A Good Day's Work (31 page)

Half a century later, I'm living proof of the abiding pull that a drive-in movie screen has on the imagination. It would be easy to look at the twenty or so drive-ins currently operating in this country—accounting for less than a hundred full-time jobs the last time anyone bothered to look—and the estimated four hundred that have gone dark since the boom
days in the late fifties and conclude that this is an industry on its last legs. Except every year nearly two million Canadians buy a ticket. If that's not staying power, I don't know what is.

I'm not the only person who thinks so. In 1998, photographer Carl Weese pulled his truck off the road in rural Connecticut. It took him a minute to figure out that he was looking at the screen of an abandoned movie theatre, overgrown with trees. A day later he got up early and photographed the screen at daybreak. He liked the result well enough to put it in a small travelling show of prints he was mounting.

What surprised him was that people reacted to the shot. “However they responded to the other pictures in the portfolio, everyone reacted to the print of the drive-in,” he wrote in the commentary for his show
The American Drive-in Theater
, which includes some of the hundreds of drive-ins he has since photographed across the United States. “Some recognized the subject immediately. Others stared and stared before ‘getting it.' ” Once the subject was identified, a smile was the invariable response, and then often a dreamy look as long-forgotten memories resurfaced. It was a showstopper.

Having seen his photos, which make drive-ins look like ancient ruins, I'm not remotely surprised. Weese thinks the rural settings touch something within people. Even the abandoned old screens, he writes, “resonate with the spirit of all who had spent time at them.” Mostly what tugs at the glaze-eyed folks who stand before Weese's photos is the desire to reconnect with the objects of youth. They, more than anything, are reminders that there was a time when not every waking hour was spent worrying about fibre intake and whether little Aidan can cut it in French immersion.

I think people also love drive-ins because they're reminded that people in this country once did lots of things together: they shopped at farmer's markets; they went to church; they caught ball games, vaudeville shows and political rallies. Much of this coming together occurred in itinerant venues like carnival midways and tents where revivalist preachers, Chautauqua performers and travelling snake oil salesmen performed. Some of what they watched once upon a time—glowering wrestlers, ready to pay prize money to anyone who could survive a few rounds—smacked of ancient Rome. Nonetheless, sitting together hoping your hockey team would slap the shit out of the squad from the neighbouring town forged communal identities. Most of us have experienced the wonder of being part of a group uplifted as one by a song or some ringing oratory. And research shows that people who get out of the house and interact with others in some way are not only happier but also live longer.

That, alas, is just not the way the universe is going. Churches are closing and service clubs disappearing. Concert crowds have dwindled to the point where it's hardly worth it for Mick Jagger to take his death rictus on tour. Video games, let alone video movies, outsell old-fashioned ass-in-the-seat cinema viewing. Anyone can see where this is inevitably headed: a society increasingly alienated from family, friends and neighbours; a species forgoing real human connection to sit at home in the eerie light of the computer screen, forming “meaningful” relationships online. A long time ago Yogi Berra declared, “If you don't go to someone's funeral, they won't go to yours.” That pretty much sums it up for me. When I thought too much about the disconnected situation, I found my hand
involuntarily reaching for the Lagavulin. Instead, I headed for the door to go find some real people. And that, in a roundabout way, was how I found myself at the Mustang.

WHEN Paul bought the Mustang, it looked like a place haunted by poltergeists: the single screen full of holes, the grounds a neglected grass lawn, the speakers mostly gone. The owners only booked old, B-list movies. The audience consisted mainly of bored local teenagers jazzed on Labatt Blue looking for a party. The first thing Paul did was to take out an ad in the
Picton Gazette
informing readers that the Mustang had a zero tolerance attitude toward alcohol on the premises. Overnight, business dropped from six hundred or seven hundred customers to just 150. Teens driving by on the highway heckled the new owners. Paul, who in a previous life worked with big-city street gangs, did a lot of the security himself. Sometimes it felt like he was a bouncer at some bucket of blood back in East Vancouver. He says, “It took a while to get the word out that the Mustang was a good, clean family place.”

