1945 - 1960 The Suburban Dream Jump to:
1945 - 1960 The Suburban Dream Jump to:
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4 Drive-in Cinemas
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While many movie theaters in small American towns closed in the 1950s, an equal number of a new kind of theater, which recognized the supremacy of the automobile in American life, opened up.
In the 1920s concerned parents had been anxious about the effects of automobiles and movies on their children's morals; their grandchildren could now combine these menaces to their moral welfare at the drive-in.
The first drive-in movie theater opened in 1933, but they mushroomed in the decade after World War II.
Under a starry Alabama sky, surrounded by cotton fields, maple trees and the chatter of cicadas, the pick-ups and Chevrolets glow and flicker, lit by the colossal white screen.
Inside the cars parents and children settle in their seats, munching hot dogs. Love-struck teenagers snuggle up; the air fills with the glow of fireflies and smell of buttered popcorn. The lights of the tiny town of Centre, a mile away, are too dim to penetrate this enchanted scene. The movie begins. It could be 1953.
This was Saturday night, however, and across America, from this beautifully restored drive-in cinema in northeastern Alabama to Colorado’s Rocky Mountains and the valleys of California, the same nostalgic scene was being played out in hundreds of locations. Despite the country’s enslavement to the internet, the video game and mobile phone, or perhaps because of it, baby-boomers are rediscovering their love of the drive-in movie while a new generation is being captivated.
By 1956 there were 4,200 drive-ins, earning nearly a quarter of total box-office receipts.
They were promoted as "the answer to the family's night out"; a way for married couples to avoid the expense of baby-sitters, but their real attraction was to the youth market, where teenagers could escape parental supervision.
The drive-in market encouraged a new kind of filmmaking, pioneered by Columbia producer Sam Katzman and American International Pictures (AlP). Discarding conventional formulas such as the Western, they geared their films solely for the teenage market, hooking a story on to any gimmick they could think of.
The success of Rock Around the Clock in 1956, and the cycle of rock 'n' roll movies that followed made it clear that "teenpics" could reap huge profits even. If they pointedly excluded an older audience. These mainstream productions spawned imitations, such as Teenage Crime Wave (1955) and Hot Rod Rumble (1957). In 1957, when the Everly Brothers sang Wake Up Little Suzy, about a teenage couple who fall asleep at the drive-in, there were about 5,000 outdoor cinemas in America. The other major "teenpic" genre was the horror film: low-budget "exploitation" movies (so-called because their 'publicity budgets were higher than their production costs), with titles like I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) were pumped out to provide the material for the double and triple-bills at the drive-ins.
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