The DRIVE-IN just got real!

Testing "Jaws" in the parking lot: 'I need something in the foreground to give it some scale!'

Well, folks, it’s here. After months of scrimping and saving and cultivating, the Midnight Citizen Drive-in is ready to go. Who wants in?

What is The Midnight Citizen Drive-in, you ask? Friend, I ask you, what isn’t this amazing project, and what can’t it offer the lonely heart movie fan, desperate to escape the ear-blasting, antiseptic environment of the overcrowded Megaplex and all its seat-kicking pre-teens in Team Edward t-shirts?

At its heart, the Midnight Citizen Drive-in is a return-to-form, outdoor guerilla theater that I’ve rigged together with some practical technology and elbow grease. Using a mega-huge marine battery and AC to DC inverter, I plug in the powerful Epson MovieMate 62 video projector, and just park my car in front of a wall. Then, I snap in the nifty FM Transmitter with nearly a quarter mile of range and – VOILA! All you guys have to do is pull up, tune in, and relax nicely to a movie under the stars. 

The Hardware

I’ll spare you the near-one year of drama and heartache that it’s taken to get to this point – wherein I can confidently announce that we are ready to have our first screening of hopefully many.

Of course, it is hard to believe that it has almost been an entire Earth year since my girlfriend Jessica first showed me the Instructable of how to put all this together, and I said, “Hey, that’d be fun.”  Now that I’ve ordered, paid for and tested all the equipment, secured a venue, and performed the obligatory celebration dance (I did this dance in private, of course, and it is the only step of this long and drawn-out process that I will not be posting either a video or image of on this blog), I’d like to start bringing all of you down the rabbit hole with me, and hopefully locate a cult(ure) of folks who understand – as deeply as I do – the simple pleasure of watching a good movie outdoors.

 

In case you didn’t bother to click the hyperlink above entitled “Instructable”, let me just tell you that this whole idea began as a germ of interest one day last summer while Jessica and I were mindlessly cruising the Internet in one of our many prolonged fits of waddle some sloth indoors, hiding from the brutal, wet Alabama heat. In fact, this experiment in stripped-down movie going originated in California in 2005. “MobMov” (also the title of Midnight Citizen episode #48 where I officially proposed this idea for Birmingham folks) was started by College Student Bryan Kennedy, who thought it was a good idea to take all his expensive electronics out to an abandoned parking lot on the grungy side of town after hours, and invite all his friends to come watch a flick projected onto a blank brick wall. 

 

Why he thought this potentially dangerous idea was valid and didn’t disregard it upon initial inspection is beyond me, especially since I immediately agreed with his logic. In short, the experiment quickly became a small-time phenomenon, earning Kennedy plenty of followers and a featured spot on the local news. The event went onto become a movement, inspiring hundreds of MobMov chapters around the globe, and eventually ending up here in Birmingham, Alabama in the summer of 2012. Hey, that’s now!

I’m not sure about you, but to me, the idea makes perfect sense for our fair city – and, hell, the whole darn state as well. Sure, the business of using a projector to watch a movie outside is not such a new one here, and it has certainly been done with better equipment and organizational gusto. Free Friday Flicks in Homewood Park is practically a Birmingham institution, and the new Railroad Park near UAB has “Sunset Cinema”, which has kept me busy in the past with shows like Clue. But the problem here is that the programming is limited and overwhelmingly made for the family-friendly crowd – those folks who mean well, but only go as an alternative to watching the kids pick up and lick any household object they can get their hands on. Even the historic Alabama Theater –  where you could usually find me every Saturday night during the summer from my junior year in high school up until just recently – has compressed their traditions, and this summer, their choices are modest at worst, complete with a Mamma Mia sing-along and not one, but TWO showings of Gone with the Wind.

No, the objective of The Midnight Citizen Drive-in is to really embrace a different kind of way of watching movies, and to not just create the same ole cream and sugar experience of flocking to a park and watching an old movie simply because it is the summer in Birmingham and that’s just what you do. With this project, you can pull up, and – either from the privacy of your own car over your own FM radio band, or gathering with a bunch of people in lawn chairs just outside the door and around a communal radio – enjoy an Au naturale, coffee black flick, perhaps off-the-beaten-trail, and not the kind generally served up to you with a bib and pacifier. In truth, it’ll be just like the Drive-in days of yore, but hopefully without all the backseat pregnancies.  

I really want to make it clear that The Midnight Citizen Drive-in is in no way an intentional stab at pointless nostalgia, although I guess it’s effortlessly in the right spirit. Because of the so-called “hipster” culture that’s permeated the web lately in both dead-on and erroneous form, Nostalgia itself has become a four-letter word, and even though I’m not trying to drum up the old ways of outdoor cinema, I am not going to deny a bit of remorse that it is an art form that has effectively eluded the lifestyle of just about anyone under forty – almost as much as, say, the white wall tire or ten cent Coke with ice. Sure, drive-in’s still exist, and for the same reasons that they used to flourish: the ones that are still open are all out in the country, far from the nearest Megaplex, and they remain there for practical reasons – so that their customers will not have to drive a hundred mile round trip after work. Of course the kind of fare they offer now is distinguishable from what it was like in the heyday of the drive-in; where they used to project onto their white screens any print of a B-picture deemed too bad/horrific/gory/disgusting/out-there and generally perturbing for air conditioning, they now are suited to showing buttery family gook they know will not offend even the most repressed of rural pearl-clutchers.

I still have never been to a drive-in theater. I was born in 1982, when the drive-in was about as dead as Sonny Corleone after being pumped full of mafia vengeance on the causeway in The Godfather. But that’s not to say I haven’t paid careful attention to the death rattle throughout most of my life, and just like Sonny – if you’ll allow me to extend my metaphor – the drive-in refuses to lie down. And even with relentless disappointment – week-after-week, checking the listings, only to see Despicable Me or Kung Fu Panda in its second or even fourth run at the same venue – I still refuse to believe that there can never be another day when I may pull up in the grass and enjoy a true drive-in movie in its intended arena. 

Nevertheless, I’m getting a little impatient. And, so, with that thinking, I give you The Midnight Citizen Drive-in. It may not be the real deal, but just think of it as an old tradition continuing in new form. And did I mention it’s free, too?