You approach the Mustang now the same way they did then: through lovely countryside untouched by the wineries, herb farms, antique shops and intuitive energy healing studios native to Ontario's Prince Edward County. The air tonight smells of birch, pine, dust, grass and distant thunderstorms. Beyond the fields and their utilitarian farmhouses loom woods known to hold coyote and wildcat. Arrive at the Mustang a few hours before the first carload, however, and the initial thought is deserted, not ominous. There's only one way in: past the
beaten-up 70 mm movie projector and the scruffy little garden with the miniature ceramic pagoda, and beyond the wooden sign so worn that it is difficult to make out (“Your licence number has been recorded. If a headset has been taken from the place you were parked, you will be contacted by the O[ntario] P[rovincial]P[olice]—The management”). Until you come to the old city-of-Kingston bus that serves as the ticket booth.

Things from here on in seem a little dreamy, a feeling exaggerated by the first objects visible inside the grounds: an aged fire truck; a vintage Coke machine; a retro Yamaha bike; rows of old speaker posts still standing like sentinels, even though the audio comes in on the car radio. Five years ago Paul opened up the wallet to replace the main screen. (It used to be maintained by men in chairs, anchored to a truck, who swung from side to side as they worked their way to the ground. Now he brings in a bucket truck, climbs in and makes the repairs himself.) Tradition had it that drive-in owners, to save a little money, used to live in an apartment within the A-framed screen. There's nothing livable about the Mustang's new forty-eight-foot-by-thirty-foot steel-and-plywood screen. Opening a door into its bowels, I look upward and, once my eyes have adjusted to the gloom, see metal crossbeams and dive-bombing swallows. Shafts of light, entering through ragged holes, crisscross. The ground is covered with debris—old reels and popcorn makers, Recommended as Adult Entertainment signs. The air is heavy and stagnant.

The screen out back is smaller. Thanks to the drive-in's oddball business model, it is also more lucrative. Of the $10 ticket price, $1.50 goes to government taxes. Roughly $5.10 on a first-run movie like
The A-Team
or
Date Night
goes to the
film company. Studios, in fact, go to great lengths to assure they are getting their rightful cut; whenever someone new starts showing up regularly at the Mustang, Paul's first thought is “movie company flunky” checking to see whether he is underreporting the box office take. In any event, that leaves roughly $3.40 for the house.

The caveat is that the film company's take declines—and the owner's margins increases—the longer a movie is shown.
Shrek 2
, which had been out for nearly a month by the time of my visit, only nets 35 percent for the film company versus 60 to 70 percent in week one. Paul's strategy, therefore, is clear: bring in first-run, big-name flicks on the big screen. Then, after a couple of weeks move them onto Screen 2, where they can have a good long run, and sort of watch the dough roll in. “The second screen paid for itself halfway through the first season,” Paul says.
Shrek 2
, for example, is still drawing them in. “The only thing close I can think of is
Anaconda
. People loved that movie. It was so cheesy. But people still showed up several times. That's pretty cool.”

It's also a canny business tactic. The drive-in movie industry, the story goes, is run by sentimental throwbacks who just can't let go of the family business, even if it doesn't make a lick of commercial sense. Paul's laid-back sensibility seems to hide some hard-headed commercial instincts. Recently he and Nancy closed one of the two indoor theatres they own in the area. The cash flow from the Mustang and the Boulevard Cinema, the theatre they own in nearby Napanee, are helping to fund the acquisition of another indoor movie house by their daughter Hollie and one being built by their son Jamie.

Paul, at this moment, is fiddling with some machinery
inside the Screen 1 projectionist's booth: grey floors covered with old reels, tool boxes and rectangular film cases; clashing green and white walls bearing switches labelled with masking tape (“exciter lamp,” “supply pre-amp,” “moving volume”) and a wooden sign that reads “Mustang Drive-In home of the triple feature.” The gear—big projectors, crinkly silver air conditioning pipe—emits a vaguely dystopian aesthetic. It smells like machine oil, solvent and popcorn in here. In other words, it is just as you imagined it.

