LITTLE ROCK — Drive-in theaters, in Arkansas and across America, are fading like old projector bulbs.
In 1950, the traffic was so incredible that The Saturday Evening Post, a muchread magazine at the time, took a count of the places where America parked at night: 2,200 drive-ins.
Today? - 381, according to the National Association of Theatre Owners, down from 440 drive-ins a decade ago, down from 593 drive-ins in 1995.
Little Rock’s oncecrowded drive-ins have gone the way of poodle skirts, nickel Cokes and The Saturday Evening Post in every mailbox. But Arkansas still has places to see the world through a windshield.
In Marshall, the Kenda Drive-in stays open with car heaters. The 112 Drive-In, in Fayetteville, and Stone Drive-In, in Mountain View, look to re-open for the season in March.
Bobby Thompson runs the Stone Drive-in that his parents built in 1965, bucking the trends he has seen darken most outdoor screens like his.
“I’m close to 70,” Thompson says - old enough to remember 30, 40 years back, when the big idea was for drive-ins to show duskto-dawn grinds of whatever they could find. He took the opposite approach, which he credits for having kept him in business.
“I shut down to a single feature, and I make sure I run the newest, best features I can get hold of,” he says.
Some busy nights, he reports, it’s all he can do to sell tickets and run the projector by himself. On those evenings, he hires as many as three people to work the candy counter.
Style, Pages 50 on 02/20/2011