{"id":1428,"date":"2008-06-06T14:38:43","date_gmt":"2008-06-06T14:38:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=1428"},"modified":"2008-06-06T14:38:43","modified_gmt":"2008-06-06T14:38:43","slug":"spent_my_evenings_down_at_the_1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2008\/06\/06\/spent_my_evenings_down_at_the_1\/","title":{"rendered":"Spent My Evenings Down at the Drive-In"},"content":{"rendered":"

Briefly noted, today is the 75th anniversary of the first drive-in movie theater, which opened June 6, 1933, in Camden, New Jersey. I’ve never been a regular patron of drive-ins, but I have had a few memorable experiences at them — no, you may not ask me to elaborate on those — and of course I’m always a bleeding-heart for anything that’s both nostalgic and endangered, which drive-ins definitely are. (There are fewer than 500 left today, down from some 5,000 in their heyday.)
\nWired.com has a short history<\/a> of this venerable institution, and local movie critic Sean Means lists<\/a> the surviving Utah examples on his blog. I recommend the Motor Vu in Erda, for what it’s worth; The Girlfriend and I spent a very pleasant evening there last summer with her family, all of whom live nearby. It’s a family-run single-screener, charmingly low-budget and down-home feeling.<\/p>\n

One moment in particular from that night stands out: as the darkness thickens and a cool breeze begins to rise from the surrounding farmland, I notice a freight train chugging along the benches of the mountain range to the east, behind the screen. It’s far enough away that it looks like a black thread with a light at its tip, sliding along beneath the huge, projected face of Johnny Depp, the mournful cry of its horn providing counterpoint to Captain Jack Sparrow’s dire circumstances (we were seeing Pirates 3<\/i>, of course; I have to say, it worked much better as drive-in fare than it did the first time we saw it in a quote-unquote real<\/em> theater). That, my friends, is one of those rare moments when you start to think time travel might actually be possible, when you find yourself connected by experience to an audience that would’ve been experiencing more or less the same thing 50 years earlier. Moments like those are truly magical and all-too-rare these days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Briefly noted, today is the 75th anniversary of the first drive-in movie theater, which opened June 6, 1933, in Camden, New Jersey. I’ve never been a regular patron of drive-ins, but I have had a few memorable experiences at them — no, you may not ask me to elaborate on those — and of course […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1428\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}