Category Archives: Michigan

Drive-in author tells USA Today his top ten

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Mesa Drive-In marquee with photo creditAt one level, I look at USA Today’s story, posted late last night, as pure link bait. Any top ten list is designed to pull in visitors from all over just because its title is intriguing and its slide show is eye candy. On the other hand, they used my photo! So now I can change that line on my resume to “Award-winning photographer featured in USA Today.”

Where was I? Oh yes, the article. Well-known drive-in historian Don Sanders gave USA Today’s Larry Bleiberg his top ten favorite drive-in theaters. I don’t know if they were the top ten active drive-ins, or whether it just happens that Sanders’ favorites all happen to still be alive. There are notes and photos for each, so you really should go read it! But here is a quick summary:

Cherry Bowl wins Project Drive-In’s second projector

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Cherry Bowl Drive-In marquee showing Thank You

photo courtesy of PRNewsFoto / American Honda Motor Co., Inc.

The Cherry Bowl Drive-In (Honor MI) is today’s winner of Honda’s Project Drive-In. “Thank you to everyone who voted, and voted, and voted!” said the Cherry Bowl’s web site today. “Without you this would never have been possible.”

WPBN, Traverse City’s news leader, picked up the story, noting that “A Benzie County landmark will stay open thanks to hundreds of its fans.” In an earlier WPBN story, Cherry Bowl owner Laura Clark said, ”This 35mm film, 120-year-old technology is going to be going away by the end of the year. Without this film, these projectors – everything in this room – is obsolete.”

Honda had filmed some of its Project Drive-In online commercials at the Cherry Bowl, one of only a few places that Honda visited before the contest. That exposure, plus a story in the Detroit News, might have driven enough voters to support the Cherry Bowl as it continues forward entertaining its fans for years to come.

Project Drive-In roundup

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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.