I'm McGerris and this is post-mortem. The drive-in theater is now a state of mind,

trapped in the ozone of the past. It's more a genre than a physical entity these days.

We are a far cry from the heyday of open-air big sky poetry of watching movies from your car under a blanket of stars.

Now to quote this week's guest, it's all indoor bull stuff. The sensibility of the driving is still there and it is a kissing cousin of the also late and lamented grind house.

Taudry films were on display there,

disreputable stuff that wasn't allowed

to sully the movie palaces in the polite parts of town.

The drive-in was where you went to see something you couldn't see on

television or at the Biju. It was where you took a date to make out in some

semblance of privacy, but it was also a place where filmmakers with more ideas than dollars could sell their wares and find screens for their celluloid children.

The drive-in was very much a part of my youth.

In fact, I remember clearly being in the back of our

family's 1957 Chevy Station wagon to see Psycho and the impact that it had. My two

brothers and my sister, as well as my parents who dispensed homemade popcorn from the front seat,

were taken in shock by the unexpected dispensed before us. A family of six could go to the movies

for the price of a single ticket in the downtown cinema,

and you could even sneak in a couple extra teenagers in the trunk.

When the drive-in theater began in its fully realized form in New Jersey in 1933.

No one had expected it to become a passion pit

or to be the screens that gave rise to the AIPs and New World Cinemas of the world,

let alone the only place you could see movies, surely not films,

by Ray Dennis Steckler Herschel Gordon Lewis and the seedier side of life on the big screen. Now the drive-in lives on in a streaming world where

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