photograph by chris mccoy
Summer Drive-In
Editor’s Note: A city is to be shared. Roughly a million people live in what we might call “Greater Memphis,” a hub that stretches east to Germantown and Collierville, and even across state borders (and a mighty river) if we include West Memphis and Southaven. But here’s the charm of a city as distinctive as Memphis, Tennessee: It’s a different home for every one of us. There are residents of Midtown who feel like they need to pack a suitcase if they travel east of Highland. Likewise, some East Memphians schedule trips Downtown like a special event. What makes Memphis home for you? If you had to identify one place or thing that makes the Bluff City singular, what would it be?
We asked eight writers to define “My Memphis” in a single essay. While it’s impossible to answer such a challenge on a single page, it’s a start. And we hope it reminds you of a place (or thing) that makes this amazing city your home too. Feel free to share your version of “My Memphis” with us.
In the mid-twentieth century, drive-in movie theaters dotted the American landscape. As car ownership increased and the suburbs expanded, the drive-in was a place where families could get together for a flick and a picnic, without having to hire a babysitter or drive too far from home.
And as readers of a certain age know, along with family fun, young couples could get some time alone at the drive-in, as memorialized in the Everly Brothers’ 1957 hit “Wake Up Little Suzie.” The drive-in represented egalitarian entertainment, a place where you could see the latest movie on your own terms. While highbrow fare like On the Waterfront was welcome in the era’s cavernous film palaces, drive-in audiences embraced B movies and cheap thrills: Think It Came from Outer Space.
As the decades passed, multiplexes with their smaller theaters and more choices supplanted movie palaces, and drive-ins fell out of favor. The ones that escaped closure were relegated to cheap, often violent, exploitation and grindhouse pictures — and occasionally, as surprising as this may seem for an outdoor venue, pornography. By the time David Bowie sang “Drive-In Saturday” in 1973, the song had an air of nostalgia. At their peak in the mid-’50s, there were more than 4,100 drive-in theaters in America. By the late 1980s, there were fewer than 200.
Today, the Summer Drive-In holds a special place in the hearts of Memphians. The filmgoing experience can be truly communal, with carloads of families and friends breaking out the camp chairs and blasting the film soundtrack from their car radios.
One amusement company which never fell out of love with the drive-in was Memphis’ own Malco Theatres. The Summer Drive-In originally opened in 1948, a brainchild of future Holiday Inn magnate Kemmons Wilson. Malco later bought it, as the theater chain expanded, and in 1966, they closed the original location and moved it to 5310 Summer Avenue.
By 1988, it expanded to four screens, a rare drive-in multiplex that can accommodate up to 2,000 cars. It would prove to be the harbinger of a drive-in revival which began in the early 1990s and continues to this day. In the early 2000s, theater owners were forced to install digital projectors, and many of the drive-ins that remained open were closed by owners who didn’t want to deal with the expense. But not Malco. They installed four giant digital projectors, and the drive-in lived on. During the 2020 Covid pandemic, it would prove to be a fortuitous decision. For almost two years, it was the only active theater in the Malco chain, playing host to both the Indie Memphis Film Festival and the Southeast regional edition of the Sundance Film Festival.
Today, the Summer Drive-In holds a special place in the hearts of Memphians. The filmgoing experience can be truly communal, with carloads of families and friends breaking out the camp chairs and blasting the film soundtrack from their car radios. This is especially true during the monthly Time Warp Drive-In programs, first sponsored by Memphis’ last video store, Black Lodge, and filmmaker/artist Mike McCarthy. The Time Warp programs themed triple- and sometimes quadruple-features, like this month’s Comic Book Sinister program featuring Sin City, Watchmen, and The Crow, all for just $25 per auto. The drive-in remains one of Memphis’ best and simplest treasures.
