Don’t Call it A Comeback - A Newbie’s Night at the Drive-In

Cars crowd around at the Frida Cinema’s Friday-night pop-up drive-in theater.

We navigated the car through FLIGHT at Tustin Legacy, a seemingly endless array of identical-looking business buildings, and parking garages meeting us at every turn of the wheel. It’s a Friday night in Tustin, California, a city of about 79,000 nestled right next to Santa Ana - the seat of Orange County. The chilly evening had us looking for the Frida Cinema’s pop-up drive-in, who, that night, were screening the classic, 1981 JOHN LANDIS film, AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON.

Like most movie houses, the Frida Cinema, which is Orange County’s only 501(c)(3) non-profit art house cinema, was forced last year to temporarily close its doors due to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, during that time, they have found a thriving demand for the pop-up drive-in that they host at FLIGHT at Tustin Legacy. Tonight, they have partnered with HorrorBuzz.com, who has been hosting their horror movie nights at the drive-in, for a screening of the werewolf classic.

Now, if only we could find it.

Our eyes peeled for any signs of a screen or a mass gathering of vehicles came up empty, even though we saw plenty of people going in and out of the Mess Hall at FLIGHT, an upscale food court complete with a full bar located in the business park. Finally, no closer to our goal, we pulled up to a van in the parking lot, where a young guy and girl were pulling skateboards out of the trunk. 

I rolled down my window and asked the girl if she happened to know where the pop-up drive-in was and she pointed to a car park structure across the lot that we had already circled at least ten times.

“Head into that and go all the way to the top,” she said, cheerfully. “You can’t miss it.”

Now buoyed with the new information, we quickly made our way towards the structure, finally spotting a tiny 8 ½ x 11 sized sign with an arrow pointing left that simply read: “movie night.” 

Finally reaching the top of the parking garage, we saw a sea of cars already huddled around a giant, blow-up screen that would serve for tonight’s viewing. My excitement grew seeing so many people out for a shared love of the movies. Before the pandemic hit, I was a regular theater-goer, seeing at least a movie a week, but once theaters were shut down, my regular cinema visits were quickly a thing of the past. When people ask me what the hardest part of this whole pandemic has been, I don’t even have to think about my answer. Not being able to go to the movies.

It’s a Friday night in Orange County, CA and the Frida Cinema drive-in is showing the JOHN LANDIS classic, AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON.

And I’m not alone. Demand for films and the escape and entertainment they offer has never been higher, but sadly, because of productions being shut down for so long, so many of the films we anticipated seeing were pushed a year, sometimes nearly two years out from their original release schedule. The public and theaters alike started to wonder if the days of movie-going would ever recover, and the answer wasn’t looking good.

Enter the drive-in. 

Long considered a relic of the days of malt shops and poodle skirts, the last century has seen the drive-in slowly become a hovering spectre of a time now lost, where families and couples would head out in droves every Saturday night and watch the latest double-feature film in between trips to the concession stand and heavy make-out sessions. At the peak of the drive-in boom of the 1950’s there were more than four thousand outdoor theaters operating in the United States (M. Brandon, Elissavta. “How the American Drive-In Staged a Comeback.” Bloomburg CityLab, 4 September 2020).

Now, only 18 drive-in theaters still operate in the state of California. In the modern age, the drive-in became seen as a nostalgic lark, a fun, one-off trip down memory lane to go see a favorite film from your childhood, not the newest Marvel release. Because, let’s face it, we don’t go to the drive-in for the latest digital viewing technology and super crisp surround sound. We go for the warm, fuzzy feeling of sentimentality that only the drive-in theater experience can provide. 

Not that I knew anything about the drive-in experience before tonight. Before moving out to California, I had spent a good amount of my years in both Maine and New Hampshire, where, if you’re not spending at least half the year in snow, you spend the summers avoiding tourists and black fly season. There were only five drive-ins in Maine (which, geographically, is quite a large state) and even less in New Hampshire, so I never had the opportunity to go to one, and when I moved to Santa Maria, California, I had the Hi-Way Drive-In just down the road from me. But, sadly, life just got in the way and I never went.

But now, a year into this pandemic, having the opportunity to finally see a movie again with other people had me practically bouncing in my seat with excitement. Plus, seeing one of my favorite horror films ever on a big screen was a tick off my bucket list. 

We parked along the other cars, turning our FM radio to the station the film would be broadcast through and settled in with our snacks and drinks. A thrill of excitement went through me as the opening credits appeared on the screen and BOBBY VINTON’S “Blue Moon” began to play through the car speakers. I felt a tear of pure joy roll down my cheek, the emotion of a year-long quarantine and separation from people and events like this finally hitting me at once. And though the sound was tinny and the screen was half the size of the one at my local Cinemark theater, I didn’t care one bit. We were all out here on a Friday night, laughing at Jack’s biting quips as he decayed before our eyes, and honking our horns in applause at the famous wolf transformation scene. Going to the movies has always been a shared human experience, bonding people through tears, laughter, and excitement - a collective event that encapsulates the very idea of what it means to be human. 

The drive-in theater has seen a spike in popularity as a safe social-distancing activity due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

As the vaccine roll-out continues and brick-and-mortar theaters slowly start to reopen their doors, our society cautiously starts to take its first collective baby steps towards normality again. But what that new normal looks like is still uncertain. So much has happened, and these events have cut a large and deep swath through our social and political consciousness. The movie industry in particular has been irrevocably changed, with the controversial Warner Brothers/HBO Max deal, social distancing, and the popular resurgence of the drive-in theater. And maybe that’s good. Maybe some of these things should have changed years ago. It may not be the future we want, but it’s the future we’ve been handed.

Without a doubt, drive-ins have been an unsung hero of this pandemic. Once the theaters shut their doors, a spring of pop-up drive-in events quickly emerged to quench the public’s thirst to safely get out and find entertainment, particularly for those shut in with little ones and quickly running out of activities for them. Who would have thought that this oft-forgotten antiquity of a bygone age would experience an absolute boom in the 21st century? No one. But the drive-in continues to fight for its place at the movie industry table, carving out its own distinct niche in a world now plagued with, well, plagues. The comforting presence of the drive-in has always been there in the background, patiently waiting for the day we would need it again. And that day finally came. 

Don’t call it a comeback.

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