Paradise by the Dashboard Light : The great American summer love affair with the drive-in movie may be smoldering mainly onnostalgia, but there are still places to go to relive that youthful dream. Pass those nachos.

For most outdoor enthusiasts, a perfect sunset at the end of a Santa Ana Wind-swept evening is inher ently just a little sad, like a beautifully etched death to the day, heaven’s last call to humankind to pack up the picnic and move indoors.

At the drive-in, though, a dusk this ideal is nature’s way of saying, “Showtime.”

The gates of the Winnetka 6 have just opened to let in dozens of waiting cars, all eager to settle into prime parking spots well before the first feature, with an anticipated starting time ordained not so much by the exhibitor as God, or the arbiters of daylight-saving time.

With about half an hour’s worth of stray rays left before the dark has consumed enough ambient light for coming attractions to start firing up on all six screens, the Chatsworth complex’s longtime manager, Roxcina Bennett, steps out of the central snack bar to take one last contented look at the deepening silhouette of the low mountains to the north.

“It’s nice in a rainstorm too. You see the lightning off in the distance,” says the veteran drive-in operator, evangelistic about her job and about the 360-degree panorama that this big lot allows. “I sure wouldn’t want to be working in a walk-in. No fresh air.”

Bennett brushes past the term walk-in with all the casual contempt of a veteran beat cop forced to form the words desk job . “Yeah,” she ruminates, even as those pretty mountains get darker still, “I’m gonna be sad if this one goes.”

If the Winnetka does someday go the way of all flesh and all giant movie screens, it almost certainly won’t be for lack of business. Tonight’s steady stream of arriving autos testifies to the continuing lure of at least this particular nocturnal parking lot. But history shows that if bad box office doesn’t claim the ozoners (as the trades used to call them), real-estate grabs usually will.

But now is no time to speculate on this San Fernando Valley holdout being forced to go gentle into that good night, as it were. It’s too good a night. The cheerful scene Bennett is taking in could almost be straight out of the ‘50s: the lawn chairs being set out alongside the pickups, the children stocking up on bonbons, the approaching train that ritually toots its horn for the assembled cars, the blue-black of a smogless sky slowly being transformed into a theater ceiling.

Ask some people why they haven’t been to the drive-in in years, and if they’re even aware that such things still exist, they’ll often cite a fear of crime or gangs. But at the Winnetka, at least, the concerns of the security staff tend to be old-fashioned. Most stories of lawlessness revolve around the time-honored tradition of cheating the drive-in of the mere five bucks it asks to come in for a first-run double feature.

“One time there was an accident at the end of the driveway,” Bennett says, pointing past the booths, “and after a while we heard a voice coming from the trunk. Nobody could get it open. We called the paramedics, and it turned out the kid had a broken leg in there. It wasn’t funny, but we laughed later. He was yelling at his friends, ‘ You’re gonna get in the trunk next time.’ ”

Teen boys on two-wheelers are hired as a perimeter patrol here, but no one gets too ballistic over illegals, since even trespassers tend to want to blow a few bucks on Red Vines once they’re in.

“One time I caught a guy coming over the fence back over there, and it was the son of the director of the movie that was playing!” Bennett says with a laugh, not naming any names. “He said, ‘It’s not the money, it’s the fun.’ . . . We don’t get mad at ‘em. Trying to sneak in is one of the rituals of being a kid.”

Maybe around here, still. But most of America’s young will never know the joys of sniffing the spare tire on the way in, nor of sleepily yanking the speaker box off its stand on the way out. Nor of seeing a screen as big as all outdoors in the out-of-doors.

*

Reports of the drive-in’s death have been exaggerated. But not greatly.

“If you want an explanation for what’s going on in the country right now, why things are so crazy, it’s because we only have 800 drive-ins,” declares director John Carpenter, whose genre pictures have played many an ozoner, and who is proud to have lost his virginity at one himself.

Last year a book was published--”Going Going Gone: Vanishing Americana”--with chapters devoted to such anachronisms as bridge parties, rotary phones and wedding-night virgins. It didn’t take a psychic to guess which vanishing act the authors would put on the cover: a full lot of cars watching a Cinemascope movie under the stars.

Going, going? Certainly. Gone? Not to worry--extinction is not quite in sight.

“The ‘90s have not been good,” acknowledges John Bloom, better known as his alter ego, “drive-in movie critic” Joe Bob Briggs (so patriotic on the subject that his syndicated column has long featured a “communist alert” corner dedicated to eulogizing every closing ozoner in the country).

“The worst time was the early ‘80s. They were shutting down like one drive-in a day. Now they’re just shutting down one a week. So it’s turning around,” he chuckles.

