Park yourself here for some trivia:
- The first drive-in theater was opened June 6, 1933, in Camden, N.J., by Richard M. Hollingshead Jr., who played out a hunch after gauging reaction to projecting films from the hood of his Model A onto a garage wall.The out-of-work businessman came up with the idea after realizing people wanted to enjoy their vehicles and the silver screen at the same time during parties at his home in nearby Villanova, Pa. The cars were, in effect, private boxes.
Six hundred patrons doled out a quarter per car and a quarter per person ($1 tops) to watch "Wives Beware," starring Adolphe Men-jou, and listen to dialogue blasted over towering loudspeakers. Later, Hollingshead sloped the parking area to allow better viewing and added separate car speakers and heaters.
- The same summer, while driving home through Camden from the South Jersey shore, Wilson Shankweiler observed Hollingshead's facility.
That spawned America's second drive-in, which Shankweiler christened in 1934 by hanging a mammoth sheet between two poles and erecting a speaker in Orefield, Pa.
- In an age when the average American didn't have a car, and handicapped by the Great Depression, World War II and gas rationing, drive-ins didn't become popular until after the war.
- Drive-ins were fueled in the late 1940s by the baby boom, the auto boom, cheap gas and a thriving consumer market. Soon they spread to suburbia and small-town America, with giant screens often becoming the tallest landmark around, even dwarfing the Midwest's grain silos.
- Drive-ins have through the years been nicknamed ozoners, passion pits with pix, airers, underskyers and autocines.
- Drive-in marquees have advertised with alternative descriptions, such as "auto vue," "automobile theater," "outdoor theater," "motor movie," "drivin," and "motion pictures under the stars."
- Theater owners, called exhibitors or "exhibs," sometimes use the nickname "hard tops" for indoor theaters.
- Drive-ins are almost uniquely American. Japan is taking to them recently and others are found in Mexico and Africa, but, on the whole, they've really never caught on outside the United States.
An Italian drive-in opened near Rome in 1957, complete with Coca-Cola, popcorn, ice cream, hot dogs, hamburgers, pasta, espresso and space for 1,000 vehicles, including 250 scooters. "But riding on a scooter to the drive-in took a lot away from the experience," said drive-in researcher Richard H. Jackson. The theater transplant failed.
- The rapid decline of American drive-in theaters in the 1980s - tied predominantly to the rise of VCRs and movie rentals - not only claimed Hollingshead's theater (making Shankweiler's the nation's oldest), but also the industry's National Association of Drive-In Operators.
- Meanwhile, other businesses, perhaps inspired by drive-in theaters - drive-in or drive-thru restaurants, banks, pharmacies, grocery stores, dry cleaners, newsstands, churches and even mortuaries offering window viewings - have prospered, because nothing has replaced them.