'Death of the drive-ins?' Not yet
Not the 15-minute-between-movies, jump-out-of-the-car-for-popcorn-and-a-Coke variety: This intermission lasts for months, giving the few remaining drive-in theaters in the state a chance to take stock of their past season and look ahead to the tenuous future of outdoor cinema.
Bobbi Moore knows the drill, performing the same ritual a few weeks ago that she has for nine years as manager of the Puget Park: taking the antenna off the snack-bar roof and locking the gates, after getting word from her higher-ups about whether she'll be dusting the projector off come spring.
This year, they told her, she will.
But "for the last couple of years, we thought, 'This was it,' " Moore said. Drive-ins "are a definite dying thing."
The theater's regulars have sensed it — nervously asking the ticket guy if he's heard anything as they steer into the vast asphalt lot, trading rumors at the swap meet that operates there on weekend days into the fall and calling Puget Park's temporary phone message for reassurance.
"We WILL be back for 2002," the message told them.
But the Everett drive-in will eventually die, according to officials at Bellevue-based Sterling Realty Organization, which owns the theater.
When the economy is more auspicious, they say, it will be resurrected as something else — maybe a business park.
They say there's also a good chance that the other drive-in Sterling Realty owns, in Whatcom County, won't open next year. And at Auburn's Valley 6 Outdoor Theaters, the only operating drive-in in the greater Seattle area besides Puget Park, a mixed-use development is planned, though its owners say the theater will likely open for at least one more season.
When these theaters go dark, Washington drive-in owners say there will be only seven of them left in the state, which was once home to something like 10 times that. It's a fact bemoaned by drive-in aficionados, a relatively small but fiercely devoted bunch.
For them, multiplexes and independent houses aren't known generically as "movie theaters." They are indoor or walk-in or "regular" theaters: stuffy, uninteresting places that cost too much and cramp their movie-going style.
"You have to sit next to a whole bunch of people," Robert Vasquez, a Puget Park regular, says. "You gotta buy all your candy and sodas."
When he takes his 8- and 10-year-old daughters to the drive-in, which he does almost every week in the summer, they pop up some popcorn, make a bed of blankets and pillows in the back of his Bronco and drive through a Burger King or KFC before heading to the theater.
Once there, they talk in un-hushed voices as they wait for the first feature to start. By the second movie, the girls are usually sleeping in the back. When they're awake, if something scary or racy comes on the roughly 100- by 50-foot screen, Vasquez covers their eyes with the blankets.
"At a walk-in, you can't do that," he points out.
At a "walk-in," though, you also won't be distracted by the headlights of Interstate 5 traffic, the revving of pickup motors as groups of teenagers arrive late for the second movie or the occasional remnant of a broken beer bottle (the no-alcohol policies of many drive-ins notwithstanding). But for outdoor-theater lovers, the rough edges are all part of the charm.
So, not surprisingly, is the nostalgia factor.
Today's drive-in devotees — some of whom will drive 60 miles for a feature or see the same one five times if it's all that's playing — tend to be yesterday's children of the drive-in.
When they got too old to frolic on the playgrounds that often still stand in the shadows of the giant screens, they started going on dates to the drive-in.
"I went in high school and did the make-out thing," Vasquez acknowledges.
Lisa Brocksmith, a 31-year-old who caught a show during Puget Park's final weekend of the season with her boyfriend, pointed out where she played on a merry-go-round and swings when she was little.
The playthings are gone now, as are the speakers that used to top the short poles that still punctuate the asphalt lot. (Sound now comes through on car radios.)
But Brocksmith kept coming.
"It's just a cool atmosphere."
Economics work against them
Considering certain hallmarks of contemporary society — the car-centric lifestyle, the tendency toward disconnectedness — some wonder why drive-ins aren't more popular.
But the decline of the drive-in — an American invention of the 1930s — isn't a function of waning appeal, say people in the business. Even people who have never been to outdoor theaters love the idea.
When Sterling Realty closed a drive-in it owned in Longview, "we had more people demonstrating than there were at the drive-in the year before," said David Schooler, the company's president. "People are going to miss them after they're gone."
But getting films can be difficult and costly for drive-in operators, who say film companies tend to treat indoor theaters more favorably. And even though some drive-ins do well — Schooler said Puget Park has been making money — other kinds of developments could often do much better.
"When they built these drive-ins, they were all out in the boonies," said Moore, Puget Park's manager. "We're not the boonies anymore. We're kind of a prime location."
Signs of a renaissance?
Nevertheless, some in the business say drive-ins are experiencing the closest thing to a renaissance they've seen in decades.
According to the United Drive-In Theater Owners Association, which promotes the industry, drive-ins around the country have been reopening in recent years and new ones have been built — something people in the business say would have been inconceivable 15 years ago.
In Washington state, operators say they're getting Canadian tourists who have never seen a drive-in before, and Alaskans who say their hometowns don't get dark enough in summer for outdoor cinema.
Families with younger children are rediscovering drive-ins, too, said Jack Ondracek, owner of the Rodeo Drive-In in Port Orchard and a board member of the drive-in theater owners association. "For those of us who have survived the last 10 or 15 years, things are looking a lot better," he said.
Still, the nagging feeling among those who love them that drive-ins are on their way out persists, like a subtitle on the screen after the dialogue's stopped.
"I've been hearing about the dying drive-in syndrome for 13 years," said Moore.
"And here I am again," she said. "Another year, another year, another year."
Janet Burkitt can be reached at 206-515-5689 or jburkitt@seattletimes.com.