In the beginning there was Richard Hollingshead.
The Camden, N.J., businessman had an idea. Synchronized sound had been introduced to the movies only a few years before. Now, in 1932, he was working on an idea that could very well revolutionize the cinema.Why not build a theater in which patrons watched films from their cars? Hollingshead went to work, devising a series of ramps giving each car just enough elevation so that customers could see over the vehicle in front of them.
On May 16, 1933, U.S. Patent No. 1909537 was issued to Hollingshead for his outdoor movie theater. Less than a month later, on June 6, the first drive-in movie in the world - called, simply enough, the Drive-In Theatre - opened in Camden.
Admission was 25 cents a car and 25 cents a person to see a second-run film, "Wife Beware," starring Adolph Menjou. The concession stand offered beer and sandwiches.
The drive-in theater was not an immediate success. The novelty of watching a movie from your own car soon wore off, and many filmgoers questioned why they should pay the same price to endure heat, bugs and mediocre projection and sound - plus an old movie - when they could go into an air-conditioned auditorium for a brand new feature with optimum presentation values.
Camden's original Drive-In Theatre closed in 1936, and Hollingshead got out of the movie business. But by that time the idea of watching movies from your car had begun to take off elsewhere in the country, particularly in the South and in California, where warm weather meant plenty of balmy nights all year long.
By 1938 there were more than 50 drive-ins in operation, and the show-biz journal "Variety" had come up with a name for the open-air theaters: "ozoners."
Hollywood studios, most of which also owned theater chains at that time, for decades refused to show their prestigious first-run films in the ozoners, claiming the outdoor theaters were taking business away from indoor houses.
But Herbert J. Ochs, who ran a chain of drive-ins in the '40s, surveyed his patrons and found that not even 5 percent of his customers regularly attended indoor theaters.
"Our crowds are made up of couples who can't afford sitters to stay with the babies, so they bring them in the car," Ochs is quoted in Kerry Segrave's book "Drive-in Theaters - A History From Their Inception in 1933." "We get invalids who return as many as four times a week, people who otherwise would never see a picture. Among our regulars are two fat ladies who do not go to indoor theaters because they don't fit into regular seats."
Another thing Ochs discovered was that business was as good as ever on those days when his advertisements failed to mention the name of the movie being shown. His patrons, Ochs reported, "in almost every instance said they did not know what picture was being shown when they drove into the parking space. . . . We sell the drive-in theater to the public, not the picture. The program is secondary."
Bingo! Ochs had just hit on the essential fact about drive-in movies. They appealed to a large segment of the public because they were cheap, relaxed and fed into our national love of automobiles. You could eat, drink and talk without bothering other moviegoers - or even paying attention to the movies.
There were other allures as well. Drive-in operators realized early on that customers showed up to buy tickets even when it was snowing so badly the screen could not be seen. The reason? Sex. Soon the phrases "passion pit" and "petting place" had been added to the American vocabulary.
Mostly, however, the ozoners courted a family crowd and offered amenities to keep young parents and their offspring coming. Children often were admitted free. Bottle-warming tables were set up to help new parents prepare baby formula. Kiddie playgrounds were installed, typically in the so-called "dead space" right in front of the screen, from which you couldn't see the movie anyway.
The cafeteria-style concession stands generated so much income that they were known in the trade as "profiterias."
For those who took their movies seriously, the drive-in could be a frustrating experience. Projection typically was dim and the sound terrible - loudspeakers were mounted above the screen and blasted the movie soundtrack to the dismay of nearby residents and businesses. (Individual speakers for each car weren't introduced until after World War II.)
Weather always was a factor - some drive-ins offered patrons the use of a Rain-A-Way, a tentlike tarp erected over a car's windshield to keep the rain off without draining the car battery by running the wipers.
But the public seemed to love drive-ins. By 1948, 759 of them were in business; a decade later 4,000 were operating.