I'm sorry. I'm not the least bit nostalgic for drive-in movies, nor do I resent their near-extinction. Obviously, a part of their appeal was that a guy and a girl could go to one on a date, ignore the film on the screen and have a wee bit of privacy for purposes of necking…but not much. Apart from that, I never understood why anyone had any use for them except as a good place to park or hold a swap meet during daylight hours.
Ours was the Olympic Drive-In, which was located at the corner of Olympic and Bundy in West Los Angeles. The three times my parents took me there, the place was crawling with kids who were running around between parked cars and drivers were honking horns continuously and there always seemed to be some poor guy wandering around with a tray of sodas and popcorn, having forgotten where his car was located so he kept yelling, "Marge?" For some reason, it was always "Marge?" It all seemed about as conducive to romance as trying to make out in the middle of a Kmart during the Blue Light Special.
My folks took me to the Olympic to see the following movies: Gulliver's Travels (the Max Fleischer version), Onionhead (starring Andy Griffith), Alias Jesse James (Bob Hope) Visit to a Small Planet (Jerry Lewis), The Delicate Delinquent (Jerry again) and Once Upon a Horse (the film debut — and almost the demise — of Rowan and Martin). I remember the movies but not which was paired with which in double features. These spanned the years when I was six, seven and eight — 1958-1960.
I also remember the Olympic as a horrible place to watch a movie. You'd pull into a spot and take the speaker, on which you foolishly expected to hear the movie's soundtrack, from a little pole and hook it over your window…only the speakers rarely worked. If you found a good, vacant parking space it was probably vacant because its speaker didn't work…as my father would find out. He'd have to move the car again and again and sometimes even again…and then right in the middle of the movie, the speaker would conk out and he'd have to move us yet again. So there was yet another distraction. The cars next to you were always moving around. Even when you found a space with a dependable speaker, the odds were that one or both of the speakers next to you didn't work so other cars would be pulling in and out of those spaces throughout the evening.
So the sound was bad and occasionally non-existent. The image was also bad…projected on a screen miles away that was covered with bird dung and serious weather damage. The Olympic got prints that were on their last go-round and full of splices, and you could always count on each movie breaking once or twice. During Onionhead, it would just stop like clockwork every ten or so minutes and the screen would be blank for about three. I figured out later that they must have only had one working projector that night so every time they got to the end of a reel, the projectionist would have to take that one off and then mount the next reel on the projector.
Whenever there was no movie on the screen, everyone honked their horn and hooted until there was again. There was also a lot of honking when cars tried to leave and back out of their spots…
…and then there was the refreshment stand. Oh, Sweet God in Heaven…
It was located in front of the screen in a low building which also housed rest rooms which had not been cleaned since the marquee included the name of Lon Chaney…senior. There was also a little playground there with swings and teeter-totters. I have this indelible memory of my father taking me to the men's room right in the middle of one of the Jerry Lewis films and it was like a twenty-minute wait for the only working toilet. We were lined up outside and I was watching a grown-up woman who must have weighed 250 pounds, sitting on one side of the teeter-totter…and there were about six men pressing down on the other end, trying unsuccessfully to get her off the ground while she ate a meatball hero sandwich.
I laughed out loud. It was a lot funnier than the Jerry Lewis movie, not that that's usually a tough standard to beat.
Before we went back to the car, my father bought popcorn and sodas, which were the only thing in the refreshment stand that looked remotely edible. There were hot dogs there that looked radioactive…like they might actually get up and do the little dance that the animated hot dogs had done in the intermission cartoon. There was also a big tub of chili that, so help me, had something living in it.
We finally got the popcorn and drinks back to our car…which took a while because, of course, my father forgot where the car was. I think I suggested he try yelling "Marge?" even though my mother's name was Dorothy. Once we finally located the auto with her in it, I promptly spilled refreshments all over the back seat, which I later learned was pretty much expected when you took a kid to a drive-in movie. Or at least it should have been.
So I couldn't enjoy the movie and I couldn't eat. My mother had brought along my pajamas with the bizarre idea that if I got tired, they'd put me in them and I could doze off in the back seat. Like that was remotely possible. It was very awkward for her to change me into my jammies inside the car and between the sound of the movie and the car horns honking and people racing engines and the lost fathers wandering around the lot screaming "Marge?", I couldn't have gotten any shuteye if you'd administered a lethal injection. Add in the huge traffic snarl at the end and the long, long wait to get out of the lot and you can understand why I never had any use for drive-in movies. How anyone ever did is as big a mystery to me as what was lurking in that chili.
