Wimberly, Texas: Outdoor Movies at Corral Open-Air Movie Theater in Wimberly, Texas
On summer evenings in Wimberley, Texas, two moons rise over the Corral Theatre: one on the screen, and one in the sky above it. The open-air Corral has been operating since 1948, showing outdoor movies on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evenings from Memorial Day through Labor Day. There is no ceiling — just the big Texas night sky and all the stars that come with it.
The theater keeps things simple. Cedar stockade fence walls about eight feet tall. Grass alternating with hard-packed dirt. Metal and plastic lawn chairs, some decades old. A Masonite screen painted white. Concession items priced at 75 cents or less. Tickets are $3. Most people bring blankets and coolers, pick up food from the local Dairy Queen, and settle in. Shows don’t start until after dark — past 9 p.m. in summer — and many regulars have already seen the film. “I’ve already seen the movie,” says Mary Ann DeLeon, who has come to the Corral faithfully since she moved to Wimberley as a child 31 years ago. “I just like the open-air cinema atmosphere and all the friends you see here.” For Jurassic Park, the Corral sold 500 tickets a night over three nights.
Twin brothers Roy and Ray Avey founded the theater in 1948. Wimberley then had about 300 people in the whole community, so they built the distinctive stockade fence from cedar slabs hauled in from a Bastrop sawmill — an enclosed theater was out of the question financially. Original admission: 9 cents for children, 24 cents for adults (just below the tax threshold). Popcorn was 10 cents for a large bag; sodas a nickel. By the mid-1960s the brothers sold to Carol “Mama” Knolk, who ran the Rocky River Ranch summer camp for girls on whose grounds the theater now sits. Knolk declared it would show only family films — “no sex or monsters” — and introduced the mid-show prize drawing the current owner, Mary “Skeet” Anderson, continues today. Anderson bought the ranch and kept the theater going after Knolk died. “I thought it was something Wimberley needed,” she says. “It would be a shame to shut it down.”
Memorable evenings at the Corral include the night the horses in the adjacent pasture heard The Man From Snowy River and stampeded back and forth along the fence; the night a skunk wandered into the concession booth and cleared out the teenage staff; and a Halloween when Roy Avey built a bonfire on the dirt floor while the movie played. “The ghost from the projector was flickering through the smoke from the fire,” he recalls, “and it was really effective.”
“These kids are going to remember this the rest of their lives,” says Wimberley dad Gary Fine. “When they get together in their 20s and 30s, they’re going to say, ‘Remember that theater we used to go to outside?’ It’s building traditions.”