Texas Chainsaw Massacre Google Drive

[Rosalyn Pomposo]

Editor's Note: This is a significantly longer version of the drive-in feature that appears in the August print edition of Coastal Senior. The publication opted for a shorter text to allow room for more photos.Also, accompanying this story and three sidebars, we have posted all of the vintage drive-in photos we have.)

The drive-in theater industry today is only a ghost of a once thriving and iconic American institution. But it's a ghost that walks in the Coastal Empire: Two drive-in theaters screen first-run movies year-round within reasonable (well, moderately reasonable) driving distance of Savannah.

More than 90 percent of the approximately 5,000 drive-in movie theaters that were in this country in their heyday - which would have been about 1958 - are closed. But the 400-something that remain include the Jesup Drive-In about an hour and a half south of Savannah, and the Highway 21 Drive-in in Beaufort, S.C., about an hour from downtown Savannah.

Savannah, of course, used to have its own drive-ins, back in the day. According to www.drive-ins.com, a research-packed site for the drive-in buff, the city has been home, at various times, to seven different drive-ins: the Weis Auto Twin on Montgomery Crossroad; the Victory Drive Drive-In, roughly across from the old Backus car dealership; the Palm Drive-In, which apparently was somewhere between Victory Drive and Bonaventure Road from 1951-57; the Dixieland Drive-In, also somewhere on Victory; the Highway 80 Drive-In near the traffic circle in Garden City; the Dixie Drive-In, across from the Highway 80 Drive-in from 1946 to the late 1950s; and the Montgomery Drive-In on Montgomery Street. It seems the one on Montgomery Crossroad was the last hold-out, switching off the speakers in 1982 or 1983.

But when they were big, they were very, very big. Former Savannahian Buddy Kuykendall, now retired in Tennessee, managed a string of the facilities across the Southeast for the Dixie Drive-In Theaters, based out of Atlanta. He recalls the Highway 80 Drive-In as having spaces for 1,000 cars.

He also has fond memories of over-the-top promotions for horror movies. He even has the script for an old radio ad, with the periods punched into the paper from a manual typewriter and purple prose to boot. See if this wording doesn't take you back:

"Tonight, the earth cracks at the Victory Drive Drive-In theater - and that may not be all. When the star-crossed hour arrives, the upheaval will reveal four of the most terrifying monsters ever to stalk panic-stricken prey at the Victory Drive-In."

The real horror, at least for the manager, was at intermission. "We had to serve about 1,500 people at the concession stand in 30 minutes, and we did it without computers. We used cash boxes," Kuykendall said.

Getting the movie up on the big screen required some ingenuity, too. Andy Andrews, now the owner of Audio Visual Resources in Savannah, got some of his first audio-visual technology experience keeping a high school buddy company back in the late 1960s in the projection booth at the Neva Drive-in in Geneva, Ala. on weekend nights.

"One of my best friends worked at a drive-in. This was out in the country and it was only about a half a mile from his house, where his father had a farm on the main road toward Enterprise," Andrews remembered. "It was a Peerless brand carbon arc movie projector. You always had to have one reel of the film loaded ahead of the other and you had to adjust it pretty regularly. A reel would run 15 or 20 minutes."

"There was a crew of us from church who went pretty regular. We would part together and turn the speakers up and sit on the cars. Of course, we'd try to sneak someone in in the trunk sometimes," remembered Bryna Gordon of her teen years in Shelbyville, Tenn. "One of the favorite things to do was always to go to the scary shows because it was dark and even scarier than in the theater - lots of screams coming from lots of cars."

She remembers in particular a showing of the original "Texas Chainsaw Massacre."The drive-in owner was into the over-the-top marketing so favored by drive-ins, and he liked to have fun, she remembered.

"When the guys went down to the concession stand to get refreshments, he clued them in, I guess so they wouldn't be mad. When the movie was over and people were leaving and some of us were just sitting around, he had about five people run of the woods with chainsaws, wearing masks. Our whole crew was screaming at the top of our lungs. People in the backs of cars were trying to get out and those of us who had been sitting on the cars were trying to get in. It was good clean fun."

The area drive-ins that remain do the industry proud. Over the course of two weeks, I dragged friends to the drive-in three times, twice to Beaufort and once to Jesup. Besides learning more about Captain America than I ever wanted to know, I found that things haven't changed much - except you don't need scratchy speakers any more, since the sound comes in on your FM radio.

3a8082e126