A Eulogy to the Drive-In

- By Andrew Lee

This month marks the two-year anniversary of the destruction of Owen Sound’s Twin Drive-In Theatre, a local business that had been in operation for almost 70 years before being closed due to poor attendance. While it can often feel as though life in Owen Sound is fairly isolated from the rest of the world, our town has a rich and vibrant arts culture, known as it is for our visual arts festivals, celebrations of folk music, and our small but beloved Tom Thomson Art Gallery, named after the famous Canadian painter who lived in the area for much of his life.

Perhaps less known but equally interesting is our town’s historic relationship with the cinema. In the early teens, as the motion picture was making its transformation from fairground novelty to bona fide art, Owen Sound’s Griffith Opera House transitioned from vaudeville theatre to become one of the area’s very first moving picture houses. The Griffith, which after various name changes is today known as The Roxy, remained a movie theatre until the late 1980’s, and continues to operate as a venue for local theatre productions, a hub and living monument to Owen Sound’s cultural history.

Like The Roxy, which was first built amid a wave of theatre constructions during an exciting time in cinematic history, the Twin Drive-In was built in 1950 as part of a surge of drive-in movie theatres across North America. The first known of such theatres was opened in 1933 in Camden, New Jersey. As the story goes, its progenitor, movie enthusiast Richard Hollingshead, was experimenting with ways to exhibit films for people like his mother, who had trouble sitting in uncomfortable theatre chairs. Hollingshead mounted a Kodak projector onto his car, set up some RCA speakers, and an idea was born - although it didn’t take off straight away. By the end of World War II, in 1945, there were still only around two-dozen drive-in theatres in all the United States.

It wasn’t until the post-war years that the number of drive-in theatres skyrocketed. The reason for this sudden surge was multifaceted. After the war the structure of city life changed all around Canada and the US as families settled down in newly built “sub-urban developments,” which were located outside of city centres. Since most traditional movie houses were built in city centres, near populous neighbourhoods, it became harder for these patrons, particularly parents with young children, to go to the movies. In addition to this, the increasing affordability of consumer television sets in the late 1940s and early 1950s, together with other factors, led to a dramatic drop in movie theatre attendance. To combat this, Hollywood studios began dreaming up dozens of gimmicks to get people back to the movies, including new experiments in 3D, wide-screen formatting, and an increase in the output of color films.

Drive-in theatres, with their unique exhibition practice, ease of access, and relatively cheap admission costs (typically a single ticket would grant you 2 or even 3 feature film screenings), were perfectly poised to capitalize on this period. Parents could take their kids without worrying about disturbing other patrons, sub-urban dwellers could easily drive their cars to the theatre without worrying about where to park, and young couples could escape to the drive-in for relative privacy. More and more of these theatres opened as traditional theatres closed, and by 1956 more than 4,000 were operating across Canada and the US. The Skyway Drive-In, Canada’s first drive-in theater, opened near Hamilton in 1946.

As anyone who has been to a drive-in theatre can tell you, the viewing conditions are often less than ideal. Mosquitoes can be a nuisance, bad weather poses a constant threat, and the business, especially in this climate, is extremely seasonal, only really being viable in summer months. These days, as even traditional movie theatres are faced not just with the threat of television but the insurmountable challenge of home-streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime, it’s perhaps not surprising that a viewing experience as antiquated as the drive-in theatre is going extinct. Each year more and more of these theatres close – according to enthusiast-driven blog driveinmovie.com, only around 37 drive-in theatres remain open in Canada, with another 330 or so in the United States. Especially today, as the Coronavirus pandemic threatens millions of businesses around the globe, it remains hard to imagine many of these theatres will last much longer before their screens, too, are demolished for good.

While many of the people I know were not terribly saddened to see the Twin Drive-In go two years ago, I remain mournful. Yes, it is true, watching a movie at the drive-in could be cumbersome, but the texture of the experience, the feeling of the cold night air juxtaposed against the warmth of the glowing, 60-foot screen – this was completely unique. The Twin Drive-In was an experience, but more than that, it was a portal – a connection to a cinematic and cultural history that is now gone.

While today I have unprecedented access to films and television shows at my fingertips at home, it remains impossible for me to replicate that feeling of basking in another world – of sitting in the same exact spot as dozens of patrons before me, watching a film on a giant screen that is haunted by the ghosts of thousands of films before it.

As I prepare to begin my PhD in cinema studies this fall, I think back to the Twin Drive-In and know that I owe my love of cinema, at least in part, to the magic I felt there. Theatres like the Twin helped cultivate an idea of cinema not easily encountered in today’s world of streaming and digitality. Going to a theatre like the Twin transforms cinema from something abstract into something real, something tangible. While I remember vividly dozens of the films that I saw at the Twin, my memories of the theatre are equally as populated by the physical space itself. Inseparable from the memory of the films is the actual experience of watching them: of setting up lawn chairs in the back of a pick-up truck, of wrapping oneself in a warm blanket to fend off the evening nip, of staying after the screens had gone dark and watching the stars. While my love of movies will never fade, it’s sad to me that the physicality of that love is slowly dying, and I know I can’t be alone in feeling this.

So, this month, join me in remembering the Twin Drive-In theatre, and the thousands of magical experiences that I and innumerable others experienced there. Maybe I’m romanticizing simpler times, but today as I sit in self-isolation, I sure wish I could go back. screensigns