Within the booth, Paul explains, things have changed. Generally, though, the basics of showing films are the same as they've always been: films still travel in large cases consisting of about seven or eight reels. The reels each hold about twenty minutes of film. Paul used to use two projectors: as reel one was ending, he'd start reel two on the second machine. As reel two was playing, he would then load the third reel on the first projector. And so on and so on.

Time was when the ways a projectionist could screw up were myriad. There were blackouts. The highly flammable film burst into flame if it stalled in front of the ultra-hot carbon arc lamp. Projectionists put reels in backward, or in the wrong order. (Although during long, boring films entire reels were sometimes mysteriously left out with no one in the audience the wiser.) If the transitions were sloppy, the audience would let you know. Being an old-time projectionist had other hazards too. A lot of the carbon arc lamp houses weren't properly ventilated. Those exhaust fumes were toxic.

Now, using a small X-Acto knife, Paul simply splices the reels together into one giant reel—an average-length movie like
Date Night
uses about a mile of film—that is wound
around a rotating table called a “platter.” The film is then fed vertically into the top of his Xetron projector. Gear-like wheels pull the film frame by frame through the projector. Instead of carbon arc lamps, Paul's projectors now use 3,000-watt bulbs containing xenon gas, which are positioned in front of a reflective parabolic mirror. Without the shutter—a small propeller-like device that rotates twenty-four times a second—everything would flicker or look out of focus. Instead, when the image appears on the screen, it looks true to life, magical.

The new platter system is automatic. But not perfect: if the projector jams or the shutter is left open, the film will still burn, although only a single frame of it. Some lousy splicing, leaving the picture out of focus, and the crowd screams for the projectionist's head. A screw-up of any sort means you're off-screen for a minimum of twenty minutes. That's often enough for car engines to bark to life and customers to make for the exits.

Over the clamour of the movie audio, the projector motor and the air conditioning, Paul says that adding another screen would help pad profit margins. That's just not who they are. If money was the be-all and end-all, he and Nancy would have stayed with the industry-wide practice of playing the night's big feature film last to keep customers on the premises and spending as long as possible. Instead, he leads with the bigticket item, so that families can enjoy it and still get the kids home to bed on time.

The real money isn't at the ticket booth anyway. Paul tells me the secret: every person who buys a ten-dollar ticket spends another twenty dollars on grub. A good night at the canteen takes in about $4,500. To gross that amount Paul
spends about $1,500, which means that he nets about $3,000—a Warren Buffett-like 200 percent return on his nightly investment. “Movies are a popcorn delivery system,” he says. “The markups are so huge.” When I ask precisely how huge, he snickers and says that he would tell me, but then he would have to kill me to keep the secret. The most he will say is that the bag costs more than the popcorn inside it. Then he adds, “Oh yeah, did I say that nachos are a beautiful thing?”

He leads the way into the canteen—ten feet by twenty-five feet, festooned with movie posters. It is manned by his wife, Nancy, slim with reddish hair, and a pleasant young woman wearing a badge that says Charlene. The canteen is also a beautiful thing: the noir-ish glow of the slushies, the grandeur of the popcorn machine—where, nightly, sixty pounds of kernels along with special seasoning and canola oil are popped into bright yellow perfection—the possibility of the deep-fat fryer from which emerge French fries, onion rings, hamburgers, hot dogs and Pogos. A few feet away plastic containers full of onions, hot peppers, ketchup and relish await ladling. I ogle the kind of crap I haven't eaten since I was a kid: Ring and Push Pops, Drumsticks, Pixy Stix, radioactive-looking cotton candy. My eye lands on stuff I've never seen at a movie house before—Nancy's homemade fudge, mosquito coils, Frisbees embossed with the kicking-horse Mustang logo.