By Todd Garbarini
April Wright is a film director whose credits include the
documentaries Going Attractions: The Definitive Story of the American
Drive-In Movie (2013), Going Attractions: The Definitive Story of the
Movie Palace (2019) and Stuntwomen: The Untold Hollywood Story
(2020), all of which can be viewed JustWatch.com.
Like all of us cinephiles, Ms. Wright was not just a fan of movies but also a
lover of the experience of going to see a movie, especially at the
drive-in. Ms. Wright and I are similar in age and her enthusiasm for the
drive-in dates back to her childhood, a familial outing which became a much-anticipated
and frequent event during the summer months. I cannot make that claim,
unfortunately, as I have attended the drive-in only a handful of times in my
life.
Ms. Wright’s latest film, Back to the Drive-In (2023),
looks at a dozen remaining drive-ins across the United States and the owners
who are, quite honestly, struggling to keep them going. It’s a poignant look at
an American pastime that has slowly become an endangered species.
Todd Garbarini: I loved your film. I’ve been a movie
fan all my life and I love drive-ins, as well as big and beautiful movie
theaters. Clearly you share my enthusiasm.
April Wright: Yes, absolutely. I had a movie family
in a way. My dad had an 8mm camera and reel-to-reel editing equipment for that
in the basement. I did understand a little bit of the nuts and bolts of
filmmaking even when I was a kid. We watched lots of movies. There was a
neighborhood movie palace down the street from my house in Chicago that my
brother and sister ended up working at. I was able to see a lot of movies. I’ve
been interested in movie palaces, just because they were so big and ornate. Now
you watch movies at home or on your smartphone and that showmanship is changing
and I just don’t really understand why. I like making movies to remind people
about what a cool experience it can be seeing a movie as an event and an
experience.
TG: Do you remember the very first movie
you saw in either a drive-in or in a movie theater?
AW: I really don’t because it was just so
commonplace that we saw a lot of movies, so I don’t have any “first-experience”
memories. I kind of remember seeing Song of the South as a kid and I
remember Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I’m sure I saw some of
the Herbie the Love Bug films. Escape to Witch Mountain, I remember
seeing that one at a drive-in. I love horror films and I saw them, too. One
thing I remember vividly is when Carrie was on television, and my mom
telling me I couldn’t come in the room. Of course, I really wanted to, and I
snuck downstairs. I looked in right at the end where the hand comes out. It
scared me, but it made me really curious. When I was older and I saw the whole
movie, it’s one of my favorite films of all time. It intrigued me in a way,
just planted that seed since she made it even more forbidden, like, “You can’t
watch this!” (laughs)
TG: You’ve made a documentary about movie
palaces.
AW: Yes! One of the interviews in that
movie is shot at the Loew’s Jersey City. We shot that in 2017. That’s a
gorgeous theater. I love it. When that reopens, it’s going to be really great.
That theater’s interesting because at one point in time, they had split it into
three theaters during the multiplex era.
TG: What?! Are you serious? I had no idea…
AW: Yes, so on the main floor, they split
it right down the middle. You had half of the main screen on the left and the
other half on the right. They covered the balcony so that they had a third
screen up there and they took all that out, which is incredible that they were
able to remove all that partitioning. Right down the street is The Stanley
Theater which is now home to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. We got to go in there
during the Theater Historical Society
tours that we were on. That one is gorgeous, too. It’s an atmospheric
theater and they used to have a blue sky and twinkling lights on the ceiling in
most of them. Then it would look like a little town around you as if you were
outside. It’s impeccably maintained, it’s gorgeous, but they painted their
ceiling white, so it looks like you’re up in the heavens or up in the clouds
when you’re in there.
TG: I’m jealous because in my area, I had a
handful of movie theaters that I went to over the years, and now they’re all
gone. One of them was the Plainfield Edison Drive-In. They had a double feature
of Black Christmas and Psycho, The Velvet Vampire, Lemora:
A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural, etc. It opened in 1957 and closed in
1984, the year before I obtained my driver’s license!
AW: I don’t know if you know this, but the
very first drive-in ever was in New Jersey.
TG: Yes, that was Camden. The founder was Richard
Hollingshead.
AW: Yes! His son is in my first documentary
talking about how his dad invented it. It opened in 1933, so this year is the 90th
anniversary of the drive-in, which is pretty cool.
TG: Hard to believe. In fact, what I liked
about your new film, Back to the Drive-In, is that you have the Delsea
Drive-In in Vineland, NJ, the only remaining drive-in in the state.
AW: Yes. I went down there. We shot more,
but they said, “Oh, we don’t want to be in it that much.” Some people like
being on camera and don’t. A lot of the drive-in owners are part of the
United Drive-In Theater Owners Association, there’s a group. They have an
annual conference in Florida. I went to it in February of 2020, which is right before
COVID. I knew I wanted to do a follow-up (to my previous film about drive-ins),
and at that point in time, I thought I wanted to just go really in depth with perhaps
three families. I said to them there, “Does anybody want to be part of this
film?” There were some other drive-ins that had wanted to be part of my next
film that weren’t in my first one, and so I had a few potential ones. Then a
month later, COVID hit, and even though drive-ins were open, I still felt like
states were changing the rules and everything was still weird for a little
while. I waited, but then the more that COVID was going on and then drive-ins
started getting all this attention, I thought that this is a layer to my story
that I never could have anticipated. It made me expand that instead of just
showing a few families in depth and what they do. I wanted to show not only
that, but what was COVID doing to it? It made me want to have a bigger cross-section.
