Transfer, Pennsylvania
Anyone who has been stopping by here for a while knows that I've been working on a long term project on The American Drive-in Movie Theater for more than a dozen years now. The project has been done on large format black and white film, 8x10 and 7x17 inch. The pictures are not meant to be simple documentation but attempt to be a more complex 'documentary landscape' approach. Every DI theater is unique, but there are repeating visual themes and what I'm trying to do in the series is find situations where the vernacular architecture of the theaters resonates with the particular landscape of their geographical area. A large selection of these pictures can be viewed in a slideshow at this link.
This past September for the first time in several years I was able to get out on a road trip to add to the project. I continued to use the 8x10 and 7x17 to make b&w pictures that directly expand the project. But of course I had digital capture equipment along as well, so I did a lot of color work to see where that might take me. Obviously I could shoot much more freely with digital "free film" than with the big cameras. I was curious what a looser approach might come up with.
Transfer, Pennsylvania
The expedition began on September 12, at 4:30 AM, and at about 1:15 PM I reached the first of the theaters on my itinerary, at Transfer, PA. It's a small, single screen theater dating back to the late 1950s, with an unusual masonry and sheet metal screen tower. The mixed sun and cloud conditions were good—these theaters are one of the few subjects that I think look their best in full sunlight. It did occur to me that finding the first venue on my list with a big for sale sign in front wasn't exactly a great omen.
In the coming days I'll be putting up color work from this trip in afternoon posts here.
6 comments:
I guess you would have been in a minority in thinking that "these theaters are one of the few subjects that I think look their best in full sunlight"! Seriously though, are we going to see any additions to your wonderful drive in series? We had very few (if any) of these theaters in the UK.
Colin, there are quite a few new additions to the basic project from the September trip, along with the new color work.
DIs are primarily a North American phenomenon--Canada had and still has quite a few--and Australia also participated, but they were almost unheard of elsewhere. Part of this is that you need big open spaces and cheap land to run a drive-in. The plunge from 5,000 theaters at the peak in the late 50s to 500 or so that have lasted is less about competition from DVDs and home entertainment centers than from rising property values. You can't keep operating a low-margin, part-time, seasonal business when the property value goes into the stratosphere. A standard line among owners is that nobody ever got rich off a drive-in theater, except by selling the land to WalMart.
Also, America's love of the automobile factors in. The seats in a 1950s era Ford Galaxy were more comfortable than those in any hardtop theater, but would you really want to sit through a double feature in an original Mini or Austin Healy?
Cars are a big factor... Common in my childhood (60's/70's) at drive-ins were station wagons where the kids could eventually be bedded down in the back while mom 'n dad watched the tail end of the movie.
Derek, another twist on this. Most DIs show a double feature for less than the multiplex charges for a single film. At many venues, the first film will be "family entertainment" or a flat-out children's movie. Then the second feature will be be a more restricted rating—even an R—on the presumption the kids have gone to sleep.
In the same vein, "Midnight Madness" showings were popular in my youth, cult films, hard R or even soft X were the staples for those. Also popular were all night showings of a particular series (like the "Ape" movies) or of a particular theme (horror movies being popular for this).
Disclaimer: I grew up in the South, and have no idea if this was a general thing or just Southern culture.
The general idea I suspect was that the longer you could keep 'em in the drive-in watching cheap movies, the more they'd be likely to spend at the concession stand.
Derek, those were widespread practices, not just the south. Also rallies for, say, Mustang owners, or a James Dean film festival.
It's common wisdom that the managers of a successful DI theater understand they are running a restaurant that shows movies out back...
The admission is basically break-even at best. ALL the profit comes from the concession stand. Good ones offer better food than the chains at the same or lower prices. A far cry from the overpriced snacks typical at the multiplex.
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