Drive-in author tells USA Today his top ten

Posted on by

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:

Pleasant Valley Drive-In may close for good

Posted on by

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.

Meet the final (?) four winners of Project Drive-In

Posted on by


Today, Honda announced four more winners of its Project Drive-In contest to award digital projection systems. The latest lucky drive-ins include:

Ocala Drive-In, Ocala FL, the only Florida entrant in the contest.

Starlite Drive-In, Cadet MO, which somehow escaped our seemingly exhaustive four-part list of news stories about the candidates.

Monetta Drive-In, Monetta SC, The Big MO.

StateLine Drive-In, Elizabethton TN, sorry that I misspelled StateLine as two words during the project round-up.

So far Honda hasn’t taken my forwarded suggestion to finance the 140+ other drive-ins that still need digital equipment, but it is extending its fundraiser through the end of 2013. I think that local fundraisers stand a lot better chance of success than this national effort, but what do I know?

Here’s one more way to help. Honda has donated a 2014 Odyssey Touring Elite as an incentive on the Project Drive-In fundraising page. (You’ll need to scroll way down to the bottom of the page to see it.) If you make a $50,000 donation, you get the brand new Odyssey minivan, and you get the warm feeling of knowing that you help fund an additional digital projector to save another drive-in from closing. Plus you get your name in Honda’s next drive-in video. If you were planning on buying one of these anyway, why not do it here?