Today, if you ask men and women in their late 60s or 70s about the movies they saw together as teenagers in the 1950s and 1960s at the outdoor drive-in movie theaters that dotted the American landscape, their reaction might be a blush in the cheek, a slight pause, and (especially the boys) a nostalgic smile. The reason being that many of those teenagers didn’t see much of those movies because seeing the movies wasn’t the reason they went to those drive-in theaters.
This week (June 6) in 1933 the first drive-in opened in Camden, New Jersey, featuring the movie “Wives Beware,” about a man who fakes amnesia in order to carry on an extramarital affair. The first drive-in owner-operator was an auto-parts dealer named Richard Hollingshead, who built the main screen and installed three large RCA speakers around it for sound, although the later introduction of in-car speakers vastly improved the listening experience.
Tickets were around 25 cents per car and per person, so two teenage lovebirds paid 75 cents to watch some of the movie before heading to the back seat to make out (or engage in a wrestling match, depending on the girl).
Raging hormonal teenagers aside, most drive-in customers were actually families because parents could take the kids along, saving the cost of a baby sitter. Parents often dressed the kids in their pajamas so that they could fall asleep in the back seat during the movie, and since most drive-ins had concession stands, the kids got a snack before dozing off.
By the mid-1950s there were nearly 1,000 drive-in movie theaters around the country, some so large that as many as 2,000 cars could be accommodated, and Bengies Drive-in, which opened in 1956 in Baltimore, Md., boasted the country’s biggest movie screen at 52-feet high and 100-feet wide.
Drive-in movies reached their peak in the 1960s when the number of drive-ins exceeded 4,000, but by the 1970s the business slowed, in part because of competition from other video entertainment options, including video recordings and cable television. Also, in the 1970s real estate prices began to soar, so many drive-in theater owners sold their land for housing and business development, making far more money than their drive-in business had ever paid them. Finally, especially in the 1960s, evolving moral standards afforded teenagers many more outlets for their passion. By the 1990s there were fewer than 1,000 drive-ins and today there are only around 400.
One of those still around is Bengies, which still boasts the “biggest movie theater screen in the U.S.A.,” which is now digital and is 52-feet high and 120-feet wide — and the movie’s sound now comes through the FM-radio in your car.
