Chesapeake, Virginia: Outdoor Movies at the Drive-In Return to Chesapeake With an Inflatable Screen
At 8:12 p.m., an image appeared slowly on a large outdoor screen as daylight and two decades of neglect slipped away. For this night only, the drive-in had returned to Hampton Roads. “You forget just how much fun it was,” said Wendi Mitchell, 61, of Norfolk, who arrived with her husband Don a few minutes before the show.
It had been 20 years since the last outdoor screen in Hampton Roads, Cinema City in Tabb, went dark. There is a Walmart on that site now. Bob Deutsch, owner of Outdoor Movies in Rockville, Maryland, arrived at the Khedive Shrine Center off Woodlake Drive in Chesapeake with a truck holding everything but the concession stand. He placed a 40-by-20-foot inflatable screen at the far end of the field, plugged in a blower, staked it down, and had it ready in well under an hour. A digital projector capable of throwing an image across a football field broadcast the audio as an FM signal so car radios could tune in; no speaker poles were needed — though some nostalgic attendees brought their own, wired to their radios for that authentic scratchy sound. Deutsch has been in the drive-in business for 12 years and carries 30 inflatable screens; his largest is 133 feet wide and weighs more than 2 tons.
The event was a fundraiser for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and the Khedive Shrine Center Transportation Fund. Admission was $25 per car, no matter how many you tried to hide in the trunk. About 50 classic cars showed up: ‘57 Chevy Bel Airs and Nomads parked beside hot-rodded Fords and a ‘57 Dodge Coronet with tail fins that seemed six feet long. The champion for efficiency was a 1938 Packard hearse in which Ed and Remona Murmillo packed nine people.
Will Reha, 57, of Virginia Beach, spread a quilt in the cargo bay of his 1957 Chevy Nomad wagon and lay down while waiting for dark. “I just went back 50 years,” he said, laughing. “I should have showed up in my pajamas.” A few cars over, Andrea Frost and her brother Grant Waterfield were in a ‘55 Chevy Bel Air Station Wagon — the one with seat belts, because Grant’s son Wyatt, 11, was along. “We used to have our blankets and got to carry our pillows,” Andrea recalled. “I was in my footsie pajamas, and Daddy used to tell us to go to sleep.”
The feature was, fittingly, American Graffiti, preceded by a Readers Digest programme on “The Fabulous 50s.” As the film wound down, Chester Reha, 5, climbed beside his father in the back of the Nomad and arranged his pillows. There may have been only a handful of children at the drive-in that night — but oh so many who seemed to become young again, if only briefly.