Theater’s Demise Signals End of Era When Car Was King : Twilight for Drive-In

CHATSWORTH — It was only decades ago that drive-in movie theaters joined mom and apple pie in a seemingly eternal pantheon of Americana.

But the announcement that one of the last two drive-ins in the San Fernando Valley will be replaced by a gleaming 26-screen megaplex, seems to have marched the drive-in movie theater right into the dustbin of history.

“This time, news of the death of the drive-in has not been exaggerated,” said CSUN English professor Jack Solomon, an expert on Southern California culture.

The impending closure later his year of the Winnetka Drive-In is not just the end of a theater, but signals the death of the storied Southern California car culture, he said.

“Once cars signified freedom and fun and that sort of thing,” he said. “Now they seem to signify more traffic and higher gas costs.”

As a result, parking lots at modern malls and multiplexes conceal cars and accentuate the pedestrian lifestyle, Solomon said. And though they remain auto-dependent, modern moviegoers want to ditch their cars.

As drive-in aficionados mourned the passing of yet another American icon, Pacific Theatres executives said irresistible economic forces dictated their decision, announced Thursday, to shutter the drive-in on Winnetka Avenue at Prairie Street.

“Today, everybody’s geared for the big new sound effects and all the special presentations,” said Pacific’s director of advertising, Amy Wood, explaining why the new indoor theater that will replace it will boast three different sound systems. “People just love these new sound systems.”

And, industry observers note, theater chains love megaplexes, where they can pack the maximum number of paying customers into a minimal space.

*

The sprawling 25-acre site of the Winnetka Drive-In is ripe for such a new complex, which also will feature shops and restaurants, Wood said. “We just thought it was something that would benefit the northwest valley, something that would be very popular there, that the people who live there would really enjoy,” Wood said.

Long before the Valley sprouted megaplexes and gourmet restaurants, its residents, as the trendsetters for suburban America, enjoyed drive-ins.

The first drive-in opened in Camden, N.J., in 1933, but it wasn’t until after World War II, when the American car culture flowered, that the bulk of the nation’s drive-ins were built, according to Jim Kozak, spokesman for the National Assn. of Theatre Owners, based in North Hollywood.

During the war, metals and motors were used to fuel the United States’ military machine. But when peace broke out and the economy boomed, average-income families and even teenagers could afford cars, and drive-ins sprang up nationwide.

And what a craze it was. During the heyday of the drive-in back in the late 1950s, movies were shown on 4,000 outdoor screens compared with just 848 today. There were at least seven in the Valley, now-vanished names such as the Vineland, the Sepulveda, the Laurel and the Reseda.

The theaters were typically built on several throw-away acres where land was cheap. The Winnetka Drive-In, for example, was built in 1975 on what used to be a corn and strawberry field. In those days, it was a far corner of the city. The roads leading to it were dirt.

Lynn Coleman of Woodland Hills has fond memories of the nights she spent during high school and college in the mid 1960s and early 1970s going to Valley drive-ins, a pastime she continues today.

“When I was growing up in the Valley, the best time was during the evening because it was so hot during the day,” Coleman said. “You would leave at twilight and drive across the Valley and smell the orange blossoms.

“It was so great, it was so pleasant just hanging out with my friends at the drive-in.”

Etna McCoy, who has worked at drive-ins for nearly 40 years, managed the Winnetka in its early days. She recalls cars spilling onto the grassland that would eventually be paved and transformed into Winnetka Avenue, and of the golden days before, when drive-ins first claimed their place in the American psyche.

“Back then there was no Disneyland,” said McCoy, now manager of the Van Nuys Drive-In, the only remaining example in the Valley of what 1950s teenagers leeringly called “passion pits.”

“There was no Universal tours. There was no Magic Mountain. They didn’t have all this competition.”

All that would end. As cities grew and expanded over the years, so to did the value of the land beneath the drive-in screens. By the 1960s, people began inhabiting the land near the theaters, boosting property values to mind-boggling levels.

“Those plots brought in big offers,” Kozak said. “It became common for drive-in owners to be made offers they simply couldn’t refuse.”

*

But in today’s movie ticket wars, with multi-screen entertainment complexes blooming throughout the Valley--including the new 16-screen AMC that opened in March at the Woodland Hills Promenade and a proposed expansion of the cinema at the Sherman Oaks Galleria--the Winnetka’s days were numbered.

Kozak acknowledged that the Winnetka’s closure is part of a trend to develop indoor complexes where outdoor drive-ins once sprawled. Indeed, along with the Winnetka, Pacific Theatres also announced the closure of drive-ins in Fresno and Anaheim, both also slated to be replaced by state-of-the-art megaplexes.

But the trend does not necessarily indicate the complete demise of the drive-in, Kozak adds. The number of drive-in screens has been fairly stable over the past decade, ranging between 800 and 900 screens nationwide.

Today’s drive-in loyalists tend to be working class, both young and old, and are more often parents with children than lusting teenage couples. Many are baby boomers rekindling the dear old 1950s with their children and grandchildren, or older couples attending out of habit.

McCoy, the manager of the Van Nuys Drive-In--also owned by Pacific Theatres--still hopes for a drive-in revival. But she admits that’s unlikely and mourns the passing of a unique slice of Americana.

“I’ve had people come over here from Europe and Japan and so on and so forth, and they always come to the drive-in because they don’t have them over there,” she said, grieving that the loss of the Winnetka “takes down a part of the American Dream.”

Tamaki is a Times staff writer and Riccardi is a special correspondent.