by erin thursby scopes1925@msn.com
The number of drive-ins in Florida had always been higher than other states, perhaps because of the sunny weather, and Florida was one of the first states to have a drive-in movie theater. Although Florida experienced the same peak years as the rest of the country (1955-1959), the numbers never declined as much as the rest of the states. As late as ’79, when the majority of the theaters in other states had gone bust, Florida still had over 100 drive-in theaters operating. Many were located in small Florida towns as well as bigger cities.
Many of the drive-in theaters here in Florida have had to do double-duty in order to stay in business. Our lone drive-in here in Jacksonville is the Playtime Triple Family Drive-In, located between Connecting Road and Wesconnett Blvd on Blanding. This theater has had some interesting times in different capacities. In the ‘90s, according to owner Frank Birchfield, it served as a drive-in church. “A local minister used to hold the service through the PA system car radio…He would stand up front and preach with a microphone that picked everything up.” says Birchfield. Although the drive-in hasn’t been a church since around ’95, it still does double duty as a flea market on Wednesday-Saturday from 6AM-3PM on Wednesday and 7AM-3PM Thursday-Saturday.
Info: Playtime Triple Family Drive-In (904) 771-2300, 6300 Blanding Blvd - Jacksonville, FL 32244
Norbit 7PM
Reno 911 8:30PM
Abandoned 7PM
Ghost Rider 8:40PM
Wild Hogs 7PM & 8:30PM
Did you know that the University Drive-In Theatre (since closed) was involved in a First Amendment case that went all the way to the Supreme Court in 1975? Apparently, the theater was running an R rated film known as Class of ’74 AKA Gabriella, Gabriella, which violated a city ordinance for exhibiting a motion picture, visible from public streets, in which “female buttocks and bare breasts were shown.” The Supreme Court upheld the right of the theater and theater manager Richard Erznoznik to show some T & A on the drive-in screen. The case brief for this ruling is often required reading for law students, even today.
University Drive-In became a Public Library (near Farah’s on University)
The Southside Drive-In became a Gentleman’s Club.
The Midway on Beach Blvd. and The Fox on Normandy was sold to Wal-Mart.
The Atlantic, which could be found at Atlantic and University is now a Publix.
The drive-in craze was so huge that there were all sorts of variations on the basic drive-in model we’ve come to love. In ’48 Ed Brown’s Drive-In and Fly-In of Asbury Park, New Jersey opened to accommodate 500 cars and 25 airplanes. Planes were lined up in the back row because they were too high for people in cars to see over and the owner provided towing back to the airfield next to the theater.
It was 1933 when Richard M. Hollingshead combined his love of movies and cars by hanging a sheet in his backyard and projecting movies onto it with a 1928 Kodak projector mounted on the hood of his car. With just $30,000, Hollingshead opened the first drive-in on Tuesday June 6, 1933 on Crescent Boulevard in Camden, New Jersey. The price of admission was 25 cents for the car and 25 cents per person.
Hollingshead had several bugs to workout, namely how to park the cars so that they could see around each other and how to transmit the sound to all the cars. The first commercial drive-in movie theater simply had very large speakers. This proved to be problem to the neighbors, who found it too loud, too late and the people in the cars in the back row had trouble hearing the dialogue. They eventually solved the problem with speakers for each car and later local radio frequencies the cars could tune to.
By the 1940s drive-ins were gaining in popularity, with only a small slowdown during WWII as a result of rationing. With the advent of the family oriented baby boom in post-War America, there were a staggering five thousand drive-ins across the U.S. by the end of the 1950s. To put the number in perspective, if you replaced all the Wal-Marts in the country right now with drive-in movie theaters, you’d still need to add 22 more per state (over a thousand) to get to the number of drive-ins we had in the 1950s.
The largest drive-ins could host about three thousand cars, with shuttles or golf carts to take you back to your car from the concession stand or other activities. Doors would sometimes open 3 hours in advance for things like talent shows, pony rides and other kid-friendly activities. Since concessions were the big money maker, they made sure to include intermissions, which upped concession sales.
The glut of drive-ins began stagnating and then declining in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Fewer and fewer families were coming to the drive-ins, so they began to cater to the exploitation movie crowd as well as to teenagers looking for something to have on in the background as they made out. By the ‘80s VHS and Cable sounded what seemed like a death knell for the drive-ins. More and more drive-ins were sold or left abandoned.
In the 1990’s a taste for nostalgia brought a slight upswing in the number of drive-ins, with some of the theaters that survived adding screens because of demand. The number still dropped over the decade, but the market for drive-ins is much more stable than it was over the past three decades.
Today, though we’re still losing drive-ins to development and lack of profits, communities are more likely to see them as the treasures they are and work for their preservation.
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