Honk If You
Love Cinema

Somewhere in New Jersey in 1933, a man named Richard Hollingshead nailed a screen to some trees in his backyard, plopped a projector on his car hood, and pointed it at the darkness. His mother found indoor theater seats uncomfortable. His solution: don’t go inside. Build the theater around the car. Let everyone stay exactly where they are.

And thus, one of the most magnificently American ideas in the history of entertainment was born—not from corporate vision boards or Silicon Valley pivots, but from a son’s maternal devotion and a backyard full of questionable engineering decisions.

From Backyard to Bonanza: A Brief and Magnificent Rise

Hollingshead’s patent turned into a national obsession. Drive-ins spread like kudzu across the American landscape through the 1940s and 50s, perfectly timed with two forces of nature: postwar car ownership and suburban expansion. America had cars. America had land. America had an itch it desperately needed to scratch, and that itch was: watching movies while sitting in a 1957 Chevrolet eating a hot dog.

At its peak, the drive-in wasn’t a novelty—it was infrastructure. The All-Weather Drive-In in Copiague, New York, could hold over 2,500 cars. That’s essentially a temporary city of idling engines and popcorn. A city with one movie theater and absolutely no parking problems, because every single resident was a parking spot.

The Operational Chaos Nobody Warned You About

Running a drive-in theater looks, from the outside, deceptively simple: put up a screen, show a movie, collect money. The reality was a rich tapestry of operational nightmares that could only exist in a venue where the audience arrives in several tons of automobile each night.

The “Passion Pit”: A Name That Required Zero Explanation

By the 1950s and 60s, drive-ins had acquired a nickname: the passion pit. It was not subtle. It required no footnotes. Everyone immediately understood exactly what it meant and exactly what was being referred to.

Local police occasionally swept lots with flashlights, in what must have been an extraordinarily awkward beat to be assigned. Some theaters tried to combat the phenomenon by angling the little metal speakers outward so employees could monitor whether cars were, in fact, watching the movie. They were often not watching the movie.

And yet—simultaneously—families also loved drive-ins, for entirely different but equally practical reasons:

Drive-ins succeeded because they did something truly radical: they reduced behavioral friction. You didn’t have to shush your children, hide your snacks, or pretend you weren’t constantly shifting in an increasingly uncomfortable seat. You sat in your car, in your own climate, with your own food, surrounded by your own mess. Cinema, finally, as God intended.

The Long Slide Into Darkness (And Not the Fun Kind)

Television gets blamed for killing the drive-in. This is roughly like blaming a single raindrop for a flood. Yes, it contributed. But the drive-in’s decline was a multi-instrument symphony of unfortunate economics.

The Land Problem

Drive-ins require enormous plots of land. As suburban land values rose, operators faced a simple, merciless equation: the land is worth more than the business sitting on it. Selling to a developer for a shopping center? Suddenly a lot more appealing than another summer of mosquito fogging and speaker theft prevention.

The Idle Asset Problem

Unlike indoor theaters, which can run films morning through night 365 days a year, drive-ins sit completely dark and idle all day. Every sunny afternoon is a plot of expensive land generating exactly zero revenue. Business schools have a term for this. It is not flattering.

The Digital Upgrade Problem

When the film industry switched to digital projection in the 2000s and 2010s, the cost of upgrading each screen ran between $70,000 and $100,000. For small, family-run drive-ins operating on thin seasonal margins, this was often simply the end of the road.

Everything Else

Cable TV. VHS. DVD. Streaming. The entire home entertainment revolution, one relentless format at a time, chipping away at the novelty. And in cold climates, seasonal operations meant operators had four good months to make twelve months of profit. The math, as they say, does not math.

The Survivors: A Field Guide to Drive-Ins Still Standing

The few hundred drive-ins still operating fall into beautifully distinct personality types, each having evolved a unique strategy for not dying. Observe:

And Then There Are the Wonderfully Eccentric Ones

Then there’s Mission Tiki in Montclair, California, which leans fully into tropical kitsch—tiki torches, themed decorations, the general vibe that you’re watching a movie at a luau. And Wellfleet Drive-In in Massachusetts doubles as a flea market, occasionally combined with wildlife encounters, because apparently this is what “differentiation” looks like on Cape Cod.

And let us not forget Shankweiler’s Drive-In in Pennsylvania, which claims to be the oldest operating drive-in in America—open since 1934. It has been operating for over ninety years. Whatever they’re doing, it works.

COVID’s Accidental Gift to Drive-In Cinema

In early 2020, as the world shut down and indoor gatherings became a public health hazard, someone had a realization: we have hundreds of venues where people watch movies from inside their own private sealed metal boxes.

Drive-ins surged. Events were held in drive-in parking lots. Church services were broadcast from drive-in speakers. Concert livestreams flickered across drive-in screens. The format that had been slowly dying for fifty years suddenly proved itself uniquely suited to a global pandemic—a sentence that belongs in the lexicon of history’s most unexpected plot twists.

Why, After Everything, We Still Love Them

The drive-in theater survives not because it’s the most efficient way to watch a film—it is demonstrably, comically not—but because it offers something modern cinema cannot replicate:

Night air. Dashboard glow. The distant, slightly tinny sound of a movie playing through a speaker clipped to your window. Stars overhead. Popcorn that you may or may not have smuggled in your coat. The peculiar communal intimacy of a thousand people in separate cars all watching the same screen, each in their own world, each briefly part of something larger.

It is, improbably, both the most private and the most communal entertainment experience available. You are alone together. You are watching as a crowd but feeling it alone. This is not a thing indoor theaters do, or streaming, or anything else in the entertainment universe.

Richard Hollingshead nailed a screen to some trees for his mother.

Ninety years later, people are still parking their cars in fields and looking at the dark in the best possible way.

Some ideas, it turns out, just have very good bones.

Colorado Still Has Drive-Ins (Yes, Really)

If you’re in the Mountain West and feeling the urge to participate in this great American tradition, you’re in luck: