By Rachel Sauer
The Daily Sentinel
Somewhere in the middle of the evening, around 10 p.m., just before “The Giver” ended, Pamela Friend sat quietly on the glossy red bleachers outside the squat concessions building.
Electric yellow light spilled out the windows and illuminated her profile, which was aimed up, to a point above the glowing movie screen.
“You see the Big Dipper?” she asked. “When we open in spring, it’s right over the snack bar and when we close in fall, it’s right over the screen.”
On that night in mid-August, it hovered several inches above the big screen, evidence of summer passing, tilted precariously, about to spill its scoop of stardust all over the movie, all across the gravel lot, onto faces illuminated by the afterglow of a Hollywood ending. It was like being inside a better version of a snow globe: a star globe, with its dome of velvety sable sky pulled tight to the horizon, encompassing the drive-in.
The name is appropriate, then: Star Drive-In. Wheel on in, watch a movie or two as the sky fades from flamboyant gold and fuchsia to inky shades of purple and blue, the stars flickering on one by one. Have a hamburger, have some fries, sip a Coke in the bed of a truck parked backward, nestled into a cocoon of pillows and blankets.
“We’ve been here 65 years,” Friend said. The cars have expanded and contracted, the clothes have convulsed in and out and circled back, the movies cycled through, but something about it. It could be any year, in a way, any year since “The Younger Brothers” inaugurated the screen in the summer of 1949.
Let’s all go to the drive-in, and the hot dogs eternally dancing.
OPENING IN THE OUTDOORS
But before all that, before the puffing plumes of dust as trucks drive the prescribed 5 mph to an available space, before the camp chairs are unfurled and arrayed in front of compact cars parked between speakers, before the chemical tang of bug spray hovers in clouds above groups of friends, an empty lot. Ten acres of gravel.
The speakers stood in a regimental line-up of cotton swab soldiers, orderly and neat, arrayed in curving rows before the enormous single screen — 80 feet wide, 90 feet tall counting the base, big and white and presiding at the very front of things.
A solo white sedan was parked in front of the low concessions building — painted white with red trim — its trunk open so Friend could pull supplies from it. It was not yet 7 p.m. and the ticket office wouldn’t open until 7:30, but she knew her timing to the minute. She grew up here, not just at the drive-in but in Montrose County, fourth generation.
Her parents, George and Elizabeth DeVries, opened the Star in 1949. It was either a drive-in or a bar on Townsend Avenue, but Friend’s Baptist grandmother had a fit at the mention of a bar, Friend explained. Heck, as a peace offering to grandma, the drive-in wasn’t even open on Sunday its first year of business.
That last year of the ‘40s, drive-ins were in their ascendancy. The first one, Park-In Theaters, opened June 6, 1933, in Camden, New Jersey, and by 1958, the peak year, there were 4,063 drive-in theaters across America, according to the United Drive-In Theatre Owners Association.
However, between 1978 and 1988, 1,000 drive-in theaters closed, victims of multiplexes and land values and persnickety studios. Now, there are 348 drive-ins in America, six of those in Colorado and two of that number on the Western Slope: the Tru Vu in Delta and the Star in Montrose.
GROWING UP AT THE MOVIES
The Star has held on through property tax increases and fickle audiences and a tornado that destroyed the original screen on May 19, 1974.
“You couldn’t make a living doing only this,” Friend said, busy behind the concessions counter, putting buns in the bun warmer and setting out containers of pickles and jalapenos. She and her family own a farm north of town, which includes DeVries Produce and the Halloween-favorite corn maze and pumpkin patch. She points out with pride that the tomatoes and onions for the hamburgers and the potatoes for the French fries come straight from the farm.
“I cut all the French fries myself, right there,” Friend said, pointing to the silver potato slicer bolted to the back wall of the concessions area. “And these fryers and the grill,” she said, pointing to the Hotpoint appliances gleaming silver against the back wall, “are original. Sixty-five years old. Though, the bun warmer’s on its way out.”
She can remember them through her whole life. Two years after her parents opened the Star, she came along, napping in a storage room when the hour got late. By age 5, she was running tickets from the booth to her father in the projection room and, at 16, she was well on her way to overseeing the business.
And the funny thing is, she thinks movies are OK.
“The last movie I really liked was ‘The Proposal,’ ” Friend recalled. “I liked Betty White in it.”
WATCHING FOR MEMORIES
The fifth generation, however, is fond of movies: “I’m a film buff,” said April Mason, Friend’s daughter, who also has worked at the drive-in most of her life. She walked into the concession stand to chat with her mom, the Saturday night routine, before heading out to the ticket booth. Soon after she arrived came the cadre of young concession stand workers, moving around each other behind the counter in a well-practiced waltz.
At 7:30 p.m., with three cars waiting in line, Mason pushed the ticket booth window open and greeted the first customer with a friendly, “Helloooo!” Movie studios now insist that customers be charged per person, rather than per carload, so it’s $7.50 for adults and $5.50 for seniors. Children 11 and under are free.
And because the world has changed, drive-ins aren’t really the teenage free-for-all anymore, the real-life “American Graffiti” or “Grease” with four guys sardined in the trunk of a car, sneaking into the drive-in.
Those were good times, though, weren’t they? However nostalgia-burnished they may be, however romanticized and memory-embellished, there’s an everlasting truth to the lung-expanding freedom of going to the drive-in. The movie may or may not get watched. There always was roaming to do, a concession stand to hang out at, perfecting the art of seeing and being seen. Just being outside, under the stars, on a summer night. If such a thing as perfection exists, that might be it.
