Drive-in Movie Theaters Before the Age of the Small ScreenVocabulary and Expres

Drive-in Movie Theaters Before the Age of the Small Screen
   Drive-in movie theaters are considered an American invention. Drive-ins became very popular in the United States after World World II. They combined two popular loves in America: cars and movies. However, why did most of the drive-ins later close? That was a question people often wondered about and tried to look for the answer.
   The first drive-in movie theater opened in the United States in 1933. Popular Science magazine described a theater in Camden, New Jersey, as the first of its kind in the world: an open-air movie theater just for motorists. People could watch a film on the big screen while sitting in their car, eating, talking and relaxing.
   Many drive-in theaters opened in the 1950s, as the American economy expanded after the war and more people bought cars.
   In the 1960s — when I was a boy — there were between 4, 000 and 6,000 drive-in theaters in the United States. I lived in the northeastern state of Maine. Not a lot of people lived there. Yet my parents could take me and my three brothers and two sisters to any of four drive-ins located within an hour’s drive of our home. But almost as soon as drive-ins were everywhere, their popularity began to fade. Today, fewer than 400 are still operating in the United States.
   April Wright is producing a documentary about drive-in theaters and the special place they held in American culture. The film is called "Going Attractions: The Rise and Fall of the Drive-in as an American Icon. " She plans to release it early next year on the eightieth anniversary of the opening of the first drive-in theater.
   April Wright visited more than 400 current and former drive-in sites across the country during her research for her film. Drive-ins, she tells me, were " the perfect blend of entertainment and car culture. " They represented the hopefulness that followed the war, when the soldiers came home and millions of babies were born.
   "So at the time they flourished, it was after the baby boom, and so there was the convergence of a strong economy and lots of kids and car culture — people being able to afford cars. There wasn’t really television at that point in all the homes. And so it was just sort of this thing that families did where they saw their neighbors, where they took their kids. And it was this whole evening out that was very social, very wholesome for the communities, and that’s when they started. "
   So why did drive-ins lose their appeal? April Wright looked for the reasons.
   "The more I looked into it, I realized it wasn’t a single factor, not only that made drive-ins go on the decline but also what made them flourish. There is a common denominator and it’s completely cultural. They rose really quickly — the spike is sort of narrow. And they also declined very quickly — the spike there is also kind of narrow. They rose really quickly in the late ’40s and they declined really quickly in the early ’80s, so they had about a 40-year span of popularity. "