KWWL, Waterloo IA’s news leader, provides with yet another happy story of a nearby drive-in converting to digital projection in time for the opening of the 2013 season. In this case, it’s the 61 Drive-In of nearby Delmar.

I love what 61 Drive-In owner Dennis Voy said when a reporter asked him why he spent all that money on the new projection equipment. “It was either making the conversion or going out of business,” he said,” and we have too many drive-in theater fans in the eastern Iowa area that enjoy this theater.”

It’s great to see another example of a drive-in doing what it will take to stay with us for a long time to come.

photo by Michael Flecky, S.J.

“Sunset Drive-In,” an exhibition of 42 photos documenting the visual culture and architecture of drive-in movie theaters, opens Saturday at the Betty Strong Encounter Center in Sioux City IA. Admission is free, and the show runs through May 18.

The photographer is Michael Flecky, S.J., Professor of Photography in the Fine and Performing Arts Department at Creighton University. Flecky chose these photos from hundreds of images he has made over more than a quarter century. “Outdoor theaters are quickly becoming a thing of history and archaeology – unfortunately,” said the Council Bluffs native. “It’s a vanishing culture.” Sioux City’s last drive-in, the Highway 75, closed in 1988.

Flecky’s interest in drive-ins was sparked 27 years ago when he was photographing western Nebraska’s Sandhills with a large-format camera. He was attracted to the formal qualities of outdoor movie screens in the panoramic landscape, along with the shapes of grain silos and church steeples, recognizable from a distance on the rural horizon. The movie screens appeared like frames waiting for a picture, “a photographer’s dream,” he said.

Thanks to the Sioux City Journal for pointing out the opening of this exhibit. For more about Flecky and his drive-in photos, check out this August story in the Kearney (NE) Hub.

It’s all very preliminary, and it leaves me wondering how little it takes to get on the morning news shows there, but somebody is talking about building a drive-in in Blue Grass IA. Maybe.

According to KWQC, the Quad Cities’ news leader, Randy Lorenz and his wife own nine acres of land on the west side of town, and in 2008, they tried to get the Reel-To-Reel drive-in built there. Except that the land between his property and the road was unavailable, so that stopped that pretty quick.

This year, all Lorenz has to do is to get through planning and zoning and engineering, and then start construction in the spring, with a tentative opening set for mid-summer. With a new name, which he hasn’t decided on. I hope it happens, but for now it looks like just a bucket of ideas.

To find out more about it, you might start with this page that was probably generated by a computer trying to translate the video report. It’s a decent transcription for a computer, but would be pretty bad if it turned out that a high school student was doing it for extra credit. Or you can play this link to the video of the newscast itself, or click the fragile, embedded version above if it’s still in this post. You’ll have to sit through about a minute and a half of welcomes and weather reports to watch the drive-in story.