Drive-ins lend some movie magic
For the first time in months, I had the time of my life … even though it was in a carpark and Dirty Dancing was showing.
Last Thursday, my partner Andrew and I packed our dog in a hire car and drove 10 minutes from our home in Sydney’s inner-city Redfern to the Entertainment Quarter at Moore Park.
For the first time in almost three months, we were having an evening out: not another takeaway delivered by an alien in PPE gear, not another night with the drone of streaming video. We were going to the drive-in, and it didn’t matter that we’d be seeing Dirty Dancing — I was just so happy to be out of the apartment.
Drive-in cinemas around the country have reopened, and temporary new ones are popping up, as a COVID-safe answer to our long-suppressed demand for entertainment. The reason is simple: people can go to the movies without having to leave their car or interact unhealthily with other humans.
Drive-ins have long been about enjoying a movie from the snug and semi-private capsule of one’s own vehicle. Now, operators have hit on a coronavirus marketing opportunity, and drive-ins are being sold as the original socially distant communal entertainment.
While health measures remain in place, drive-ins are one of the few out-of-home entertainment options available. Cinemas in most places remain closed for now. Theatres and live-music venues, even when given permission to reopen, may stay dark because they are too costly to run at a vastly reduced capacity. Even the NRL, which led the charge by rebooting its 2020 season last week, is running games in stadiums empty of spectators.
Drive-ins work in this new environment because safe distances can be maintained. Tickets are booked and paid for in advance online. Drinks and snacks are ordered from your car and delivered through the window. Contact with others is kept to a minimum, which makes the experience much like any other night of the lockdown, except for the change of scenery — but I wasn’t going to argue about that.
Just after dark, we drove to the carpark at the Entertainment Quarter and up the ramp to the rooftop on level six.
From there, you can see the clock tower of the old Sydney Showground, the silhouette of city buildings against the horizon, and the illuminated sign of the empty Hoyts cinema below.
The Mov’in Car drive-in has room for just 64 vehicles and I learned very quickly that position is everything. Nobody puts baby in a corner. Our little Toyota Yaris from GoGet was ushered to row B, and the SUVs and other larger vehicles to the rows behind. The screen was mounted on a support of shipping containers.
I tuned the car radio to 91.7FM to hear the soundtrack, and wondered why all the attendants spoke with a French accent (Mov’in Car, it turns out, is run by the same company that produces the Bastille Festival celebration in The Rocks.) While we waited for the movie, I wound down the window and looked at the Southern Cross twinkling overhead.
Until last Thursday, I was a drive-in virgin. By the time I was a teenager, in the 1980s, drive-ins had acquired a seedy reputation, and were being killed off by VCRs and Video Ezy. (The last drive-in in Wollongong, where I grew up, was the Lakeline at Dapto, and it closed in 1986.) Plus I’ve never owned a car and as long as I live in the inner city, I don’t expect I will. My 50-year absence from the drive-in was not so much out of avoidance as lack of opportunity.
David Kilderry, who runs the Lunar Drive-in in Dandenong, in Melbourne’s outer southeast, was steeped in the romance of drive-in movies from a young age. He grew up in suburban Reservoir, and when his parents added a second-storey extension to their home, he wanted the bedroom with a view of the screen at the Coburg drive-in some streets away.
“It was difficult to watch without the sound and knowing what was going on,” he says. “But on summer nights as kids, we’d ride around on our bikes and we had four drive-ins surrounding where we lived. I remember seeing bits and pieces of everything, from The
Towering Inferno to Earthquake and Rollerball.”
Kilderry would have a career as a film projectionist and became national technical manager for Village Cinemas. Twenty years ago, he and his brother were looking for a drive-in cinema they could run and restore, and they bought the Lunar. It first opened in 1956 but closed in the 1980s, and when the Kilderry brothers found it, it was a trash and treasure market. The Lunar is now enjoying a second life and is Australia’s largest drive-in with four screens.
“Our audience is family-based and couples dating, and that’s what drive-ins were about in the 1950s and 60s,” Kilderry says. “In the 70s and 80s they turned into Australia’s grindhouses. Yes, they would run Star Wars and Grease, but between that, they were running exploitation and horror. I worked at the drive-ins during that era. You’d see a rotten double feature like Rise and Fall of Idi Amin and Salon Kitty — you’d fill the place on a Saturday night. Then you’d try One Hundred and One Dalmatians in the school holidays and no one would come.”
The drive-in’s reputation has now come full circle and the format is once again a fun and respectable entertainment. The US, which in the 1950s had 4000 drive-ins, has witnessed a revival in recent years, pushed by patrons seeking novelty and nostalgia. Of the 300 or so outdoor screens in Australia during the drive-in’s heyday, only about 15 are in operation. Kilderry says his business was growing by 10 per cent a year before the lockdown, and he was turning patrons away nightly.
On Monday, with the cautious easing of social-distancing measures in Victoria, the Lunar reopened with about 500 customers. Other drive-ins also have reopened such as the Heddon Greta near Maitland, in the Hunter Valley, and the Mainline in Adelaide’s north. Yatala Drive-in, on the northern fringe of the Gold Coast, was until recently the only cinema of any description operating in the nation. Temporary drive-ins are popping up, including one at Melbourne’s Docklands, and a drive-in at Bathurst’s Mount Panorama will be a feature of the regional city’s winter festival next month.
Indoor cinemas largely remain closed, but are starting to reopen where regulations permit. In South Australia, the Palace Nova at Prospect in Adelaide’s inner north has started screening recent releases, and some Queensland cinemas will open at the weekend.
Victoria’s cinemas will be back in operation from June 22, and in NSW they are expected to open from early July. Palace Cinemas, which operates 17 cinemas around the country, is planning to reopen its venues from July 2.
Australia’s biggest cinema operator, Event Cinemas, is preparing to reopen when permitted to do so, with contactless ticket sales, social distancing and hand sanitiser on tap. The chain has installed its Intelligent Social Distanced Booking system that can seat groups and families together while ensuring that surrounding seats remain unoccupied. Event’s director of entertainment, Luke Mackey, says the demand to return to the movies is “overwhelming”.
“This highlights that the cultural importance of cinema has never been greater and, like our customers, we are eager to reopen soon so we can continue providing an opportunity to escape in entertainment and have a positive impact on the wellbeing of our communities, which is needed now more than ever,” he says.
The other challenge facing the movie industry is the dearth of new titles, given the shutdown of film production in Hollywood and elsewhere. Drive-ins are showing family favourites such as Shrek, Toy Story and Back to the Future, and staples of yesteryear such as Jaws, Grease and Saturday Night Fever. Hopes are pinned on a new Christopher Nolan spy thriller, Tenet, due for release next month.
At the Mov’in Car drive-in, we ordered a pepperoni pizza that was delivered fresh to the car and instantly steamed up the windows. It was delicious, with a crispy base and tangy sauce.
We wedged plastic wine glasses between the dashboard and windscreen, and settled back to watch Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey trip the light fantastic on the big screen.
At the end, we applauded in our cars and collectively honked our horns in approval. For the first time in three months, I could honestly say I had the time of my life.
