There's a screen in West Virginia for sale on ebay right now. It's item # 442180868
Stephen
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I've also had the rather depressing job of dismantling a drive-in (with Gordon and former owner). I went up looking for concession equipment and left with the whole thing. Nothing as sad as an overgrown drive-in theatre. You can almost see the fun that was had there, and now gone forever. My only motivation and hope in buying this stuff is to maybe "save it's soul" in some way and use it again at my own drive-in.
Now, if I can only convince my wife that it really would look okay right here in the back yard!
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Dave Bird
I've posted the sad news to the "drive-in list". Does anyone know where the 7 open Montana DI's are?
I have visited over 200 drive-ins in my lifetime (USA and Australia) the ones that close fall into the following catagories:
1. Big circuit sell to realise land value and put $ into an indoor multiplex - often operating profitably at closure.
2. Old Bill & Norma who have run it the same way for 40 years & finally run out of puff.
3. Single screener, can't book the right product, sells lousy food and don't know what the term "customer service" even means let alone marketing sell to meagstore developer.
Now picture the drive-ins that run today and will continue to do so:
1.Multi screens with 1st run product,
2.Know the market and where it comes from,
3.Networks with fellow drive-in operators and watches the indoor competition like a hawk,
4.Quality food, friendly staff that are a mix of youth AND experience,
5.Combine the best of old drive-in showmanship eg intermission clocks, speakers on posts, flashy roadsign,
6. Quality presentation with a BRIGHT picture no larger than 80ft wide that is 10 footlamberts not 3 footlamberts, Dolby stereo processors, platter and definitely no carbons!
7. Let the market know you are a drive-in that is still open - you would be amazed how many people think they are all gone when one may be close by but no longer on that major Hwy.
Follow these rules and you have a better than average shot of a very successful theatre business for the long term.
See how the good ones do it today at:
www.drive-insdownunder.com.au
David
One of Wesley Trout's articles advised projectionists to be sure to take pictures of a brand-new Drive-In before the first car drives in. Never again, he advised, will the speaker posts be so straight, the paint so new, the speaker cords so straight....
Now we have come to the point of history where most Drive-Ins are closed, or at the point of doing so.
It is an emotional experience, to walk the field of a closed Drive-In, one in which you have worked the booth, especially near dusk.
You can almost hear the sound of car horns, the rush of the concession staff to get ready for intemission, and, as you enter the booth, the whinning of the arc-feed motors.
You feel tempted to appproach where the sound rack used to be, to announce one last time that "The concession stand will be closing in ten minutes.."
I wonder if, in the future, I shall feel such foolish sentimentality about the mega-booths of today.
, and fondly remember and shed a tear for the ones that have become shopping malls and parking lots. 
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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
Rick, how did they know that they'd found the most important point in the dialogue to announce "Attention, the snack bar will be closing in 15 minutes."? And we're they plugging their nose when they said it, or was it just a really old mic? 
When I purchased the projection equipment from the defunct "Woodzo Drive-In" in Newport, Tennessee, the theatre had been closed for over a year but when you walked in the door to the concessions/projection building everything was there waiting for the next show. There was still food in the concessions stand (i.e. 14 month old Nacho Cheese - still in the warmer), and trailers still threaded on the platter. It looked like they just walked out and and never came back.
By the time we had finished loading the equipment into the truck, dusk had fallen over the lot. The massive 104' concrete screen stood silently across the field - it seemed to know it would never see another film projected across it's face.
I imagined what it would have been like to see the lot filled with cars and children playing on the lawn beneath the screen. Like Rick said... if you listen closely.. you could hear them.
Now months later, I'm faced with the decision to sell my home, move my family to the middle of "B.F.E." nowhere, and take a $300,000.00 gamble, to show movies in the middle of a corn field - hoping the patrons will come.
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."
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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.
The drive-in has started. We are here. Now. A cooling night.
Hot carbon. Hot popcorn. Sweaty palms not knowing where to go
while the sweet smelling stranger has invaded the car.
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?
------------------
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
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?
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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.
And now, intermission.......refresment time.
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Dave Bird
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.
Again, thanks for the kind words. I think most of us that worked at drive-ins found them the best jobs we could ever dream of having.
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