The Revolution Will Be in Technicolor

The whole drive-in thing started back in 1932 in Camden, N.J., when a guy named Richard Hollingshead started experimenting with a makeshift screen in his backyard, mounting a 1928 Kodak projector on the hood of his car. Within a year, Hollingshead patented his idea and opened the first commercial drive-in theater. The idea took off and a pop culture explosion followed, peaking in the 1960s when the nation boasted between 4,000–5,000 theaters. But the 1980s advent of the VCR killed the industry, and today there are only 383 theaters registered with the United Drive-In Theatre Owners Association.

A nationwide group of underground enthusiasts is reviving the tradition in a way that would make even Dalton Trumbo proud. USA Today and the Boston Globe have covered this over the past year, but the Christian Science Monitor just published a big feature yesterday about a new cultural phenomenon known as "Renegade" or "Guerrilla" drive-ins. Also called MobMov (mobile movie), rogue film aficionados project films onto sides of abandoned buildings, train cars and highway underpasses for small audiences, switching up the location for each film to stay ahead of the law. The Monitor story focused on John Young from West Chester, Pennsylvania, who permanently mounted a 16mm projector to the sidecar of a 1977 BMW motorcycle, creating a mobile drive-in theater. His renegade outfit, West Chester Guerilla Drive-In, hosts films once a month. May's film was Ghostbusters, while June featured Back to the Future. This month is The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

An LA-based underground drive-in explained how it works on another site: "Renegade Drive-In Movie Theatre is a collective of outdoor cinemaphiles that hold spontaneous movie screenings in random & covert locations, projecting a chosen film onto raw surfaces in unconventional locations ... Date & rendezvous point are usually announced 24–72 hours in advance, and participants are encouraged to maintain a low profile when arriving at clandestine locations."

The guerrilla drive-in phenomenon is spreading like a well-manicured disease, with new groups popping up in cities across the board. Wait til the RIAA gets wind of this one. They'll probably create a special covert police unit to quash this underground movement of copyright insurrectionists. It'll be all-out intellectual warfare in the celluloid jungle! If you wanna start up your own renegade theater, check out the fun how-to page at Instructables.com, or the comprehensive website wholly dedicated to the movement at MobMov.com. This, as they say, is only the beginning.

Photos: Top, courtesy of Bree Bailey via Flickr, and bottom, courtesy of ClevelandCGS via Flickr.