The old projectors were built like tanks and many of those from the early 1930s (when drive-ins began) are still up and running. “The booth that ours came in has graffiti on it talking about when Kennedy was shot, so it probably goes back to at least the 1960s,” Javener says. He says when he built his theater, he thought he had a fun and relatively profitable business that would last forever. Unfortunately, the combination of an inferior economy and superior technology may leave him with a theater that only lived for a few years.
Up in Canada, drive-in owner Keith Stata also saw an indestructible projector and a theater that’s been in a holding pattern for decades and figured he had a good investment on his hands. He figured wrong.
Note jet flying into a skyscraper in the film-within-the-film:
