Vineland hopes to make an expensive conversion

Screen shot of drive-in videoMost drive-in video is good, though some videos are better than others, and this little snapshot of the Vineland Drive-In in City of Industry CA is one of the best I’ve seen lately. It comes to us from Annenberg TV News of the University of Southern California.

If you’ve never been to a drive-in (how sad!), this video is the best news report to capture the full experience – tickets, screen, concessions, projectors, and the closing credits, a really nice touch. Oh, and it’s about how the folks at the Vineland are optimistic that it will be able to convert to digital projection by the end of the year despite the $320,000 price tag for four screens. Thanks USC Annenberg, for this fine report, and for letting me share it here.

Update: I am sorry, but the embedded version that USC Annenberg provided insisted on autoplaying whenever the page loaded. That’s darned annoying, and the version on the Annenberg page doesn’t do that, but I can’t figure out how to make it quit, so I took it out and replaced it with a screen shot of that video, linking to the original article. If you know how to make it stop autoplaying, please let me know and I’ll embed it again.

Valley 6, Wilmington now permanently closed

Valley 6 Drive-In signWhile it’s great fun to celebrate the birth of a new drive-in, we also need to make mention of drive-ins that pass away. Sometimes they close to great fanfare, but more often they just decline to reopen in the spring. Here are two more of those stories.

From the Auburn (WA) Reporter comes word that the Valley 6 there really looks dead. It hasn’t ordered movies for the 2013 season, and its manager passed away in December. What appears to be its official Facebook page hasn’t been updated since May 2012, and a Valley 6 fan page there (where I borrowed that Valley 6 sign photo) says its phone number is disconnected. There’s also a Facebook group with discussion from former employees.

The Washington Court House (OH) Record Herald wrote last Friday that Phillip Chakeres, the CEO of the company that owns the Wilmington Drive-In, hadn’t decided whether it will reopen this season. He “plans to make the final decision within a month.” Then yesterday, the same reporter wrote in The News Democrat of Georgetown OH that Chakeres said the Wilmington “will not open this season and its future is questionable”. The stated reason is unusual for drive-ins these days: the Wilmington was losing money.

It’s likely that there are more closings that we will only hear about after the fact; newspapers rarely publish business obituaries. The News Democrat story included an ominous note about Chakeres’s drive-ins: “Chakeres now operates three in Clayton, Springfield and Fairborn, having recently permanently shut down three in Celina, Lucasville and New Carlisle.”

Coyote Drive-In almost ready to open


Oh boy! The only thing better than a story about the opening of a brand-new drive-in theater is having some nice video of it to embed for you.

NBCDFW (secretly KXAS-TV), Fort Worth TX’s news leader, ran a fine little story about the construction work that’s nearly completed for the Coyote Drive-In just north of downtown. Two of its three screens are in place, its food pavilion is almost done, and earth movers are ripping out debris that would get in the way of driving and parking and watching movies. If that sounds a little familiar, it’s because we mentioned the Coyote here a few months ago.

But don’t take my word for it. If you want to read what’s pretty much a transcription of the story, head over to the NBCDFW site. But I think you’ll be better off just watching that great two minutes of video. If it doesn’t bring a smile to your face, you’re not a drive-in fan.