Today I learned that there is a lot of passion and hard work in running a drive-in movie theater. Yes, that is a serious statement.
Showing up well before the show, we wanted to spend a little time seeing what goes into this thing. By the way, this is the only theater in three counties and it is one of the only theaters in this region that gets first run theatrical releases on film. If you don’t know what that is, its actually quite rare for ANY drive-in movie theater to get such a thing.
This, above, is Cars 2. We were going to watch Cowboys & Aliens… which came out today. Yes, in the middle of a field on my truck’s sound system.
Hours before the show, most people don’t realize there is a lot of work to be done. Its not just putting a reel on a projector and turning on the light.
The movie has to spool up and be spliced to one big reel from 8 or 10 or 12 smaller ones. Then the whole thing has to be flipped and re-run onto a second reel. (Because the splicing puts it on backwards. It has to “rewind”.)
All old-school.
This is Dave. Dave wears a Utilikilt. Yes, that is a kilt. Like a scottish kilt.
He says its like the comfort of wearing a bath towel all day.
You just can’t make this stuff up.
The sun began to go down and the cars started filling the fields. Two screens, four movies. Cowboys & Aliens followed by that new Tom Hanks movie… and Cars 2 followed by Captain America on the other. Seriously new movies in the middle of a field in one of the most rural counties in all of the Ohio River valley.
The concession stands get hopping.
.
All the while, Dave is hard at work getting the power up on one of the projectors. Something isn’t right. But he is a technician at one of the big news stations in Cincinnati, he probably is the only one who actually COULD fix it.
Finally, all is well and, as Dave says it, the movies go flying through the air.
.
A little late heat lightning in that photo above.
The picture isn’t great, the sound isn’t great, but there’s something fun about the drive-in theater that keeps everybody coming back. On a big night, he will have four hundred in attendance. Two hundred is a small night…
Everybody needs something to be truly passionate about. It was really fun to hang out and see this one…
Stay tuned…
-Noah D.
