Drive-Ins Are Back, but It’s a Secret

The drive-in-movie theater celebrated its 75th anniversary last year. As the story goes, Richard Hollingshead Jr. experimented with the format in 1933 by showing movies in his driveway in Riverton, N.J. He hung a bed sheet between two trees and placed a Kodak film projector on the roof of his car.

After a rise in popularity through the 1950s, interest in the drive-in theater steadily waned (there aren’t any left in the New York metropolitan area). But over the past few years a new style of drive-in has cropped up, aided in part by the increased use (and the drop in price) of digital projectors, and it’s not too different from Hollingshead’s early experiments.

They’re called “guerilla drive-ins,” or mobile movies, because there is no permanent theater. Organizers screen the movies on warehouse walls and in parking lots. And screenings don’t usually take place in the same location twice. Viewers sign up for a service that e-mails them with the time and location a few days ahead of each screening. The movies are generally free, and organizers accept donations to fund the few hundred dollars it takes to secure the location and projector.

Bryan Kennedy, 28, an iPhone developer in San Francisco, runs MobMov.org a site that lists more than 240 guerilla drive-in chapters around the world.

He started MobMov in 2005 while a student at University of California, Berkeley. Using a digital projector he had just bought for his home and an inexpensive FM transmitter to send the sound to a car’s stereo, he showed “The Graduate” with no ambitions of grandeur.

“It was very organic,” he said. “There were three cars at the first show. Then some people said I should come up with a name and a Web site. And then random people started calling me about the next screening.”

Eric Kurland was one of those random people. “He lived in L.A. and asked if I was set up to do chapters in different cities,” Mr. Kennedy said. All of a sudden, the Hollywood chapter of MobMov was born. Today, Mr. Kennedy’s site includes a tutorial on how enterprising people can start their own MobMov: how to set up an outdoor theater, what to look for in a digital projector, how to hook up a projector to a car, where to buy an FM transmitter, legal issues and more.

The roots of the guerilla drive-in movement has been traced to Santa Cruz, Calif., where Wes Modes started a collective to screen outdoor movies around 2001.

A Times story from 2004 described a very renegade process with primitive equipment and little regard for the law. In those early days, the Santa Cruz Guerilla Drive-In trespassed on property — looking out for police — and did not secure rights to show the movies.

“It was definitely an inspiration,” Mr. Kennedy said. “It was the name — guerilla drive-in — that really inspired this.”

Mr. Kennedy went to one of the Santa Cruz Guerilla Drive-Ins before starting MobMov. “It’s really cool. You know you sit on the grass and watch a movie outdoors,” he said. He also explained that what he wanted to create was a more authentic drive-in experience (i.e., watching movies from inside a car), though he had never been to one himself.

“Drive-ins are interesting because it’s a customizable experience,” he explained. “You can bring your kid, who may spend the entire time crying in the back seat, but that’s fine — you roll up your window. Or you can roll down your windows and interact with the other people. It’s up to you.”

Every MobMov screening has an intermission, during which audience members can interact, which Mr. Kennedy said, is his favorite part of MobMov.

Last weekend, MobMov showed “The Sting,” the 1973 classic with Paul Newman and Robert Redford. It was projected against the wall of a hangar on a decommissioned military base on San Francisco’s Treasure Island to an audience of around 50 cars, Mr. Kennedy said.

He expected to show a movie every other week — workload permitting — and has upgraded his equipment considerably since that first screening in 2005. But he still doesn’t charge a fee. He has tried to come up with a business plan to monetize the growth of the MobMov movement, but he hasn’t figured out a way to accommodate profits with the good-natured vibe of the experience. “Nothing seems to fit,” he said. At least it doesn’t cost much to put on.

“My biggest expenses are the movie licensing fees,” he said. “And I rent a car to run the projector. I live in the city so I don’t have a car.”