Drive-ins are now the Rodney Dangerfields of movie theaters: they don't get no respect. Those of us who are city slickers really miss them, however, and search them out whenever our travels take us through small town America. They are one of those simple pleasures of life that you took for granted but miss once they're gone. In days of old, little kids used to love them because they would cavort in the playgrounds that were inevitably on the premises. Teenagers loved drive-ins because they would go there to play inside the car. (The mind reels at how many people came of age in the back of an old Chevy - an experience immortalized in Bob Seger's Night Moves) Yet, there was a time when the film industry held drive-ins in high regard as a major source of box-office revenue. Take a look at this trade industry ad we came across in our archives...Drive-ins were actually supplied with 70mm roadshow prints of Lawrence of Arabia! The idea of seeing David Lean's masterpiece on a drive-in theater screen may seem bizarre, but where else could you experience the film while passing around a six-pack and cigars? I also used to love the mismatched double and triple features that rural drive-ins would offer. Once in upstate New York, we went to see Charlton Heston and Laurence Olivier in Khartoum double-billed with Ferlin Husky in Forty Acre Feud. Only in America....- Lee Pfeiffer
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