Here’s a tiny anecdote that doesn’t really mean anything. I noticed that over at the Redwood Drive-In (West Valley City UT), they’re showing Epic followed by 42 as one of their double features. That’s six characters. Has there ever been an actual drive-in movie double feature with fewer than six characters in the titles?

(And another thing, why does the Redwood 6’s web site show just four screens active without mentioning the number 6? Google’s aerial view clearly shows six screens, and its Street View shows six double features on its understated sign as of August 2011. Did the Redwood take down a couple of screens? Will it ramp back up to six shows later in the summer? But I digress.)

Now don’t just send me any two titles or speculate that somebody somewhere showed Mud with 42. (For some reason, Mud didn’t show up on a lot of drive-in screens I keep track of.) Earlier this year, we had Argo and Mama at drive-ins but no one-character movies to go with them. If you want to research some old newspapers or some old page at the Internet Archive, you might try to find something to go with:

• Pi (released July 1998), not last year’s Life of Pi, this was an oddball film about a math genius.
• 54 (released August 1998), the disco-era retrospective with Ryan Phillippe.
• O (released August 2001), the modernized version of Shakespeare’s Othello with Julia Styles.
• P (released February 2005), an art-house horror movie directed by Paul Spurrier.
• R (released June 2011), an art-house prison drama starring Pilou Asbaek.

Were there any three-character titles in the summer of 1998? Did some drive-in show a short-titled film with O or one of those art-house movies with ozone-friendly themes? If you find a shorter double feature, leave a comment here with a link to the proof. Start digging!

photo by J.R. Eyerman — Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Take a look at the 200-pixel photo thumbnail I’ve embedded here. Look familiar? That might be because it’s been used as a “generic” drive-in photo for several theater sites, including one in India, and I just spotted it in an otherwise well-researched book, Drive-in Theaters by Kerry Segrave. (I’ll post a book review in a few days.)

That photo was taken in 1958 at a drive-in in Salt Lake City by J.R. Eyerman and published in Life magazine. (The drive-in isn’t named. Based on the city lights, I’d say it was the Motor-Vu, but it could have been the Highland or the Park-Vu, all long dead by now.) You can see the full-sized photo and the story behind it at the Life web site.

Ben Cosgrove, editor of Life.com, writes “Despite how familiar and recognizably universal an experience it might be, however, it turns out that it’s remarkably difficult to really capture in a single, still photograph what it feels like to go to the moving pictures.” Amen to that! In fact, the more I look at that photo, the more I wonder whether it was doctored or partially staged.

I’ve got no problem with the magnificent mountainous sunset, reflected by rows of hardtops. That right there is a superb photo, probably taken from the projection booth. But look at the ambient twilight. It’s hard to imagine a projectionist even starting a feature with that much light in the sky, but we’re supposed to believe that The Ten Commandments had been running long enough to have reached Charlton Heston’s Red Sea scene?

It’s easier for me to believe that the photo was doctored or staged. Eyerman could have started with that photo of the cars pointed at a blank screen, waiting for the movie to start. Then he could have superimposed that frame from the film, resulting in “Charlton Heston as Moses, arms outstretched, looming over what appears to be, if one looks at it just right, a congregation of rapt, immobile automobiles at prayer,” as Cosgrove elegantly describes it. The low-tech alternative would be to stage it by projecting just that frame, even as a slide, well before the film was shown to the audience, then taking the photo. Although it wasn’t so easy to do in 1958, superimposing wins my uninformed vote.

Got a better idea? Know more about this than I do? (That’s not difficult.) Leave a comment and tell us more.

Update: The Salt Lake Tribune just mentioned this photo in a sidebar for a drive-in story. According to the note, Eyerman showed the Brigitte Bardot film And God Created Woman to an invited audience of college students. “For the photo that was actually published, Everman (sic) swapped Heston’s image for Bardot’s.” See, I was right this time!