This Newberg drive-in is celebrating 70 years of movies in Oregon

Opened in August 1953, the 99W Drive-In Theater has been delivering nostalgia and fond memories to Oregonians for nearly 70 years. Over the years Oregon has been home to nearly 50 drive-in theaters, but now less than a handful remain. Michael Aronson is the co-director of the Oregon Theater Project and an associate professor of cinema studies at the University of Oregon. Brian Francis is the owner and operator of the family-owned business, 99W Drive-In. They both join us now to share the story of the Newberg-based theater and the history these kinds of cinemas have in the state.

Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Oregon was once home to about 50 drive-in movie theaters. Only a handful remain. That includes the 99W Drive-In movie theater, which opened in Newberg in August of 1953. It is still going 70 years later. Brian Francis is the owner and operator of this family business. Michael Aronson is the co-director of the Oregon Theater Project and an associate professor of cinema studies at the University of Oregon. They join us now to talk about the lure and the history of drive-ins. It’s great to have both of you on the show.

Michael Aronson: Thanks for having us.

Brian Francis: Thank you for having us on.

Miller: Brian, who started the 99W?

Francis: It was the mood in the air with the exhibitors to do something after the war, and in the trade publications such as Box Office magazine, the new hot thing was drive-in movie theaters. After the war, it was okay to go out and do things again, drive around in your car and wear down your tires and that kind of stuff. This technology was kind of put on hold during the war years. For the drive-in it was unleashed then, and so it became a popular thing to build. A lot of them were built in the later ‘40s, ‘48 was a great year. Then in 1953 is when the 99W Drive-In opened.

Miller: And who built it?

Francis: J.T. (Ted) Francis, my grandfather.

Miller: Did he have a background in movie theaters already?

Francis: Well, he has a background, and he has one in movie theaters too. He was born in 1900, so it was always easy to remember his age. He lived until he was 98 and a half, about the time ‘Star Wars: [Episode I] - The Phantom Menace’

came into theaters.

Miller: [laughing] That’s how you chart years, is movies.

Francis: Yes, I can do that. That’s one way to remember things. So… he was born in Southern Oregon, down near Drain, Yoncalla, and in Milwaukie, one time just for something to do - He dropped out of high school because of World War I because his older brother went over to be a doughboy, so he was taking care of the farm. But when World War I was over, his brother survived, and he was kind of like, ‘Well, the farm goes back to the oldest son.’ So he went off on his own, jumped on a log plank in a log flume over to Drain. Walking behind the back of a business, he saw someone, a projectionist, hand cranking a machine moving a picture on the wall. The guy asked him if he wanted to try it for a few minutes. So he did. He went in there and tried that. His arm got tired but he got hooked on the exhibition, running movies.

So there he was, dropped out of high school, having to take care of a farm. And so he got a projector and a sheet and a car by shoe cobbling and stuff like that in Drain and went around to high schools and lodge halls, the church basements – places where people had never seen a movie and some had not even seen a car – rural places in Oregon, the Odd Fellows Halls and stuff like that. But he got tired of traveling in 1926.

In Newberg, although he’s called ‘The Movie Man’ here, the guy who brought movies to Newberg, there were already three silent movie theaters that had existed in Newberg. Two of them were closed at the moment. I don’t know why exactly. But he talked to the bank, and he opened up the Star Theatre and the Baker Theater in the ‘20s and ran silent movies until 1930, 1931 or so when we went over to sound on film.

Miller: And then 20-something years later, the drive-in. Michael Aronson, when did drive-ins first appear in Oregon?

Aronson: Right about the time he’s talking. In general, they really took off right after the postwar era. Particularly, actually, as rationing for gas went away and people were getting out again, as he said. By the early ‘50s there was an Oregon Drive-in Theater Association – that’s how strong it was – you know, a group of people. And you see them popping up, a half dozen or so every year, in the early ‘50s.

Miller: Was that the heyday? I mean, when would you say, Michael, was the heyday of drive-ins?

Aronson: Yeah, by the mid 1950s there were 4,500 of them across the country. To give you some sense, today there’s less than, I think, about 300. It really exploded in the ‘50s and as suburbs grew and really took off. And then kind of a slow decline starting in the 1960s with construction, in Oregon for instance of the I-5. The 99W tells you exactly where it is, right? That used to be a much more major road than once the I-5 went in. That happened across the country obviously in the ‘60s.

Miller: So, I mean, you really can see a connection between the growth of drive-ins and the growth of American car culture and suburban culture?

Aronson: Oh, yeah, very much. And remember, before the drive-in and before the end of World War II, we thought of movies as being located mostly in downtown urban centers, the movie palaces of the ‘30s and ‘40s. As people began to leave the city centers and move out into places like Newberg in larger numbers, drive-ins – because land was relatively inexpensive, because of car culture – really took off in this time period.

Miller: Brian, what kind of stories did you hear about the early years of the family drive-in?

Francis: Well, there was a drive-in before the 99W. In 1948, there was the Corral Drive-In, which was built in McMinnville where currently present there is a Wilco store. Which ironically, curiously is next to a Walmart, which was always looking for drive-in land in the ‘90s, or so the legend goes. So in 1948 there was that drive-in, and then in 1953 there was the 99W. I grew up in a house on drive-in property like a lot of drive-in kids. So I’d look out the window and I’d see Lady and the Tramp eating spaghetti. Or I’d look out and I saw a woman getting painted gold in Goldfinger, and that kind of bothered me.

Miller: Wait. Literally, from your windows, you could see the movies that were showing?

Francis: Yes, I had a deck and I had a speaker wired underground over to the house. You’d turn the knob just like you were on the drive-in.

Miller: [laughing] Your house was… it was a drive-in.

