particularly cool detail we should all know about, please leave a comment.

More of your candidates:

Whew again! That’s 20 more drive-ins with local coverage of their Project Drive-In eligibility. I don’t know whether there are 20 more that I haven’t mentioned, but if I spot enough new ones, there may be a third episode of this franchise.