Drive-Ins Decline, but Nostalgia Keeps the Remaining Few Alive

The movie was about to start at the Starlite Drive-in and 5-year-old Corey Saul was still running circles around the family blanket.

“Come and get another hot dog, Corey,” his mother yelled from the car, as Corey’s older sisters chatted and sipped sodas on the grass.

“I like coming here because I can play,” Corey said before taking a man-sized bite, oblivious to the catsup dripping onto his Rugrats T-shirt. At the indoor movie theaters, “I’m not even allowed to talk.”

The clunky gray iron speaker attached to the car’s door frame crackled to life, playing the same big-band tune that has heralded the start of movies here for 50 years--”Stardust.”

The Starlite is one of nine drive-in theaters left in Virginia, which had as many as 143 in 1968. There are 500 remaining nationwide, where there once were more than 4,000 according to the United Drive-in Theater Owners Assn.

“At one point, people thought that drive-ins would eventually all be gone, like the dinosaurs,” said Don Sanders, author of “The American Drive-in Theater.” “I don’t think that’s the case now.”

Sanders and other advocates of drive-in theaters said there are indications they’ll endure as an icon of Americana.

The number of drive-ins has stabilized in the last few years after nearly 30 straight years of decline. A few more have closed, but several new ones have opened as well.

“It’s kind of making a comeback, like the diners have,” said Mark Bialek of Baltimore, Md., founder of the theater owners’ association. “It’s part of America that I think people really want preserved.”

On Wednesday, the drive-in movie stamp will go on sale as part of the Postal Service’s Celebrate the Century series. It shows a movie screen with a cowboy riding a horse across a canyon and rows of vintage cars in the foreground. Americans picked drive-ins as the top stamp subject to commemorate the 1950s.

The first drive-in opened in Camden, N.J., on June 6, 1933. But they didn’t really catch on until the 1950s, a decade when more than 3,000 theaters popped up across the countryside, Sanders said.

Teenagers came in droves when the theaters started showing movies such as “I Was a Teen-Age Werewolf” and the beach-blanket movies starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello.

Sanders traces the beginning of the decline to the start of daylight saving time. That pushed up movie starting times so they finished well past kids’ bedtimes.

The popularity of color television in the 1960s kept people home, as did the video rental business. And some theater owners further tarnished the image of drive-ins by showing X-rated movies, Sanders said. In a more recent trend, drive-ins have been crushed by suburban sprawl.

But through it all, the Starlite has persevered. So has the Moonlite Theater in Abingdon, which has been open since 1949 and has been the subject of two country songs.

“I caught a couple hiding in the trunk just last week,” Moonlite owner William Booker said. He let them stay after they paid. After all, that’s how he got his start in the business.

When he was caught in a car trunk many summers ago, Booker was forced to pick up the trash for two weeks. When the drive-in’s manager eventually retired, Booker bought the place.

Like the Moonlite, the Starlite only shows moves rated G, PG, and PG-13. Admission is $3 for adults and $1.50 for children. Corey’s hot dog cost 75 cents, and the popcorn and candy bars are even cheaper.

“It’s cheap family fun,” said Tammy Saul, who drove her husband and children from Pulaski, a 45-minute drive, to see “EdTV” at the Starlite.

Projectionist Patrick Huffman had to whack the film wheel with the heel of his hand to get it rolling smoothly and silence the honking by impatient drivers.

“I’ve been coming here since I was 8, when my dad drove an old Camaro and we would come an hour before the show to eat,” Huffman, 35, said. The hot dogs, he said, still taste the same.