And even just sitting in a car, watching a movie, it’s a novelty that never quite wears off. Especially these days, when entertainment is never not available, when over-stimulation is a hovering problem. There’s nothing to multi-task at the drive-in. The thing to do is sit outside and watch two movies. It is an occasion, an event like punctuation at the end of a summer day.
MAKING IT AN OCCASION
Nests of pillows are a bonus, of course. On an August night, Asa Chapman, a Montrose guy, and Tayler Weaver, down from Grand Junction, lounged in the back of an SUV, its back hatch open wide, comfortable on multiple pillows.
“I’ve actually never been to the drive-in before,” Chapman admitted. Weaver figured it was time he did, so they packed popcorn and drinks and a bed of blankets, waiting as the sun went down for the movies to start. They couldn’t even remember what was playing — “Lucy,” maybe? — because the point was to get out under the stars.
Cathie and Don Whisman came down from Grand Junction with daughters Alissa, Amber and Cassi, meeting up with Cathie’s sister, Chris Boyce.
“We grew up coming here,” Boyce said, pointing to her sister.
“It’s almost a nostalgia thing,” Cathie Whisman added. “Getting out, just having a chance to talk with each other before the movie starts, and it’s such a nice night.”
They sat in camp chairs arranged in front of their cars, jackets at the ready in case the night got chilly, eating sandwiches. How often do you get moments like that, they wondered, just hanging out together, watching the sun go down, enjoying a movie?
Adam Chaffin could answer that: Not often. With a combined family of six children between him and his girlfriend of two years, Merry Timmons, they just don’t get out on date nights all that often. So, a date night to the drive-in is special. They pulled the gray back seat from their Suburban, put it in the back of Chaffin’s truck, and parked with the truck bed facing the screen, Chaffin’s arm around Timmons as they cuddled on the bench seat.
“My mom’s watching the kids,” Chaffin explained, “and we had to go when it was movies that the kids wouldn’t want to see. They’d have been so sad if we went to see ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ without them.”
Drive-ins are about various avenues to comfort. Jessica Landon and Mark Ramirez, visiting her from Sacramento, California, crammed a damask-covered wing chair — “I found it on the curb!” Landon declared proudly — and a papasan chair into the trunk of her small sedan.
“Welllll…” Landon admitted, “it didn’t actually close all the way, but I only live a few blocks from here and we drove slowly.”
CREATING A FUTURE
A little after 8:30 p.m., with “dusk” being the advertised starting time, Friend started the show. First, a few local ads, then she faced the computer screen and pushed a touch screen button. Just like that.
“It’s a lot different, digital is,” she said. “Film was a lot simpler; if a bulb went out, that was easy to fix.”
But the world changed, and continues to change. Being film-only began limiting Friend’s options for movies she could bring to the Star, so going digital was inevitable. But so expensive! Close to $100,000. For some bleak days in 2012, Friend wondered if she’d have to close the theater. She wondered if it would even matter.
“So we thought, we’ve got to do something to show her that this really does matter,” said Chris Tolvo, who, with his wife, Stephanie, began a “Save the Star” fundraising campaign. Along with other volunteers — some of whom, like Chris Tolvo, used to sneak into the Star as kids — they held silent auctions and pancake breakfasts and knocked on doors, eventually raising about $24,000.
Friend took out a loan on the farm for the rest of the amount, and in May 2013 had the digital projection equipment installed in the small cinder block room opposite the breezeway from the concession stand.
“It was amazing, what the community did,” Friend marveled. “Coming to the drive-in really matters to people. It has a lot to do with memories of being a kid, being a teenager, just a nice summer night at the movies.”
Dave Peters and Jodie Petersen drive up from Durango several weekends a summer just to go to movies at the Star. Oh, sure, they make a weekend of it with camping and mountain biking, “but before the Rocket closed (in Durango) we used to go every weekend,” Peters said.
“It doesn’t even matter what’s playing,” Petersen said. “We just come up to go to the drive-in.”
GAZING AT THE STARS
So, the sun sank into a billow of pink clouds at the western horizon and the cars and trucks continued lining up at the ticket booth.
“One old person,” joked a lady in a blue sedan, handing her $5.50 to Mason.
“One senior in high school,” Mason corrected.
“I told my son I have to take a nap just so I can go to the movies,” the lady said, laughing, before she pulled around the fence and into the lot.
Mason greeted people by name, handing them fliers for next week’s double feature, because it’s always a double feature at the drive-in. During summer, when the kids are out of school, the drive-in is open every night, but once school starts it’s back to Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Friend admitted that she welcomes the slower schedule.
Secretly, though, it’s hard not to feel a pang for the nights in the middle of June and July, when the movies are family fare so kids come in their jammies and inevitably fall asleep somewhere in the second feature. Because that’s part of the drive-in, too.
“This is a place for families,” Friend said, adding that she tries to stay away from R-rated movies and wondering, as a side note, when the language got so bad and some movies got so crude.
“I don’t like that,” she said, shaking her head.
Instead, what she likes is the focused beam of light shining from the projection room and ending up as a movie on the big screen. Bugs and dust motes dance in the light, diamond brilliant, as the gravel lot — “you’ll never find a weed here, I’m a farmer,” Friend said — quiets and stills.
People sit in their cars with a speaker perched in a rolled-down window, or with the radio tuned to 107.3. Or they sit in camp chairs or in truck beds or lounge in the back of SUVs. Occasionally, drawn to the firefly glow of the concession stand, a beacon in the darkened lot, they buy hamburgers and popcorn, boxes of candy and sodas, carefully picking their way over the gravel and back to their spots.
Maybe they make out a little — it happens less than you’d think, Friend said — or maybe they fall asleep. More likely, though, they gaze up at the big screen in front of them, the starry night warm all around them, everything the drive-in should be.