Coming soon: the digital drive-in movie theater
The owners of the 406 surviving drive-in theaters in the US have long memories: They can recall 10-cent Cokes, B-movies like ``I Was a Teenage Frankenstein," and tail-finned Cadillacs driving off with the speaker still clipped to the window.
And many use the same equipment from the golden age of the double feature: At the Wellfleet Drive-In, for example, the original projector from 1957 is still switched on every summer evening.
The country's remaining drive-ins, including five in Massachusetts, have managed to endure the onslaught of television, the multiplex, and the VCR, as well as the rising real estate values that can make selling the land beneath a drive-in irresistible. But the newest concern among drive-in owners is the advent of digital projection and the predicted obsolescence of celluloid.
``I would not want to bet my business on the ability to keep obtaining 35-millimeter film prints into the future," says John Vincent, one of the owners in Wellfleet. ``We've taken a keen interest in digital projection because we want to be around for the next 50 years or so."
Hollywood studios have been talking about a filmless future since at least 1999, when movies like ``Tarzan" and ``Star Wars: Episode I" were shown digitally in several indoor theaters. If the studios could send movies to a projection booth in digital form, either via satellite or on hard drives, they could avoid producing hundreds or thousands of celluloid copies when a movie is released, shipping them around the country, and then collecting and destroying them afterward.
Digital distribution would save the studios millions in distribution costs each year, but it requires theaters to install a digital projector and related gear in the projection booth. Until recently, the technology had only been tested and installed in indoor theaters -- not ``ozoners," as the Hollywood trade paper Variety has dubbed drive-ins.
That situation got some drive-in owners thinking back to an earlier transition in the movie business, when theaters first installed sound equipment in the late 1920s. Thousands of theaters that couldn't pay for the equipment, or didn't move fast enough, went out of business.
``We don't want to see any drive-in theaters become victims of the digital transition," says Rick Cohen, owner of the Transit Drive-In in Lockport, N.Y., near Buffalo. ``But because we're not a big segment of the movie exhibition industry, we're not the number one concern of the companies making digital projectors or servers," the computers that store the digital version of a movie.
Of the estimated 36,000 movie screens nationwide, just 657 are outdoors . At a trade show last fall, Cohen got the attention of one manufacturer of digital projectors, NEC Corp., suggesting that the company demonstrate one of its projectors at his drive-in.
``To be honest, I had kind of written off drive-ins," says Terry Westhafer, a consultant who works with NEC to develop relationships with theater owners. ``I figured they'd stay around until film died, and then have swap meets."
But the more Westhafer learned, the more she was convinced that drive-ins could represent a viable market segment. Since the 1990s, 36 drive-ins have been built, and 60 shuttered drive-ins have reopened. (While the number of drive-ins is still in decline, there has been a small uptick over the past three years, according to the United Drive-In Theater Owners Association, but their numbers remain far from a peak of about 4,000 in 1958.)
And drive-ins have always had trouble getting a bright enough image on the screen, since if the projector's bulb is too bright, it can burn through the film; NEC boasts of having the brightest digital projector available.
Earlier this month, about 100 members of the drive-in theaters group gathered at the Transit Drive-In for what Cohen and others believe was the first demonstration of digital projection at a drive-in. They watched ``The Chronicles of Narnia," preceded by some vintage material that had been digitized, including the memorable animated dancing hot dog that entices the audience to visit the concession stand.
``With any mechanical projection system, a shaky image is sort of inevitable," says Wellfleet Drive-In's Vincent, who chairs the digital cinema committee established by the owners' association. ``But digital is rock solid."
Digital projection could also increase the revenue that drive-in owners earn from advertising shown before the movie, or between the halves of a double feature.
But digital cinema comes with a jumbo-sized price tag. The NEC projector alone costs between $90,000 and $100,000, though the price is expected to drop as sales volume grows. Cohen and other drive-in owners, like their counterparts at indoor cinemas, aren't eager to foot the cost of the equipment on their own, since its installation will in large part benefit the studios by lowering distribution costs.
Several companies, including Technicolor and a New Jersey company called AccessIT, are offering to finance the digital projection equipment for indoor theaters, limiting their outlay by charging the studios a fee each time the studios send out a digital release. But those companies haven't begun serious discussions with drive-in owners.
``The target that everyone is going for are the large-grossing indoor theaters, where you can get the most bang for the buck," says Russell Wintner, an executive at AccessIT. (Wintner, one of the pioneers of digital cinema, also happens to own a single drive-in in Cleveland.) In Wellfleet, Vincent says he doesn't think he'll be replacing his 50-year-old projector with a digital model this summer or in 2007, but perhaps by 2008. If enough of his peers follow suit, the ozoner, long on the endangered list of roadside Americana, will have miraculously outlived film.
Scott Kirsner is a freelance writer in San Francisco who maintains a blog on entertainment and technology, cinematech.blogspot.com. He can be reached at kirsner@pobox.com. 
