End of the Road Drawing Closer at the Drive-In

‘We’re all living on borrowed time. I can’t think of many drive-ins that aren’t worth more dead than alive.’

--Tad Danz,drive-in owner

When “Return of the Living Dead” flickers off the Mission Drive-In screen in San Juan Capistrano for the last time tonight, fantasy will give way to reality at the Orange County landmark forever.

Fantasy, in this case, is hot summer nights, a couple of B movies, a van, a six-pack and a date. Reality, as other area drive-ins have also discovered in the past few years, is a shopping center.

The drive-in, which opened in November, 1966, with Elvis Presley in “Paradise Hawaiian Style” and Clint Walker and Martha Hyer in “Night of the Grizzly,” soon will be torn down to make way for a shopping complex that will include a Marshalls Department Store and a Wherehouse record store, said Ted Stroschein, whose family owns the property.

“That’s stupid,” said Anthony Astorga, 19, of Dana Point, who thought that both “Living Dead” and the impending closing of the theater were “pretty lame.” Astorga, on his way to the snack bar one night last week at the Mission, said he comes to the drive-in with his girlfriend, Heidi Serna, three or four nights a week during the summer.

Regular Patrons

“They’ve got plenty of shopping centers around here,” said Astorga. “What do they need another one for?”

Another regular patron, Carmen Kish, 26, of Dana Point was seated in a beach chair outside his brown van while his three pajama-clad children watched the screen through the van’s wide-open back doors. “I’ve been coming here two or three times a week for 12 years,” said Kish. “You can’t beat the price--$3.75 for myself, and the kids get in free. They do a damn good business here, too; it stinks that they’re closing it.”

Nothing could really save the Mission Drive-In, however--not the giant mural (artist unknown) of Mission San Juan Capistrano on the back of its screen, nor its romantic ring of eucalyptus trees and mountain backdrop. Its owner and city officials have been preparing for the end for some time, and Pacific Theaters, the drive-in’s operator, has done little to improve the facility over the past few years. The snack bar is seedy, and the theater is one of the last drive-ins that still use “squawk

boxes” that hang on car windows for sound instead of a private radio frequency.

The same economic realities that have forced two other Orange County drive-ins--the Fountain Valley Drive-In and the Warner Drive-In in Huntington Beach--to close in the past 12 months finally did in the Mission. Seven drive-ins remain in Orange County, one of which plays only Spanish-language films.

All over drive-thru, drive-by Southern California, drive-in movie theaters are being driven out--if at a slower rate than in colder parts of the country. In Long Beach, a six-story office building and 200-unit apartment complex are nearing completion on the site of the 1,000-car Circle Drive-In, which closed in February after 32 years. In San Diego, the number of drive-ins has dropped from 12 to six in less than a decade.

“It’s going to be sad, but I’m going to help tear it down after Sunday,” said the Mission’s assistant manager, Kim Weaver, 24, of San Clemente. Weaver, whose duties include watching for fence-hoppers, unpaid trunk passengers and drinkers, said her roughest nights of the summer were during a run of National Lampoon’s “European Vacation.”

‘We Did a Good Job’

“The place was packed; I guess everybody wanted to see if what the critics were saying about it was true,” Weaver said. “Sometimes they get a little rowdy, but if you set down the rules, you can keep things under control. We did a good job of that here.”

Theater manager David McIntosh, however, is not at all sentimental about the Mission’s imminent end. “It’s just a little Podunk theater,” said McIntosh, who will be transferred to another Pacific theater closer to his home in La Habra. “It’s not really deserving of all the attention it’s getting--on some nights last winter, there were only 10 or 15 cars out there. You can’t sustain a business like that.”

Pacific Vice President Robert Selig, who opened the Mission 19 years ago with his partner, Robert Patrick of San Juan Capistrano, said the drive-in grosses about $6,000 a week and employs 15 people on a busy night. The theater may have turned a profit but, like many of the other now-bulldozed “passion pits,” its box-office and snack-bar receipts pale in comparison to the cash flow that could be generated by more intensive commercial use of the valuable real estate.

‘Living on Borrowed Time’

“We’re all living on borrowed time,” said Tad Danz, owner of the La Mirada Drive-In, just beyond the county line in Santa Fe Springs. “I can’t think of very many drive-ins that aren’t worth more dead than alive, even though most of them probably make an operating profit. Land costs now are so high--most drive-ins are long-term real estate holding actions, where you hold on to the land until the optimal (selling) point. You won’t see very many of them around here 10 years from now.”

The seven acres on which the Mission Drive-In sits will not change hands, but they will finally be developed for a use more in keeping with their escalated value.

“I don’t know exactly what the land is worth, but bare land in that area is going for about $700,000 an acre,” said San Juan Capistrano Councilman Larry Buchheim. “The theater served a purpose, and everyone hates to see it go, but it didn’t pay to have that kind of lease on such valuable land anymore.”

‘It Was a Dinosaur’

Brian McInerny, who heads a group trying to spur business in downtown San Juan Capistrano, agreed that the Mission was blocking the city’s redevelopment plans. “It was a dinosaur,” he said. “It’s sitting on an excellent location for a shopping center, with freeway visibility. People traveling up and down the interstate, for the first time, will see a major store in San Juan Capistrano. It’s going to drag them in.”

But with the Mission’s departure, San Juan Capistrano will be left without a movie theater of any kind. The closest first-run movie theater for residents of San Juan Capistrano and San Clemente is now a walk-in in the Mission Viejo mall--an unattractive scenario for San Juan, which is trying to increase nighttime use of downtown bars, shops and restaurants. Next summer, however, the Edwards theater chain plans to open a walk-in movie theater with six screens in San Juan Capistrano, said company Chairman Jim Edwards. He said the site is already selected. It will not be in Stroschein’s shopping center, but he refused to name the location while the bid was still in escrow.

Here to Stay

The owners of the remaining drive-ins in the area acknowledge the growing economic pressures but say they are here to stay--at least for a while. Danz, whose grandfather bought La Mirada Drive-In’s 17-acre site shortly after World War II, said he has no immediate plans to close his 1,100-car, single-screen drive-in next to the Santa Ana Freeway. “We’re not short-term-profit-oriented,” Danz said. “I’m running a business, and I have no intention of converting to other use. In fact, I just spent thousands of dollars for new lenses and better illumination on my screen. Still, though, we can’t compete with walk-ins on comfort, picture quality and sound.”

Executives at Pacific Theaters--the company that owned all three recently closed Orange County drive-ins--bristle at the suggestion that they are abandoning the drive-ins. The company owns the property under the five drive-ins it still operates in the county and could make a healthy profit by selling off some of its holdings. But Frank Diaz, director of theater operations, said the company won’t sell “even if the property is worth jillions of dollars.”

Not Going to Sell

“We get offers periodically from developers, but we’re in the theater business; we’re not going to sell the land and get out of it,” Diaz said. “Besides, the drive-ins that you see continuing have been profitable; that’s why they’re still in business.”

Diaz said that while single-screen drive-ins may be economically unfeasible, multiplex drive-in theaters, which show up to five or six films at once, are doing just fine.