I needed to see what was going on and go to some really old and some fairly new
drive-ins. I wanted to go to some big ones with seven screens, and I wanted to
go to the single screens out in different states. I tried to just pick every
type of factor to represent. The weird thing was, as soon as I got on the road
and went to a few of them, I realized they were all telling me the same story. They
were all struggling. Everybody was just trying to get through this period. They
were small businesses, family-owned, and they were just trying so hard to keep
them going because they really care about what it provides to their community.
That’s how it came about. I was going to do it anyway, but then the way I
decided to do it evolved because of COVID.
TG: What I find interesting is, in the
movie, they say, “We ask you to keep your mask on while you’re in the car.” We
forget how bad it really was back then during the height of COVID.
AW: Yes. I think that might have been a
California drive-in, too, because California was more rigid than other places.
California was definitely in a program wherein if the numbers were high, the
rules were stricter. If the numbers went down, then it got released. That might
have been at a moment when the numbers were high. I know because although I’m
from Chicago, I live in Los Angeles.
TG: I haven’t been to LA since 2008. I have
gone to more drive-ins as an adult while out on business than I ever did when I
was a child. It just kills me to see this type of thing dying out. I look at
the theaters that used to be around here on CinemaTreasures.org and there is no
evidence that these places ever existed.
AW: I know. When you see a horror movie at
a drive-in and you can look over to your right or left, and there’s a forest right
next to you, that’s an extra layer of film! That’s like 4-D!
TG: Who are some of your favorite directors?
AW: One of my favorites is Brian De Palma.
TG: Oh, I love him. I just saw the new Dressed
to Kill 4K Blu-ray and it’s beautiful.
AW: I really like pretty much all his
films, just the way he shoots them. I like the
split-screen stuff. I think they all hold up. He had great actors and
all of them and just, yes, I think he’s a great filmmaker. Like even the Mission
Impossible series, I still think the first one is the best one that he
directed.
TG: Do you like William Friedkin?
AW: I do. Actually, we’ve met and chatted before
because he’s also a fellow Chicagoan. I love The French Connection.
That’s probably his best movie, my absolute favorite. I went to a screening of
that at the Academy where he was there doing Q&A and just some of the stuff
that he did because he came out of documentaries first. For him to do moving
shots the way he did and just the grittiness of it, I mean that was something
on the newer side when he shot something that way. Yes, I really love that. I love all John Carpenter’s
stuff, for sure. Richard Linklater. I love (Steven) Soderbergh’s work because
he’s just made such a wide array of movies, big movies but also small and experimental,
some that he shot on videos cameras. He tries different things. I really like
them as filmmakers as well. Amy Heckerling has such a great body of work and
Penelope Spheeris. She started in documentaries. I actually just went to see
her doc a few days ago, the first Decline of Western Civilization, about
punk and she was there for Q&A. I love Nicholas Cage, too. Thrillers and
horror are probably my number one. Of course, I do like documentaries as well,
especially if they’re about subjects that you can learn something about. The
Shining is one of my favorites of all time. Also, I love John Landis. I’m
from Chicago, and he shot some things there like The Blues Brothers.
TG: How much footage did you shoot for Back
to the Drive-In?
AW: Quite a bit. I had a crew to help me in
Los Angeles when I was here, but the rest I actually did by myself. I had my
primary camera, I had my drone, and then I had a GoPro, which I did time-lapses
from empty daytime to evening. Between those three, it gave me enough to cut
together, but I usually got to each drive-in in the afternoons, you would start
maybe at three in the afternoon, capturing all their preparation, and then stay
until late, usually two in the morning. It was basically almost twelve hours of
footage for each one, because I would just get there and be shooting non-stop.
Then the logical way to put it together, I thought it might be by subject, but
once I looked at it, I realized, no, it’s got to be chronological. Just one big
arc of the afternoon, the prep, and then opening the doors, and then the snack
bar, and then getting the movie on screen, and then the breather once all that’s
done became the way to tell it.
TG: I miss the aura and aroma of the
theaters I went to as a child.
AW: Yes, it’s true. Movie theater smell.
When I go to old theaters, too, a lot of times you walk into them and your
reaction is, “Oh, there’s a good old movie theater smell.” Also in the projection
rooms, if they’re where they have all that old equipment, that’s a certain
smell because the film and the oil and all that had a smell, too. That’s almost
gone now because they had to convert them to clean rooms for the digital
projection. You must have a climate-controlled, very fancy environment for
those. A lot of the drive-ins still have both projectors.
TG: Do you have an all-time favorite movie?
AW: Rocky.
TG: Did you see it in the movies when it
first came out?
AW: I did. Even though I was a little kid,
my mom saw it and she wanted to take us to see Rocky. That’s probably
part of it. Also, I realized after I’ve been a filmmaker for a little while,
some of the things I like or I’m drawn to – and Carrie falls into this,
for sure – is that I really like underdogs and people who shouldn’t win but
somehow do. That’s a theme in the films that I like. For Rocky,
obviously, that is one of the best underdog stories. It’s not even the message
of winning. It’s just going the distance, of course. The story of making it is
an underdog story, too. The fact that Stallone can be a semi-nobody struggling
actor and come up with this and write it and create such an iconic character
that lives on is inspiring as well. I love that movie. It is my all-time
favorite. If you want to talk horror, my all-time favorite is Carrie.
TG: I was sorry to see your film end
because I just wanted to see so many other people talking. I’m sure you’ve
probably seen The Last Blockbuster,
the film about, literally, the last Blockbuster Video, which is in Bend,
Oregon. In some ways, your movie reminds me of that film because I say, yes,
there are no more video stores to go to. I want to thank you so much for taking
the time to speak with me.
AW: Thank you very much. I’m glad you
liked the movie!
Back to the Drive-In can
now be seen streaming on iTunes, Amazon Prime, Google Play, and Vudu.