In fact, it’s not even quite so bad as that. Jim Kozak of the National Assn. of Theater Owners reports that the number of drive-in screens in operation nationally actually went up in the last year, from 837 to 859. That can be attributed largely to successful existing single-screen drive-ins being multiplexed or the occasional abandoned one being reopened.

So the good news is that “in the ‘90s, it’s leveled out a lot,” as Kozak says. The bad news is that this slightly upward blip is the first movement in that direction since the distant 1970s, and it follows two solid decades or more of inarguably precipitous decline, since the time when America claimed nearly 5,000 individual drive-ins.

Who of a certain age can forget driving cross-country at night and unexpectedly coming across the huge screens situated alongside the dark highway, as if stumbling across Paul Bunyan and his kin, writ large against the sky?

Younger Angelenos would little guess that sizable drive-ins once sat at such high-density spots as the corners of Olympic and Bundy (the long-gone Olympic) or Hyperion and Riverside (the even longer-gone Los Feliz) or Fairfax and Beverly (the Gilmore, demolished in the ‘70s).

But in the country’s less populated climes, the ruins of America’s love affair with the drive-in often remain on permanent view.

“I like to think of it as America’s Stonehenge out there, because it is part of our past, and the way they look in the landscape is remotely analogous,” says Stanford professor Jan Krawitz, whose directed a well-received documentary on the subject, “Drive-In Blues.” “In California or the Northeast, if they go out of business, there’s a shopping mall there a day later. But in Texas, there are still decaying and atrophying drive-ins all around. You see them beaming in the landscape from 20 miles away.”

John Bloom, a Texan himself, is as earnest in extolling his sentiment for these same spooky urban-archeological sites as he is ironic when, in the guise of Joe Bob, he celebrates the exploitation fare that used to be their staple.

“There’s no more melancholy sight in America than an abandoned drive-in,” Bloom laments. “Yet I always want to stop and walk around in there when I see one. It’s still a place that seems kind of magical.

“A lot of people associate it with their youth. They associate it with the first time they fell in love. They associate it with being really safe in the back seat and their parents in the front seat. You know, there’s all kinds of emotions attached that involve love and family and community.

“And then in addition to that, it’s so much bigger than life. We’ve never had motion picture screens as big as the ones built for the original drive-ins. It was just this beautiful vision in the sky; you forget the screen is there,” says Bloom, more wistful by the moment. “It’s like watching the movie written on heaven.”

Director Allison Anders recalls seeing her first movie at a drive-in, and, as a 3-year-old, perceiving the experience as literally divine.

“For years I had this memory of this big man in the sky with a turban on his head,” Anders says with a laugh. “It took me a long time to realize that I had been to a drive-in and that’s what it was. I distinctly remember having the feeling that there’s a man in the sky talking and everybody around me is acting like it’s perfectly normal. I thought it was God .”

N ot that the movies shown always aspired toward ethe reality by any means. Entire genres and sub-genres--the Hells Angels pictures, certain species of bug-eyed monster movies, etc.--were spawned by the existence of drive-ins.

When major studios often wouldn’t give outdoor theaters first-run movies in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and demanded a sizable percentage of receipts when they did, Sammuel Arkoff’s American International Pictures rose up to create cheap product that the drive-in operators could rent for a flat fee. One of Arkoff’s prize producers, Roger Corman, split from AIP to found New World Pictures, also a major supplier.

“When I started working for Roger Corman, the movies weren’t shown anywhere but drive-ins,” says director Joe Dante. “Roger didn’t like to make any scenes too dark, because at the drive-in you wouldn’t be able to see ‘em.

“Sometimes studios used to make up different sets of prints. I remember when ‘The Omen’ came out. It was a very dark movie, and they made two different versions--a dark for indoor theaters, and a really bright, washed-out version for the drive-ins. And of course,” he says with a laugh, “they got all mixed up.”

Corman--popularly proclaimed the “king of the drive-in”--sets the record straight in recalling that “even at the peak of the drive-in business, the traditional hard-top theater always was the bulk of our income . . . though I was getting maybe 40% of my income from drive-ins, and the major studios were getting 25 or 30%.”

Nowadays, the vast majority of remaining drive-ins play strictly major studio pictures, making it harder for film buffs to find the kind of sleepers churned out almost by accident in the AIP and New World assembly lines.

Still, Corman says, “I think the opportunities are there for young filmmakers today with home video, just as they were in the ‘50s and ‘60s with drive-ins.”

