Wanna buy a drive-in?
FOR SALE: Outdoor movie theater in a small Missouri town with a 73-year-history of sparking memories (and entrepreneurial dreams) as big as the screen.
The Sunset Drive-In Theatre in my hometown has been on the market for two years.
It’s one of nearly 20 drive-ins for sale in the U.S. right now, including the oldest drive-in in Texas. There are only about 300 of these theaters left, a sharp decline from the 4,000 that entertained Americans in the 1950s and 1960s.
The story of the drive-in decline has been well-noted over the years.
An American invention, drive-in movie theaters first started in 1933 in Camden, New Jersey, by a guy in the car industry who developed a small version of what we know now in his home driveway. He expanded the concept and opened the Automobile Movie Theatre, whose slogan was "The whole family is welcome, regardless of how noisy the children are."
Owner Richard Hollingshead was granted a patent for the concept, which kept drive-in numbers low until the patent was revoked in 1950. Then the floodgates opened.
That’s when the Aurora movie theater opened, 1951, just a couple of years after the Graham Drive-In opened about an hour and a half west of Fort Worth. These theaters have been running continuously ever since, typically from April to October.
But thousands of theaters haven’t made it. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the drive-in became iconized in movies like “Grease” and “The Outsiders,” the actual drive-ins were closing as we started watching movies at home, first on VHS and then on cable TV, DVDs, and now streaming.
Perhaps an equal factor: Daylight Savings. The Uniform Time Act of 1966 pushed sunset back an hour later during the prime drive-in months, pushing movie start times to 10 p.m. Overnight, drive-ins went from being something you could do with your kids after work to a strictly weekend activity.
The drive-in comeback started in the late 1990s, but then came the digital film era, when studios stopped making print copies of the movies, so theaters had to buy all new digital gear. (Do you know how much it takes to make a Marvel movie? I can’t even imagine what those cost to show in a theater like this.)
I have such great memories from that time, swinging at the playground under that giant screen and watching all those summer blockbusters from the 1990s. Apollo 13. Independence Day. Jurassic Park. Armageddon. It was a golden era for handsome men saving the day in increasingly strange high-stakes situations.
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In high school, my friends and I would pack into our car, sometimes making someone ride in the trunk or cover up with blankets to save a few bucks.
There are three movie theaters in the Austin area, and they have all opened in the past 15 years: Doc’s in Buda, which opened in 2018, and Blue Starlite Mini Urban Drive-In, which has two locations.
The last movie I saw at the Sunset Drive-In was in 2016 with my dad. My sister was in town, too, and we took my kids, then 9 and 5, to watch “Independence Day: Resurgence.” We had no idea what was coming that fall with the election or the following year, when he got his cancer diagnosis.
That was his last good summer.
When I was in Aurora in July visiting my mom, I saw the FOR SALE sign out front.
“I’d love to run a drive-in,” I heard myself say.
I can’t imagine actually running a drive-in, but there’s a dreaminess to the idea. A naive idealism, this desire to do something so out-of-the-ordinary and the aspiration to do something you love and make a living at it.
Then I remembered that my dad had a dream to run a movie theater. Not a drive-in, but one of those little indie art house theaters that were popping up all over the country in the late 1990s.
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