Pleasant Valley Drive-In may close for good

Pleasant Valley Drive-In at nightHere’s the kind of story we’re going to see a lot over the next few weeks. The Pleasant Valley Drive-In, Pleasant Valley CT, having failed to attract enough votes to win a projector through Project Drive-In, now faces an uncertain future, as reported by WVIT, New Britain’s news leader.

“I’ve got six months to try and raise the money and get new projectors in here,” said owner Donna McGrane. “So hopefully we can get some fundraisers going and make it happen.”

WVIT had the good idea of checking with Pleasant Valley’s elected officials to see whether they could do anything to help save the town’s landmark theater. But it sounds like Pleasant Valley, the town, is as hard up for cash as Pleasant Valley the drive-in.

There was another good report about four Iowa drive-ins in roughly the same boat presented by KLJB, the Quad Cities’ news leader. But that embeddable video is hosted by Worldnow, which uses some kind of JavaScript that this blog can’t digest well. To watch part of that clip (meaning the leftmost portion of the entire video), visit my Worldnow example page.

Update: Well that’s ironic. In a post where I complain about Worldnow’s odd incompatibility with Carload, the other video I embedded decided to quit working. You can still see it if you click the screen capture I’ve replaced it with at the top of this post or if you click here.

Project Drive-In roundup 2, The Sequel


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.

Project Drive-In roundup


I’ll admit it. I’ve been so overwhelmed by the local media coverage of Honda’s Project Drive-In that it’s been hard to write. On one hand, I don’t especially want you to vote for some Florida drive-in over one on Ohio or vice versa. Heck, I’ve even noticed that Honda has added at least a couple drive-ins (such as the Apache) that weren’t there when voting started.

There are only so many ways I can spin the local news when it says that nearby drive-in X needs to convert to digital projection, and its best / only hope is if it is one of the Project Drive-In winners. So I’m just going to gather them all a bunch of them in this list. There are probably lots of interesting, fresh details here and there about each drive-in, but I’m going to let you discover them. If you find something sufficiently cool, post a comment about it, will you please?

Your candidates, alphabetized by state:

Whew! That’s 20 theaters so far. I’ll see how many more I can round up for our next installment.