A number of Corman-produced pictures were filmed at , not just for, drive-ins. One was Dante’s debut feature, “Hollywood Blvd.,” for which the no-budget crew actually paid admission to the Gilmore Drive-In, eschewing permits, and shot a good section of the comedy on the sly in the back row.

Another Corman production was the far more serious “Targets,” Peter Bogdanovich’s highly regarded first feature. The chiller’s unforgettable climax had a psychotic Valley sniper taking residence with his rifle inside the screen tower of the now-defunct Reseda Drive-In, picking off some of the patrons gathered for a horror picture’s premiere.

Was it affection for the drive-in that led the director to set his climactic shooting spree at one?

“Oh, no ,” says Bogdanovich. “I never liked drive-ins, which is part of why we made the movie: I thought it might help to close them. It seems to have! I don’t think it hurt, because everybody who’s ever seen it says they felt weird going to drive-ins after that.”

Wow--why the antipathy toward a great American tradition?

“Its main attraction, I think, was always for necking,” he says, “but as far as seeing movies the right way, it always kind of made me feel sad, because there’s no audience. You don’t hear the audience, so you might as well be at home.”

What to Bogdanovich repre sents a kind of boxy isolation represented something very different--the ultimate in personal freedom, really--when drive-ins first sprouted across America in the 1930s.

“It was an era when, hard as it is to believe now, formal clothes meant something, and blue-collar people felt they had to go home and change clothes after work to go out to the movies,” says Kerry Segrave, author of a 1993 textbook history of drive-ins. Within the enclosed informality of the spiffy new Ford, then, dad’s dirty work duds and the kids’ pajamas were suitable gear for a night out.

The first real drive-in went up in 1933 in Camden, N.J. A year later, Los Angeles claimed the second site, at the intersection of Pico and Westwood boulevards. By the end of World War II, there were still only about 700 nationwide, but a decade later the number had skyrocketed to more than 4,000, and the love affair was in full bloom.

The screen towers--especially in California and Texas--were often things of beauty, where a massive mural might have a cowboy roping a steer with a moving neon lasso.

“They would spend half their construction money on these screen towers because they were located by the highway and wanted to attract you with what was on their signboard,” says Texan Don Sanders, who is compiling a book of drive-in photos. “It was designed as kind of an impulse sale.”

Weird forms of promotion abounded. There were several short-lived “fly-ins” adjacent to airports, where small planes could pull up alongside cars, and at least one “horse-in,” not to mention a “fish-in” where moviegoers could throw a line into a stream while the film unspooled.

“People didn’t go to the drive-in because there was a specific movie,” Segrave says. “The ads never told you what time; they just said dusk. Well, who knew when dusk was? But everybody came early because they had the kids out on the rides. It was a bunch of little theme parks, before we had real Disneylands and Disney Worlds.”

Now the state where the drive-in originated, New Jersey, doesn’t have even one left. If they should have thrived forever anywhere, it would be Southern California, but Los Angeles and Orange counties are down to 10 standing operations between them, quite a slide from the 53 of three decades ago.

In the last five years alone, the local area has lost the Centinela, the Studio, the Compton, the Buena Park, the Lakewood, the El Monte, the Sundown and the Skyview--and their accompanying murals. What’s left, a la indoor theaters, are mostly the architecturally dull but profitable six- and eight-plexes that went up in the ‘70s, the last boom time.

W hat went wrong to so se verely threaten the ozoner layer?

The nature of the nuclear family itself, for starters. “Teen-agers can sort of do in their living room under their parents’ noses what they used to have to go to the drive-in to do, in terms of sexuality,” Stanford’s Krawitz points out.

Another problem: location, location, location.

Says John Bloom, “Drive-ins were always located in a vulnerable place, because the ideal place is at the edge of a city, where the people peter out and the country starts. Well, that’s the first land that gets developed if the city moves that way. And the guys that are building office buildings very rarely find a piece of 15-acre land all in one piece that they can buy.

“And the other thing that happens is that the worst thing at a drive-in is glare on the screen. So you get a bunch of McDonald’s and stuff around, and suddenly the picture doesn’t look as bright as it should. The best ones were the ones built into a forest.”

Critic Leonard Maltin loved drive-ins as a kid, largely because of the hour or so of cartoons that usually played until it got dark, but he can’t quite bring himself to recommend them now: “Watching a movie at a drive-in is like voluntarily watching a movie on a plane,” he says.

Purity of presentation doesn’t matter to everybody, though. Recalls John Carpenter, “I made a movie in the ‘70s, ‘Assault on Precinct 13,’ that took place mostly in the dark, and I went out and saw it at a drive-in--and I’m telling you, when the lights went out (on screen), you couldn’t see a thing, because the ambient light was so bad. So these weren’t the greatest conditions, no.

