1933: A New Jersey Entrepreneur Finds a Way to Combine Automobiles with Movies

June 6, 1933

The first open air drive-in movie theater opened on Crescent Boulevard in Camden, New Jersey. Richard M. Hollingshead (1899-1975), finding a new way to use the “horseless carriage,” worked out the details for that theater by experimenting with the setup in his own driveway.

One major challenge involved the automobiles that would pull into the theater. It dawned on Hollingshead that if the automobiles were parked behind each other, then those in the rear would not be able to see the full movie on the big screen. To help remedy this, he toyed around with spacing automobiles in his driveway at various distances and placing blocks under the front tires. All of this enabled Hollingshead to calculate the correct spacing between automobiles and which angles to use for ramps that would raise the front tires. Consequently, the new theater had seven rows for vehicles and ramps graded to five percent.

The theater was designed to accommodate up to 400 vehicles at one time. The aisles there were 50 feet (15.2 meters) wide, with the projection booth in the center of the front row. In addition, the theater had one ticket booth, an entry gate and exit that were each floodlighted, a 60-foot (18.3-meter)-tall screen set on a stage, and sound provided by strategically placed air horns. (The above photo of this theater was published in the August 1933 issue of Electronics magazine.)

Admission was 25 cents each for both automobiles and people (with a maximum of a dollar for the latter when there was a group traveling together in one vehicle). Several attendants directed traffic.

Hollingshead’s idea for combining automobiles and movies caught on slowly, with only 52 drive-in theaters nationwide about a decade later. That number rose dramatically after World War II, however, with at least 1,000 of those theaters in existence by 1949. Incidentally, the movie shown on that opening night in Camden was a box-office failure billed as Wives Beware and starring Adolphe Menjou (1890-1963).

Photo Credit: Public Domain

Additional information on Richard M. Hollingshead and the first open air drive-in movie theater is available at Richard Hollingshead – Wikipedia and The History of the Drive-In Movie Theater | Arts & Culture| Smithsonian Magazine