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What Happened to the Drive-In Movie Theater?

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There was a time when you could load the whole family into the station wagon, pay a dollar for the carload, and watch a double feature under the stars. The kids played on the swings beneath a forty-foot screen while the sun went down. You hooked a small metal speaker on your car window, adjusted the red volume knob, and settled in for four hours of movies, popcorn, and summer air. No babysitter needed. No dress code. No one cared if the baby cried.

At their peak in 1958, there were over 4,000 drive-in theaters across the United States. They represented a quarter of all movie screens in America. By the early 2000s, fewer than 400 remained. Today roughly 280 survive. More than 93 percent are gone.

This video tells the full story. How a man named Richard Hollingshead Jr. built the first drive-in in his New Jersey driveway in 1933 using a Kodak projector, a bedsheet between two trees, and a lawn sprinkler to test if movies could play through rain. How the postwar baby boom turned drive-ins into the most democratic entertainment in America. How a family of six could see two films for the price of one indoor ticket. How teenagers claimed the back rows and earned the drive-in its nickname: the passion pit. How kids hid in trunks and everyone knew it.

And then, how it all went away. Daylight Saving Time pushed showings past nine at night. Suburban land prices turned ten-acre lots into Walmart parking. VCRs and multiplexes pulled audiences indoors. And in 2013, the switch from film to digital projection forced hundreds of surviving drive-ins to choose between a seventy-thousand-dollar upgrade or closing forever.

What disappeared was more than a cheap way to watch movies. It was the only place in American life where you could be alone with your family and part of a crowd at the same time, all under the same open sky.

If you remember the speaker on the window, the playground under the screen, or falling asleep in the back seat during the second feature, tell us in the comments."