Like baseball, drive-ins are a "Field of Dreams". Best of luck in your venture, and I hope "If you build it, they will come."

------------------
John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Eastman Kodak Company
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7419
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: 716-477-5325 Fax: 716-722-7243
E-Mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com

Drive-In
Sun at 3 PM calling, get your work done.
Sun at 4 PM the evening will soon be here.
Sun at 5 PM time to finish, eat, get ready.

A drive with windows down, air thickening on my left arm,
sun in the eyes, a last warning.
Time to arrive.

The gate locked and alone
the screen towering above with anticipation.
The marquee waiting
for the dusk
and switch
and power
and greeting to all the drivers, customers.

Inside
a circuit breaker panel calls
click, click, click, ca-chunk click.

A tape player starts,
the echos of music in a field of
speaker speaker speaker
speaker speaker speaker
speaker speaker speaker
speaker speaker speaker

beginning Scyllas call.

Fryolator
clunking, bubbling, coming up to heat
soon french fries with vinegar and salt.

A griddle, clean and slick with layer of fat
to protect
melting, heating, exciting.

waiting for the taste of hamburger
the smell of onion out the vents to the cooling air.

Popcorn popper turning heating clicking, wanting
waiting for the first splash of oil
the first charge
of corn

satiation,

ahh, popcorn, time to cook
the smearing of oil
and a pop
another...
and another... another...
a cascade of poppity poppity poppity
crescendo
fortissimo
double fortissimo

Hi!
How are you, ready to go to work?
Oh God, what a wonderful night I want it to last forever.

A kiss of understanding
A joy of life

a drive in soon to open but not yet,
the corn, the fries, the hot dogs, the hamburgers
must be ready
the music must be perfect

Hi!
a cashier waiting to sit
in a little box no larger than a shoe
and admit people to paradise

where the ramp man rolls the burner around the lot and
picks up a few bits from last night and checks

the speakers to make sure they work
bagging those that don't so
each ramp is perfect.

Hamburgers meet buns
Fries hit oil
Popcorn tumbles
The audience arrives
the sky dims, darkens

more cars, more cares left at the ticket booth

A screen that shields the sun
begins to take ominous shape
The squishhhhh of the first arc
carbon bright, carbon night
first carbon I strike tonight
Are you enough?

Will you overpower the last rays of the sun?
Is it time for this day to be done/begin
whirrrrrrrrrrrrr

The blare of a horn. No.
Too early. Time to enjoy the dusk
buy pic
listen to music and
Coke and corn and hot dog and mustard and ketchup and relishing
every moment, every movement of the last clouds
glowing with life in the last hour before

the first cartoon
a carton of laughs, the same every night to begin the countdown until
Squishhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh the next carbon
The first movie begins.
Trumpets blare, speakers resonate.
The popcorn machine goes silent.

Wandering back to cars,
customers entranced by 90 feet of white plywood covered with moving light.

It's been thirty years since my days in a drive-in booth, but your great poem brings it back like it was yesterday. This work of art needs to be published elsewhere too.

Would you mind if I submitted it to the editor of Kodak's Cinema Notes?

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I used to be a virgin too!

"All I needed to know, I learned at a drive-in".

Sorry, labs usually need to charge over $1 per foot for this type of custom work. The 5272 internegative stock alone is about $0.65 per foot. Plus the cost of making a new sound negative.

Why not strike a deal with Derek Maxwell for him to use your originals to make prints for sale in his catalog?

------------------
John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Eastman Kodak Company
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7419
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: 716-477-5325 Fax: 716-722-7243
E-Mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com

Surprisingly, since I was doing pro photography during the time I worked the Mt. View D.I., I never took photos at any drive ins, except for a few daytime shots of the one I trained at in Norwalk, CT.

Anyway, I'm glad I was able to bring those memories back for you. Thanks for the kind words.

I don't want to give the impression I'm being nit-picky or overblown here, it is just that I have a lot of other poetry and short stories that I plan on publishing some day, so I do want to keep clear title and I don't want the wider audience pulled out from under me, and I have to say this to protect myself.

BTW, the poem is meant to have the phrase-

speaker speaker speaker
speaker speaker speaker
speaker speaker speaker
speaker speaker speaker

with each row of speakers in slightly smaller type, to better give the feel of the echos from an empty field of speakers.

Before long I began to appreciate all that went with the place, the ramp tramps, daylight saving where you did not finish until 2.00am, cars spinning their wheels, patrons peering in the open projection room door on hot nights, hamburgers, steak sandwiches, the manager yelling on the squawk box to hold the 2nd feature - the snack bar is still full, watching 900 cars snake down the road as far as i could see...........

the more I write, the more that comes back to me. The Victoria 8, Ashcraft Core-lite, Norelco AAII, RCA and Brady speakers, calling the motor and changeover cues and that "thwack" as the changeover was hit. Trying to run a print of Flesh Gordon with only one side of the sprocket holes in existance.

The Hoyts Skyline drive-in circuit once spread across the country yet ended abruptly in 1991 with a rapid succession of closures and buy-outs.

David