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When Rubber met Cinema: The automobile, the motion picture and Pitts Fredericksburg Drive-in theater were a big hit I
Remembering the Golden Age of the Pitts' Fredericksburg Drive-in theater. By Ted Kamieniak
Date published: 12/16/2006
T WAS APRIL 23, 1951, when the first drive-in picture show debuted in Fredericksburg.
The feature attraction was director John Ford's majestic big-budget Western "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon," starring John Wayne, with Joanne Dru and John Agar. The Free Lance-Star advertised "Pitts Drive-in Theatre--a Carfull for a Dollar-Plus Tax--Shine or Shower--Route 1--Four Mile Fork." There were two shows nightly at 7:15 and 9:15. The flick was billed as "Drama that's Raw Violent Real."
The last remnants of the Fredericksburg Drive-in, which closed in 1990, were bulldozed away this summer to make way for offices and retail use.
The marriage of the car and the motion picture began in the early 1930s when a man named Richard Hollingshead Jr., while parked in the driveway of his Riverton, N.J., home, placed a Kodak 16mm projector on the hood of his vehicle. He focused it on a screen hung from a nearby tree, behind which played a radio. Subsequent experimentation involved varying screen sizes, projector throw lengths and the introduction of crude sound systems.
Then he designed a ramping system for parked cars so that the front of each car was pointed upward and toward the movie screen. Drawings were produced and the concept patented, according to the book "The American Drive-In Movie Theater," written and compiled by Don and Susan Sanders.
Matching America's love of cinema with its attachment to the personal convenience of the automobile was inarguably far-sighted and brilliant. Hollingshead submitted the patent in August of 1932, and in May 1933 "construction began on the world's first drive-in theater." It was located near Central Airport in Camden, N.J.
On June 6, 1933, Hollingshead's "Automobile Movie Theater," opened for business, to a packed lot, showing the second-run film "Wife Beware," starring Adolphe Menjou.
The concept of the drive-in caught fire, and by the time America entered World War II there were about 100 drive-ins nationwide. But the war brought drive-in construction to an abrupt halt as Americans focused on the great task at hand, and steel (used in the superstructures supporting movie screens) was needed for more urgent purposes.
Date published: 12/16/2006
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