During the winter doldrums, I’m catching up on some of the stories I didn’t get to during the long Drive-In-a-Day Odyssey that took up most of my time last year. One of those is about a church in Scotts Hill TN that illustrates my definition of a drive-in theater.
In May 2017, the Cornerstone Church built its own drive-in screen and started showing faith-based movies on Friday and Saturday nights. Admission was free and open to the public, and there was a concession trailer with popcorn, drinks, hot dogs and burgers. In July, the operation was profiled on WBBJ, Jackson’s News Leader, in a video that I couldn’t embed here. The drive-in continued showing films on weekends until closing its season in mid-October.
“Teenagers can take their girlfriends on dates here for free instead of having to worrying about asking their parents for money,” Cornerstone’s Joanie Gant told WBBJ. “The parents don’t have to worry about what they’re seeing because they know it’s going to be a faith based film.” There’s a good picture of the full screen at the Lexington Progress.
As I wrote over a year ago, a drive-in is any outdoor theater at a fixed location where members of the public can drive their own cars in to watch a movie on a recurring basis. The Cornerstone is unconventional, but it fits the definition as well as the Blue Starlite or the Apache. Once it opens again in 2018, I’ll need to add it to my official drive-in list.
The Twin City was built in 1949 by Raymond Warden and Bo Diggs. In 1956, Diggs took it over, and in 1974 he sold it to his nephew Danny Warden. Danny and his wife Ellen Warden still own the place.
The Wardens have endured two crises. A tornado ripped off two-thirds of the original screen tower on Oct. 1, 1977, but the Wardens erected a replacement before the next weekend’s movies.
The second crisis arrived more slowly and I’m not exactly sure how it worked out. In August 2013, the Wardens were raising the alarm that they might have to sell the Twin City because of the need to switch to digital projection. “We’re going to show through this year, and unless something changes, that might be it,” Danny told the Johnson City Press. “You never know, though, we’ve had a couple of people who say they might be interested in buying it. If someone buys it and switches to digital, then it will stay open.”
Ellen had a slightly different perspective a couple of weeks later, quoted in the Bristol Herald Courier. “The digital conversion is something we can afford and we are blessed to be in that position because of the good business decision we have made over the years,” she said. “People have been buzzing around Facebook that they are scared we are going to close. As long as we can get those 35 mm prints, we’ll keep showing movies for those who show up. But with a digital projector, I don’t think it will be if, but when.”
As I said, I’m not sure exactly what happened, but by early 2014 the Twin City had its digital projector, and the Wardens still appear to be around. The Bristol Raceway is less than a mile away, and during race weeks the drive-in becomes a campground. This August, Ellen told WCYB, Bristol’s News Leader, “When we first started this in ’95 we filled up and turned them away,” but 2017 had been a disappointment.
I just missed the last weekend of the season; this place stayed open later than I had expected. I’m still looking for one more movie to reach my goal of 200.
Miles Today / Total: 63 / 38268 (rounded to the nearest mile)
Movie Showing / Total Active Nights: dark / 199
Nearby Restaurant: With the drive-in closed, I went looking for an old-fashioned diner and wound up at the Old Lighthouse Diner. It offers full-pound hamburgers, which were a bit much even for me. I picked a late breakfast instead, the Captain’s Breakfast with eggs, bacon, home fries, a griddle cake and coffee. Griddle cakes rule!
Where I Virtually Stayed: The top-rated hotel in town is the Fairfield Inn, so I chose it over the Hampton Inn. My room at the Fairfield had something that this Hampton didn’t – a mini-fridge. Plus there were cookies and coffee waiting for me at check-in and a nice breakfast in the morning featuring omelettes and bacon. It was one of the nicest Fairfields I’ve visited so far.
Only in Bristol: Bristol is home to a 70-foot long, three-story Grand Guitar. As Roadside America explained, Joe Morrell built it as a gateway between the interstate and his hometown of Bristol, the self-proclaimed “Birthplace of Country Music.” It opened in May 1983, it opened to the public and housed, among many other things, Morrell’s personal collection of hundreds of musical instruments. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2014.
It’s Day 325 of my virtual Drive-In-a-Day Odyssey. Driving through the forests of North Carolina, it took a little over two hours to go from the Sunset Drive In Theatre just west of Shelby NC to the Stateline Drive-in in Elizabethton TN near the northeast tip of the state.
I first want to address that name. The marquee is written as StateLine, and TripAdvisor (among many others) calls it the two-word State Line. But the drive-in’s About Us page and its Facebook page both call it Stateline, so that’s what I’m going with.
Now that one minor mystery is mostly resolved, there’s another one. Everyone seems to agree that the Stateline opened in 1947, but I’m not sure who owned it then. The slow-to-change Motion Picture Almanac listed “R. D. Dunn” as the owner in its 1952-66 editions. Thanks to an Elizabethton Star article (PDF), we’ve got a history from 1952 forward. “Earl Bolling, who owned it from 1952 until the 1970s, and again from 1980 to 1995.” Did this Dunn own the drive-in before Bolling?
On the other hand, the MPA said the owner between the Bolling eras was R. Glover, probably Ray Glover, who was in some other theater transactions of the period.
The Star wrote that Andrew “Andy” Wetzel purchased the theater from Bolling or his estate after he passed away. I also saw a mention online that Wetsel is married to the daughter of Bolling’s widow, and that’s how he acquired the Stateline. However it happened, Wetzel was the owner in 2000 and is still there this year.
He caught a serious break in 2013 during Honda’s Project Drive-In contest. It had announced that it would award five free digital projectors but later decided to add a second round of four more. The Stateline was one of the four winners in that second and final round.
“I realized then that this was going to be probably my only chance to stay open,” Wetzel told Film Journal International. “We don’t have the kind of operating costs to be able to take on that kind of [digital] upgrade… If we didn’t do something with Project Drive-In, we were going to have to end up closing the door.”
The embedded YouTube video of the day is from the last film that the Stateline showed, a free performance of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 as part of the celebration of the Honda award.
When the Stateline opened this spring, Wetzel was quoted in another Elizabethton Star article. “The new projector really brought us out of the dark age,” he said. “We were running the same projectors that were original to the theater in 1947. They were great pieces of equipment, but they were mechanical. The new stuff is all computer based. It’s given us the opportunity to different things like show DVDs, computer, anything with an output.”
Of course, the Stateline isn’t showing anything now; it’s closed for the season. It’s just another dark night in November for me.
Miles Today / Total: 104 / 37171 (rounded to the nearest mile)
Movie Showing / Total Active Nights: dark / 194
Nearby Restaurant: I had to eat at Jiggy Ray’s Downtown Pizzeria after reading that it had bid on the classic Bonnie Kate indoor theater here. (It lost out to the City of Elizabethton.) It’s a great old, casual place for some home-cooked pizza and a surprisingly good salad bar. I enjoyed The Dalai Lama, which was one with everything, of course.
Where I Virtually Stayed: The best place to stay in Elizabethton, and definitely the closest to the Stateline, might be the Americourt Hotel. My room was quite inexpensive, but it had a mini-fridge and solid wifi. Breakfast had sausage and eggs and well as the continental regulars. I’m glad this was here.
Only in Elizabethton: Less than 10 miles north “out in the middle of absolute nowhere” is Backyard Terrors Dinosaur Park. As described by Roadside America, Chris Kastner built an array of life-size (though not all adult) dinosaurs in his backyard. The self-guided tour ends with an animatronic velociraptor display, and donations are voluntary.
