Check in to this motel to watch drive-in movies
By DOUGLAS BROWN
Aug. 4, 2004
Shaun Stanley / Denver Post
One Borger, Texas, family looks through a motel room's window to watch a drive-in movie screen.
MONTE VISTA, Colo. -- We watched Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban from chairs and a bed, three of us lined up along a motel-room picture window, a fat, bright moon hanging above the movie screen.
This could likely happen in only one place in the world: the Best Western Movie Manor Motor Inn.
For 40 years, people have been driving to this tiny town in south-central Colorado's mountain-ringed San Luis Valley to check into George Kelloff's motel, where the rooms face an outdoor drive-in movie screen, and where sound is piped inside from speakers on a wall.
Every night in the summer, Kelloff shows pictures on his two screens, one for Movie Manor customers, the other angled away from the two-story bank of motel windows and meant for the Star Drive-In Theatre crowd. The screens run different films.
Watching outdoor movies from within a motel room is much more entertaining than I had imagined.
For one thing, there's the beer: You bring it, and the cooler, and the motel supplies the ice.
More important, there's Kelloff, the 83-year-old Colorado native of Lebanese descent, who lives in the hand-built ranch house beside the concession building, both structures sitting smack between the motel picture windows and the movie screen. From a room in Kelloff's house, he fits truck-tire-sized platters of film onto reels, pushes a button and starts the movies.
Kelloff, a compact man with large glasses and white hair swept back from his forehead in the manner of a movie mobster, still sells drive-in tickets himself from a booth. He flicks the lights on the playground beneath the main screen to shoo the kids before starting the movie. In the morning, he greets guests at the motel restaurant, where tall cowboys in black hats and leather vests come to eat huevos rancheros and kibbee sausage, a twist on the Lebanese concoction of bulgur wheat, ground beef and spices.
The Movie Manor has personality; it has Kelloff's innocent enthusiasm for films, particularly those of the PG variety. And movie kitsch is sprinkled everywhere.
The Movie Manor was Kelloff's dream in the early 1960s, when he lived in the house and owned and operated the drive-in. His in-laws would visit the small house, and he and his wife would sleep in the kitchen -- the room with the picture window facing the movie screen. One night in the kitchen, Kelloff told his wife, "By God, I'm going to build a motel like this."
"My wife said, 'You're nuts.' "
Now, the theater lives in part because of the motel, which brings in enough extra revenue to keep the movies flickering on his silver screen.
The motel sits just outside of Monte Vista, an agricultural town of about 5,000 people at 7,666 feet elevation. The views from the motel are uncluttered. You see mountains in the distance.
The names of movie stars grace the doors of every room. We unloaded our bags in the Yul Brynner room, plopped down on the beds, turned on the television, and there he sat, Yul Brynner, talking to an interviewer in an old clip.
Across a parking lot, the sidewalk in front of the motel restaurant is full of the names of movie personalities -- Clint Eastwood, Jerry Lewis, Gene Autry -- etched in the concrete, as if the stars themselves had scrawled graffiti in wet cement. Inside, etchings of John Wayne, Frank Sinatra and other stars pepper the walls, and the restrooms are labeled "actors" and "actresses."
Movies are shown May through September. Call 800-771-9468; access www.bestwestern.com. Area tourism information is at www.monte-vista.org.
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