When I was 11 years old, I spent about a month and a half living in a motel with my mom and my sisters.

We were between homes and, since my mom didn’t really have the money to pay for our rooms, she and my two oldest sisters would work as maids during the day while my sister Erin and I stayed in our own room and watched stuff on the television that we probably shouldn’t have been watching.  (“What are you watching!?” mom would say as either Erin or I grabbed the remote and tried to get the TV off of HBO as quickly as possible.)  In retrospect, I know that all probably sound very dramatic and traumatic but I have to admit that, at the time, it just felt like an adventure.  I was jealous of my mom and my sisters getting to wear uniforms every day and basically go anywhere they wanted to go in the motel.  I would ask my mom and sisters about what they found in the rooms that they had to clean and I would beg for a chance to go with them because I figured it had to be fun to see how other people lived.  They always refused and years later, my sister Megan would tell me that they usually just found discarded underwear, used condoms, and half-eaten fast food.  Sometimes, I would sit in the front lobby, bothering whoever was working behind the desk and trying to overhear conversations.  I would love watching the various people who checked in and out of the motel and I would imagine amazing identities and life stories for them.  At night, I would listen for sounds coming from other rooms.  One time, the police were called because the people below us were fighting and I remember watching the reflection of the red lights flashing across the walls of my room.

That said, I think my main memory of living at that motel was that there was a creek right next to the hotel (though I always envision it as being a raging river whenever I think back to those days) and, on the other side of that creek, there was a drive-in movie theater.  Every night, I would go out on the balcony and look into the distance, at the silent images flickering across the giant screens.  The fact that I couldn’t actually hear what Stallone and Schwarzenegger were saying only made the experience more enjoyable.  I could make up my own stories to go along with the images.  Watching those movies became a bit of a ritual for me.  I had to watch every night and at the same time and if anyone tried to keep me from doing so, I would throw a fit.  Though I didn’t fully realize it at the time, for me, that drive-in came to represent stability.

I found myself thinking about that drive-in as I watched the documentary Back To The Drive-In.  Shot in 2021 and 2022, Back To The Drive-In cut backs and forth to tell the stories of drive-ins around the country and how they dealt with the pandemic.  Every owner has their own reason for owning and loving their drive-in.  Some of them are friendly eccentrics.  Some of them are full of nostalgia and recreating the past.  Some of them are hard-nosed businessmen who make sure to enforce the rules.  My favorite was the guy who decided to that his backyard was the perfect location for a drive-in.  (He calls it The Field of Dreams.)  However, they all have the same basic story.  Business was suddenly good during the Pandemic because their competition was closed down.  However, in the post-Pandemic world, they’re facing an uncertain future.

The documentary, of course, was made before box office successes of Top Gun: Maverick, Oppenheimer, and Barbie proved that people are willing to return to theaters but the fate of America’s drive-ins are still up in the air.  And that’s a shame because, as this funny and wonderfully humanistic documentary shows, the drive-in is more than just a theater.  It’s an experience and once they go away, our culture is going to be just a little bit more dull.  As I watched the documentary, I made note of which drive-ins are within driving distance of my home.  I’ll do my part to support these temples of Americana and I hope everyone else will as well.

Save the Drive-In!