“But,” he adds, still the most ardent of defenders, “it was mostly the experience . The drive-in was a great place to go for people to be together--and be alone.”

*

At most drive-ins now, the once-ubiquitous playground equipment is locked away, a victim of another unfortunate circumstance of modern life: cautious insurance concerns.

Yet at the Van Nuys Drive-In tonight, swing set or no, families well outnumber young lovers, the “passion pit” image apparently as outmoded as rumored. For lower- and middle-income families, it’s an extremely reasonable babysitter alternative: With children under 12 admitted free, a large brood can attend for the $10 it costs two parents to get in.

Andy Altamirano of Moorpark has his wife and five kids packed into a camper, its rear end popped open to face the screen where “Rob Roy” is about to unspool. The Cine-Fi sound, conveyed through an antenna clip-on, is cranked up through the car stereo.

“Mother brings leftovers, we make popcorn and buy candy,” he explains, pulling out the blankets. “You can’t go into a walk-in with a picnic basket, that’s for sure. And you can fart and burp--”

“Dad!” protests one of the kids, aghast.

“--and eat popcorn and talk and all sorts of stuff, without disturbing anyone, or being disturbed,” Altamirano continues. “It’s like camping out. You’re under the stars. Last month we saw shooting stars. You can see bats sometimes. Can’t see bats in a regular theater.”

Up on screen, Liam Neeson and Jessica Lange are threatening to get randy under the kilt. Dad threatens a parental veto. “Is this thing R ? Everybody close your eyes,” Altamirano orders. Compliance follows, along with giggles suggesting the kids’ fingers aren’t sealed up too tight.

When sleepiness overtakes the children’s curiosity, they can drop off right in place, of course. The potential to get horizontal has long been the greatest advantage of drive-ins for teen lovers and drowsy tykes.

*

Happily, the number of drive-in screens in Southern California is set to go back up, by one. The Studio Drive-In in Culver City--long slated for demolition, but given a reprieve when the recession stalled a planned housing development--has been leased through 1997 by two business partners with deep pockets who plan to run the place as a labor of love.

“The drive-in has picked up such a negative connotation, that it’s become a swap meet, or a gang-related situation. We want to think of it as the opposite of that,” says Marty Sadoff, one of the partners. “I hate to use the word yuppie , but I guess it’s like an upscale try at doing a drive-in, with titles that would be considered more to the taste of an affluent or artistic crowd.”

Sadoff’s day gig is as director of digital effects at Digiscope, a special-effects facility located just blocks from the Studio. True to his high-tech nature, he’s installing DTS digital Dolby Pro Logic sound to run through car radios, a first for this area’s drive-in trade.

His family operates an outdoor theater in Buffalo, N.Y., where digital FM sound was installed last summer. “Business just shot up,” he says. “We ran ‘Speed,’ and people were coming back two and three times. It was incredible. I mean, cars were shaking.”

The Studio could stand a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on too. But if he rebuilds it, will they come?

“It’s the largest screen left in L.A., at 90 feet wide,” Sadoff says of his Culver City lot, which he plans to reopen this summer. “And the cars have changed back. We’ve gone from the Japanese cars with no seats back to the Jeeps, where people really don’t mind sitting in the car. And if you could give ‘em a picture they can see, and sound that’s not only as good as but better than a movie theater, what would happen?”

Good question.

Until the Studio reopens, though, there is but one forlorn single-screen drive-in left in Los Angeles or Orange counties, holding onto dear life, presumably, on the strength of its weekend swap meet: the Azusa Foothill.

To pull in here at dusk on a slow weeknight is to be astonished by what a wide-open lot an individual outdoor screen was once capable of commanding, with thousands of painted spaces facing the big screen--though hundreds of speaker poles in the front and rear have been pulled out, superfluous for the kinds of crowds the Azusa now draws. No antenna clips here; this is old-fashioned all the way, including distorted speaker boxes, which is why nostalgia-driven drive-in cultists love the place.

As “Bad Boys” commences, only a handful of cars sits in the breathtakingly large lot. By the end of the first feature, a grand total of a dozen autos have ambled in.

And then “Tommy Boy” begins, the soundtrack echoing strangely around this ghost town. “That . . . is . . . awesome ! “ bellows Chris Farley to an audience of almost no one, his catch phrase amplified in row after row of hundreds of speakers, all playing to specters.

Come the weekend, the swap meet will fill the place just fine and subsidize the nighttime operation for another week. But, right now, it feels just about like the loneliest place on Earth.