A black rocket of a shape moved through the invisible sea: a shark, the granddaddy of all sharks, the seed for all of man’s fears of the deeps.
And it caught the old man in its mouth, began swimming upward toward the golden light of the moon. The old man dangled from the creature’s mouth like a ragged rat from a house cat’s jaws. Blood blossomed out of him, coiled darkly in the invisible sea.
The young man trembled. “Oh God,” he said once.
Then along came that thick dark cloud, rolling across the face of the moon.
Momentary darkness.
And when the cloud passed there was light once again, and an empty sky.
No fish.
No shark.
And no old man.
Just the night, the moon, and the stars.
Hell Through a Windshield
We are drive-in mutants.
We are not like other people.
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 Oath,” by Joe Bob Briggs
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 in comparison.
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 barbeque 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 dialogue over ZZ Top doing “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 4-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 in Camden, New Jersey, June 6, 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 were 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 I-45 in Houston, a drive-in capable of holding up to 3,000 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 modern 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 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 a short discussion of Joe Bob Briggs, The Patron Saint of Texas Driveins, 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 sacrilegiously held indoors this year — that has been attended in the past by such guests as Roger Corman, King of the Bs, 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 Outer 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 Twin 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 merry-go-round up front for the kiddies, all this surrounded by an ugly six-foot, moon-shimmering tin fence.