Austin Powers wasn’t the only one time traveling last week at the McHenry Outdoor Theatre. Turn into the dusty driveway just north of Route 120, hand a five-dollar bill to the girl in the glass booth, and roll up to a speaker pole in front of the big screen (try to find one that works). Before you can say “Ivana Humpalot,” it’s 1969. Well, 1969 on life support. The plug was pulled on a sister screen in Grayslake before the season opened this spring. It looks like the McHenry, the last outdoor movie theater in the north and northwest suburbs, could follow anytime, though owner Tom Rhyan says there’s “no reason [and no plans] to change it right now.”
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Rhyan says business is double what it was last year, with many of the Grayslake customers “moving over,” but on a muggy Tuesday with a threat of rain there were only 25 cars in the lot. Green minivans and little red coupes full of teens ready to party crunched across the gravel and hunkered down, waiting for darkness to fall. The vans parked backward, spilling kids and coolers out of rear doors. Lawn chairs were popped open, blankets spread facing the screen. The snack stand, a white concrete bunker, did a dreary business in popcorn and soda at megaplex prices. At 8:30, when the show started, the sky was still lighter than the screen and Powers was as faint as a vapor trail. When the horizon finally darkened, about the time he met up with Ms. Spits or Swallows, the mosquitoes came out to dine.
If you were a teenager, no matter what was showing, the drive-in was a good place to learn about sex. But more than that, drive-ins were about romance–the love affairs Americans had with their Chevys and Oldsmobiles that made them want to experience life from behind the wheel. The theaters’ prognosis in the age of the virtual highway looks grim. Drive-in restaurants have given way to drive-throughs, and if we want a little privacy while we watch movies there’s a VCR in the bedroom. But the biggest factor is rising land values. “They sat out there in cornfields,” says Bill Benedict, an archivist for the Theatre Historical Society of America. “Now they’re engulfed by suburban sprawl.” The hulking carcass of the Grayslake Outdoor, for example, will soon make way for a shopping center. According to Theatre Society records, more than 40 drive-in theaters were built in the greater Chicago area. Only six are still operating: the Hi-Lite in Montgomery, the Cascade in West Chicago, the Bel-Air in Cicero, the Hilltop in Joliet, the Cicero Twin in University Park, and the McHenry.
