On the warm evening of June 6, 1933, a line of cars rolled onto a fenced lot on Crescent Boulevard just outside Camden, New Jersey. Admission ran twenty-five cents for the car and twenty-five cents for each person, with no carload paying more than one dollar.
The feature was a modest comedy called "Wives Beware," thrown across a giant screen while families sat in their own front seats with the windows down. That night a man named Richard Hollingshead Jr. gave the country something it did not know it wanted.
He had tested the idea in his own driveway using a bedsheet for a screen and a projector balanced on the hood of his car. Within a generation, the glow of those outdoor screens lit up small towns from Maine to California, and a summer night was never quite the same again.
A Bedsheet, a Projector, and a Patent
Richard Hollingshead Jr. was a young man working in his family's auto parts business in South Jersey, and the story goes that he was trying to solve a simple comfort problem. His mother found ordinary theater seats too cramping, so he wondered whether people might watch a picture from the roomy seats of their own automobile.
In his driveway he nailed a bedsheet between two trees, set a projector on the hood, and tried the radio at different volumes to see how the sound carried. The tricky part was sightlines, since a tall car in front could block the one behind.
His answer was a series of gently terraced ramps that tipped each vehicle upward toward the screen. He received a patent in May 1933 and opened his theater weeks later, after an investment of about thirty thousand dollars.
The idea was so new that Hollingshead had to teach people how to behave in it. He could not keep the first lot profitable and sold it after about three years, but the concept he licensed to others would soon outrun him by miles.
The In-Car Speaker That Saved the Show
The early drive-ins had one stubborn flaw, and it was the sound. Operators mounted enormous horn speakers beside the screen and blasted the soundtrack over the whole field.
Cars in back got a muddy echo, and neighbors for a mile around got an earful whether they wanted one or not. The fix arrived in 1941, when RCA introduced the in-car speaker.
It was a heavy cast box with a volume knob, and you lifted it off a post and hung it over your half-rolled window. For the first time every family controlled its own sound, and the complaints from the surrounding houses mostly went quiet.
That single invention unlocked the whole business. Of course it came with its own small comedy. Folks would forget the speaker was hanging there and drive off at the end of the night, snapping the cord or yanking the pole clean out of the ground.
By the 1970s and 1980s many theaters switched to broadcasting the soundtrack over a low-power radio signal, so you simply tuned your dashboard to the posted station.
The Peak Year of 1958
The drive-in came into its glory after World War II. Returning servicemen married, bought cars, filled new neighborhoods with children, and looked for cheap family fun. The number of outdoor lots climbed quickly in the postwar years, reaching about 820 by 1948 and roughly 3,775 by 1954.
The high-water mark came in 1958, when the country counted 4,063 drive-ins. With roughly 12,000 indoor theaters still operating at the time, that meant about one in four of the nation's movie theaters was an outdoor one.
The same years were hard on the old indoor houses downtown, whose numbers slid from about 17,000 in 1948 toward 12,000 a decade later. A drive-in asked nothing of you but a tank of gas and a few dollars.
You came in your work clothes or your pajamas, you brought the baby and the dog, and nobody minded if the little ones fell asleep in the back. For a young family on a tight budget, it was the most affordable night out in town, and for teenagers it was something else entirely.
More Than a Movie: Playgrounds and the Lobby Reel
A good drive-in sold a whole evening, not just a picture. Many had a playground right under the screen, and parents turned the children loose on swings and slides until the sky went dark enough to start the show.
Some lots added baby bottle warmers, laundry service, even pony rides. The real money, though, was at the concession stand, where the aroma of popcorn and grilled hamburgers drifted across the rows.
To fill those stands during intermission, theaters played a now-famous reel from Filmack Studios of Chicago, a family company that opened its doors in 1919. In the best known version, a box of popcorn, a candy bar, and a soft drink cup march down the aisle to a short jingle, urging everyone to visit the lobby.
That reel, titled "Let's All Go to the Lobby," was so woven into American life that the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2000. Some lots grew enormous.
The Ford-Wyoming in Dearborn, Michigan eventually held thousands of cars across several screens, and the All-Weather in Copiague, New York spread across many acres with a shuttle train to carry you from your car.
The Long Slow Fade
The decline began almost as soon as the peak arrived, and television led the way. Why load the family in the car when a picture came into the living room for free? Then the economics turned against the drive-in.
In the colder states a lot could only operate during the warmer months, a far shorter season than an indoor theater that opened its doors all year, and the land sat idle the rest of the time. As towns spread outward in the 1960s and 1970s, the acreage a drive-in occupied became worth far more as a shopping center or a housing tract than as a field of parked cars.
Owners who faced costly repairs often chose to sell to a developer instead. By 1983 the number of outdoor screens had fallen to 2,935. The arrival of cable television and the home videocassette recorder pulled away still more customers, and by 1990 only about 900 drive-ins remained.
By the summer of 1999 an owners group counted just 447 still operating. At the thousands of lots that had already closed, the screens were torn down and the speaker posts hauled off for scrap.
The Ones That Remain
The drive-in did not die. A stubborn handful held on, and a few new ones have even opened. The United Drive-In Theatre Owners Association counted 283 still operating in 2024, and by 2025 the figure stood at 280 theaters with 480 screens among them.
The oldest of them all is Shankweiler's in Orefield, Pennsylvania, built in 1934 by a man who ran a chicken restaurant and saw Hollingshead's lot for himself. It is still showing double features today.
Shankweiler's own story mirrors the whole industry, having put in individual car speakers in 1948, switched to AM radio sound in 1982, and moved to FM in 1986. The surviving theaters work on thin margins.
Many had to spend heavily to replace film projectors with digital ones, and they compete against streaming services piped into every home. Yet the ones that endure draw families who want their children to know what it feels like to watch a movie with the car windows down and the real stars overhead.
A Drive-In Timeline
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 1933 | First purpose-built drive-in opens near Camden, New Jersey |
| 1934 | Shankweiler's opens in Pennsylvania and still operates today |
| 1941 | RCA introduces the in-car window speaker |
| 1958 | Peak of 4,063 drive-ins, about one in four U.S. theaters |
| 1983 | Number of outdoor screens falls to 2,935 |
| 2025 | 280 drive-ins with 480 screens counted still operating |
If there is a drive-in within a reasonable drive of your home, consider making an evening of it before the season ends. Call ahead or check the listing, because most run only in the warmer months and some take only cash at the gate.
Bring folding chairs for the trunk, a blanket for when the air cools, and your own snacks only if the theater allows it, since the concession stand is what keeps the lights on. Tune your radio to the posted station and roll the windows down.
Take the grandchildren if you can, and tell them how it was when the screen first lit up and the whole family watched together under an open sky. Some pleasures are worth passing along while they last.
Sources
- Smithsonian Magazine, The History of the Drive-In Movie Theater (May 27, 2008), https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-history-of-the-drive-in-movie-theater-51331221/
- History.com, The DIY Beginnings of America's Drive-In Movie Theaters (June 5, 2025, updated July 10, 2026), https://www.history.com/articles/drive-in-movie-theaters
- Encyclopedia.com, Drive-In Theater, https://www.encyclopedia.com/media/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/drive-theater
- driveintheater.com, Drive-In Theater History, https://www.driveintheater.com/drivhis1.htm
- United Drive-In Theatre Owners Association, Statistics (2025), https://uditoa.wildapricot.org/Statistics
- Library of Congress, National Film Registry: Let's All Go to the Lobby (2000)