We are sick.
We are disgusting.
We believe in blood.
In breasts.
And in beasts.
We believe in Kung Fu City.
If life had a vomit meter.
We'd be off the scale.
As long as one single drive-in remains On the planet Earth.
We will party like jungle animals.
We will boogie till we puke.
Heads will roll.
The drive-in will never die.
Amen.
The drive-in theater may have been born in New Jersey, but it had the good sense to come to Texas to live. Throughout the fifties and sixties it thrived here like a fungus on teenage lusts and families enticed by the legendary DOLLAR NIGHT or Two DOLLARS A CARLOAD.
And even now-though some say the drive-in has seen its heyday in the more populated areas, you can drive on in there any night of the week-particularly Special Nights and Saturday-and witness a sight that sometimes makes the one on the screen boring on comparis-on.
You'll see lawn chairs planted in the backs of pickups, or next to speakers, with cowboys and cowgirls planted in the chairs, beer cans growing out of their fists, and there'll be the sputterings of barbecue pits and the aromas of cooking meats rising up in billows of smoke that slowly melts into the clear Texas sky.
Sometimes there'll be folks with tape decks whining away, even as the movie flickers across the three-story screen and their neighbors struggle to hear the crackling speaker dia-logue over ZZ Top doing "The Tube Snake Boogie." There'll be lovers sprawled out on blankets spread between two speaker posts, going at it so hot and heavy they ought to just go on and charge admission. And there's plenty of action in the cars too. En route to the concession stand a discerning eye can spot the white moons of un-Levied butts rising and falling to a steady, rocking rhythm just barely contained by well-greased shocks and four-ply tires.
What you're witnessing is a bizarre subculture in action. One that may in fact be riding the crest of a new wave.
Or to put it another way: Drive-ins are crazy, but they sure are fun.
The drive-in theater is over fifty years old, having been spawned on Camden, New Jersey June 6th, 1933 by a true visionary-Richard Milton Hollingshead.
Camden
, as you may know, was the last home of Walt Whitman, and when one considers it was the death place of so prestigious an American poet, it is only fitting that it be the birthplace of such a poetic and all-American institution as the drive-in theater Or as my dad used to call them, "the outdoor picture show."
Once there was over 4,000 drive-ins in the United States, now there are about 3,000, and according to some experts, they are dropping off fast. However, in Texas there is a re-emergence and new interest in the passion pits of old. They have become nearly as sacred as the armadillo.
The Lone
Star
State alone has some 209 outdoor theaters in operation, and many of these are multi-screen jobs with different movies running concurrently alongside one another. Not long ago, Gordon McLendon, "The Drive-in Business King," erected the 145 in Houston, a drive-in cap-able of holding up to three thousand automobiles. In fact, it claims to be the biggest drive-in in existence.
Why does the drive-in thrive in Texas when it's falling off elsewhere? Three reasons.
(1) Climate. Generally speaking, Texas has a pretty comfortable climate year round. (2) A car culture. Texas is the champion state for automobile registration, and Texans have this thing about their cars.
The automobile has replaced the horse not only as a mode of transportation, but as a source of mythology. If the Texan of old was supposedly half-human and half-horse, the mod-ern Texan is half-human and half-automobile. Try and separate a Texan from his car, or mass transit that sucker against his will, and you're likely to end up kissing his grillwork at sixty-five miles an hour. (3) Joe Bob Briggs.
Okay, start the background music. Softly please, a humming version of "The Eyes of Texas." And will all true Texans please remove your hats while we have 5 short discussion of Joe Bob Briggs, The Patron Saint of Texas Drive-Ins, He Who Drives Behind The Speaker Rows, and columnist for The Dallas Times Herald. In fact, his column, "Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-in," is the most popular feature in the paper. As it should be, because Joe Bob-who may be the pseudonym for the Herald's regular film critic John Bloom-don't talk no bullcorn, and he don't bother with "hardtop" movie reviews. He's purely a drive-in kind of guy, and boy does he have style.
Here's an example, part of a review for The Evil Dead: "Five teenagers become Spam-in-a-cabin when they head for the woods and start turning into flesh-eating zombies. Asks a lot of moral questions, like 'If your girlfriend turns zombie on you, what do you do? Carve her into itty-bitty pieces or look the other way?'
One girl gets raped by the woods. Not in the woods. By the woods. The only way to kill zombies:
Total dismemberment. This one could make Saw eligible for the Disney Channel."
Single-handedly, with that wild column of his-which not only reports on movies, but on the good times and bad times of Joe Bob himself-he has given the drive-in a new mystique. Or to be more exact, made the non-drive-in goers aware of it, and reminded the rest of us just how much fun the outdoor picture show can be.
Joe Bob's popularity has even birthed a yearly Drive-in Movie Festival-somewhat sacrile-giously held indoors this year-that has been attended in the past by such guests as Roger Corman, King Of The B's, and this year by "Big Steve," known to some as Stephen King. (If you movie watchers don't recognize the name, he's a writer-feller) "Big Steve" was given the solemn honor of leading off the 1984 ceremonies with Joe Bob's "drive-in oath" and arrived wearing his JOE BOB BRIGGS
IS A PERSONAL FRIEND OF MINE T-shirt.
The festival has also sported such features as The Custom Car Rally, Ralph the Diving Pig (sure hate I missed the boy's act), the stars of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Miss Custom Body of 1983, "unofficial custom bodies" and Joe Bob his own self. And last, but certainly not least, along with this chic gathering, a number of new movies like Bloodsuckers From Out-er Space and Future-Kill made their world premieres.
What more could you ask from Joe Bob?
Kill the music. Hats on.
The drive-ins I grew up with went by a number of names: THE APACHE, THE rim PINES, THE RIVERROAD being a few examples. And though they varied somewhat in appearance, basically they were large lots filled with speaker posts-many of which were minus their speakers, due to absent-minded patrons driving off while they were still hooked to their windows, or vandals-a concession stand, a screen at least three stories high (sometimes six), a swing, see-saw and merrygo-round up front for the kiddies, all this surrounded by an ugly six-foot moonshimmering tin fence.
They all had the same bad food at the concessions. Hot dogs that tasted like rubber hoses covered in watery mustard, popcorn indistinguishable from the cardboard containers that held it, drinks that were mostly water and ice, and candy so old the worms inside were dead either of old age or sugar diabetes.
And they all came with the same restroom. It was as if THE APACHE, RIVERROAD and TWIN PINES were equipped with warping devices that activated the moment you stepped behind the wooden "modesty fence." Suddenly, at the speed of thought, you were whisked away to a concrete bunker with floors either so tacky your shoes stuck to it like cat hairs to honey, or so flooded in water you needed skis to make it to the urinals or the john, the latter of which was forever doorless, the hinges hanging like frayed tendons. And both of these public conveniences were invariably stuffed full of floating cigarette butts, candy wrappers and used prophylactics.
Rather than take my life into my own hands in these rather seedy enclosures, I often took my chances battling constipation or urinating into a Coke cup and pouring the prize out the window. The idea of standing over one of those odoriferous urinals-and there was always this item of crayoned wisdom above them: REMEMBER, CRABS CAN POLE VAULT-and having some ugly, fuzzy, multi-legged and ravenous leap out on me was forever foremost in my mind. Nor did I find those initialed and graffiti-carved seats-when there were seats at all-the more inviting. I figured that no matter how precariously I might perch myself, some name-less horror from the pits of sewerdom would find access to that part of my anatomy I most prized.