While not exactly an expert on such double-featured institutions, I have spent a little time inside the fence blinds of Deep South drive-in movie theaters, enough time to debate whether they are actually theaters at all, or just big, plywood edifices hoisted up some creosote poles in a terraced, speaker-poled field.
Most of my experience involves Alabama drive-ins, but I experienced a couple in Texas (The Brazos in Granbury and the old Astro3 in Dallas), where there were about 400 big screens in the peak drive-in years.
In a multiplex world, a drive-in seems quaint now and you have to look hard to find one. However, if you have never been to one, do it – it’s like riding a dinosaur; you won’t get the chance much longer. And it’s a lot of fun.
Montgomery’s Fairview Drive-In was my first, although I didn’t always exactly drive in. I sometimes rode my banana-seated bike across a field behind our Westgate subdivision to see John Wayne or Clint Eastwood or Charlie The Cougar rip up the Wilsons’ cabin.
The Fairview’s ugly twin sister, The Jet Drive-In, sat right next door. The Jet was the kind of car-humping, plywood wind-buster where a young boy could sneak up behind the old fence and see naked women on the screen, mostly screaming while somebody tried to carve them up or generally murder them in some bloody fashion. Never went to the Jet legally, but we wore a two-lane trench through the field up to the hole in the fence that served as the portal through which the facts of life oozed through to a generation of pre-puberty-stricken Southern male knuckleheads.
Sometimes our African-American counterparts from the neighborhood next to ours kept the trail well tended in our stead if something like “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” landed on the screen. We shared the hole in the fence in a monument to racial harmony that far surpassed the efforts of adults of that time, who often shared only hate.
By the time I took the wheel of my departed grandpaw’s 1962 Ford Galaxie 500 in the 1970s, we’d moved about 100 miles south to Andalusia and the Fendley Drive-In glowed neon and nasty off the Florala Highway next to the Ford Tractor dealership.
A big sign read: “Don’t pull the speakers off the poles.” So, naturally, we tried and pulled the bumper off DeWayne’s truck one night.
When we didn’t have a window-fogging date, we’d drive down to the Fendley, wait until there was a line of cars to distract the woman in the ticket booth and enter through the exit. This pathetic activity passed for high entertainment in a place where the only official restaurants in town were the Shamrock, CB’s Pit BBQ and The Little Kitchen (where Harris once downed 48 pieces of “all you can eat” fried chicken at lunch there).
The Fendley didn’t just host typical drive-in drivel like “Billy Jack” and Dirty Mary Crazy Larry. The management also brought in “Love Story” and “Wuthering Heights” just to mess with the Bubbas. Emily Bronte would have been proud. Then again, I also saw Ray Milland’s head attached to Rosey Grier’s body in “The Thing With Two Heads” (the movie poster shouted: “They transplanted a WHITE BIGOT’S HEAD on a SOUL BROTHER’S BODY.”)
It was usually guts and gore, blood and boobs, and the joint was always packed on the weekend. The back was romance row, and I figured half the babies born in Andalusia were conceived while rocking, crummy speakers crackled “Night of the Living Dead.”
Years later, I would read John Bloom’s pseudo-anonymous “Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In” in The Dallas Times Herald and think about the visceral act of watching a movie bouncing off a warped, plywood wall while sitting in your car with the weather and the sounds of a fight in the next car sneaking in through the window just like the static of the cold, metal speaker.
My kids have never been to a drive-in movie and probably never will. They will never see the accidental car lights blinding the screen or hear the horns of disapproval when that happens or smell the scent of hot dogs and burgers and popcorn pouring through the open door of the cinderblock concession stand.In their digital world of HD images and Dolby audio, the idea of something so crude as a movie under the stars will go the way of those Greenland glaciers. However, if you’d like a little peek through the hole in the wall again, check it out: http://www.driveinmovie.com. There may still be a drive-in near you.