July/August 2005

To Hull and Back

Find a Good Seat and Settle in for the Virginia Drive-in Tour

By Don Harrison

Frank Kulesza is standing in a cramped, stuffy projection booth, looking completely calm while ribbons of thick celluloid travel precarious pathways around his head.

“I’m having trouble right now with the fire damper,” the manager of the Hull Drive-In says matter-of-factly, showing me the pathway of tonight’s first feature as it travels into a lighted metal shutter.

“Right now I’ve got a paper clip holding it all together.”

Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle unfurls through various wobbly spindles and around corners, twisting and re-spooling onto a large dish that looks like a yo-yo turned on its side. This is occurring in a cramped room no bigger than an efficiency apartment. The destination and departure point of the print is a monstrous Brenkart-RCA movie projector, which came with the legendary Hull Drive-In in Lexington, Virginia, when it first opened in 1950.

The mammoth whirling behemoth seems more like something out of the sci-fi classic, Forbidden Planet—Robby the Robot’s older brother—than the sleek, sophisticated digital equipment we’re used to fiddling with at home.

The nation’s only nonprofit drive-in theater, the Hull still does it the old way, with a paper clip if necessary, keeping alive that peculiar American, small-town phenomenon—watching movies in your car. While they have disappeared in Hampton Roads, many original drive-in movie houses erected during the CinemaScope boom of the ’50s still attract traffic and seize the imagination on weekend nights in Virginia towns like Lexington, Rural Retreat, Christiansburg, Marion and Fork Union.

You often read that this bastion of sleepy, small-town life is also showing signs of revival in the urban setting—certainly the internet has helped to galvanize interest in movies under the stars. A huge screen was recently installed inside the minor league baseball home of the Bowie Baysox in Bowie, Maryland, making it the first time in more than a decade that moviegoers in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area have had access to a drive-in. It is a new drive-in theater, with digital projection and FM surround sound.

Jennifer Sherer, cofounder of www.drive-ins.com, arguably the best informational guide of its kind on the web, says the Bowie installation is an interesting rarity. “Although urban drive-in revival is not unheard of, most of the recent activity tends to be in more rural areas. This is most likely due to the high cost of real estate and the fact that drive-ins work better with less ambient light nearby.”

Sherer’s website is devoted to promoting and documenting the surviving screens across North American and as far as Australia. Naturally, she has visited the Hull, which was saved in 2000 when a local community group lobbied for nonprofit status. “Its reputation preceded it, the community efforts to get it back up and running,” Sherer says. The drive-in historian loves the fact that the screen is nestled in a scenic valley.

In the late ’50s, the heyday of the drive-in fad, there were thousands of drive-in theaters like the Hull scattered across the country, but that number has dwindled to a mere four hundred. However, in many small towns, such as Lexington, dashboard viewing under the summer stars never went out of style. The commonwealth, notes Sherer, is lucky to have preserved so many surviving examples, like the Hull, of the drive-in’s golden age.

For the rest of this story, you can order the July/August 2005 issue of Hampton Roads Magazine.