Francis: Yes. ‘[Beyond] the Valley of the Dolls,’ ‘Midnight Cowboy.’

Miller: Wow.

Francis: Things started getting really rough, you know, in the ‘70s… ‘Godfather.’ In the nitty gritty ‘70s, I was working in high school there. So I kind of lived working there is what I did. There was a lot of drama in 1960, is it ‘62? The Columbus Day Storm knocked down the screen, also knocked down the screen in McMinnville. That one did not rebuild. But we rebuilt the one in Newberg of course. I was very young then. I had to go live at my grandmother’s house for six months.

Miller: Michael Aronson, what do you think is a perfect drive-in movie? We’ve just heard from Brian all kinds, from ‘Lady and the Tramp’ to ‘Midnight Cowboy’ which I think… Was that the first technically X-rated movie in theaters?

Aronson: Well, X-rated used to be a regular Hollywood studio rating. It just meant for grown-ups, not necessarily adult entertainment in the way we think of it. And it is still the only one to win an Academy Award.

Miller: Okay, maybe that was the superlative of it. In your mind, what makes a great drive-in movie?

Aronson: Well, as he’s kind of pointing out, between the two ends of the spectrum, right? On one hand, drive-ins were designed for families. If you see early refreshment stands have ads for free baby bottle warming, and they were promoted as family entertainment. But as things shifted, particularly as he pointed out, in the 1970s. When I grew up going to drive-ins, they were mostly about exploitation and horror films all night long with free donuts in the morning if you survived. So I guess it depends what you like. But, having grown up as a teenager in the ‘70s, there was nothing better than going to see, you know, ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ at 2 o’clock in the morning with your buddies. That’s the period that I grew up in.

But the drive-ins have always had that kind of duality: on one hand, family entertainment, on the other, really aimed at teenagers. And that’s true from the 1940s, the theaters were constantly trying to figure out how to both attract teens and also sell themselves as wholesome family entertainment.

Miller: And Brian, that’s something you saw? I mean, trying to attract both those teenagers who wanted to basically have an in-car date and families who were going to give their kid a bottle of milk?

Francis: Depends on if you’re running AIP pictures, Crown International Pictures or trying to get Disney pictures, if you can get them, or any wholesome Hollywood entertainment movies, Steve McQueen or westerns or other kind of movies that people would go to for the drive-in. I’m talking about the ‘70s there, because in the ‘70s it kind of ended. The exploitation period ended in the ‘70s when the VCR was created, and all that stuff went straight to tape – the stuff that Joe Bob Briggs talks about. That’s a little unlike what the real drive-ins were doing.

I’m kind of going off here, but there was kind of a problem in the early ‘80s when those independent places like AIP and stuff went straight to tape, and they weren’t really servicing the drive-ins anymore. Drive-ins couldn’t get first-run films for a long time because they weren’t… I don’t know, because we were [inaudible] carload pricing, there weren’t that many, I don’t know – there’s reasons why we couldn’t get first-run movies. We’d have to get them really late. The prints were allocated to the state, you know, a certain number of prints. And by the time the drive-ins could get them it was usually a little later down the line. There was no multiplexes yet, so you couldn’t get a print from somewhere else. When the multiplexes came around, in the later ‘80s, then [it] got to be logical to give prints to drive-ins because there’s all these prints lying around that could be used, and we started picking up business again.

Miller: What do you see as the biggest challenges that drive-ins face today?

Francis: That drive-ins face today?

Miller: Yeah.

Francis: Well, it’s kind of gone back to the ‘90s, in terms of attendance. It’s like there’s a lot of other drive-ins around. But what it really is, I guess, is streaming. People have been trained to watch movies a different way. Even though there’s an importance with having the social media just rise and everything like that, since the pandemic, we’re kind of off on our own a little bit more, I think, the drive-ins are. We call ourselves ozoners, of course.

Miller: You call yourself what?

Francis: Ozoners. My grandfather was a ‘hard-topper’ until 1953 in which he became an ‘ozoner’ because he opened a drive-in, would be the way to put that.

Miller: Michael Aaronson, I’ve heard that VHS tapes and DVDs and then streaming now, obviously, can be pointed to as some of the reasons that drive-ins have struggled. But I’ve read that another big one was just real estate, that land was often more valuable if it were developed. What role does development play in the demise of a lot of drive-ins?

Aronson: Yeah, very much so. The biggest expense in many ways for a drive-in is the land. So when it was inexpensive, movie theater hard-toppers, as he calls them, actually complained because the costs were relatively low in terms of start-up, and they felt like they were competing. But, obviously as the suburbs grow, you see as early as the 1970s in trade magazines that shopping malls, something we’ve talked about, take that same space up. And they’re willing to pay much more, so there’s a real competition for land. The 99W used to be outside of Newberg town boundaries, and now it’s well within it. So, very much so, I think that that’s the case. Those that are still there are the ones that have survived because they’ve been able to hold on to the land, with these kind of family operations.

Miller: Brian, is there a season, a high season, for drive-in movies? And are we entering it?

Francis: That used to be, since ‘Jaws,’ that was established as the ‘tentpole’ time of the year to start putting out all the big hit movies. There is kind of one going on this year, though, or that sort of thing with the ‘Mario’ film and ‘Guardians.’ It’s different than it used to be. It kind of is when you can get it now with the way they release movies, which is right now. This is the high season, when school gets out… Memorial Day to Labor Day weekend is what we usually call the high season in the drive-in industry. Fourth of July is like halfway through the season, used to be. There’s not a lot of big stuff coming out in August, so we don’t know how long the high season will last this year. I do, you know, mix new and old and repertory films at my theater.

Miller: What are your hopes for this season?

Francis: That people will like ‘The Flash’ and ‘Indiana Jones’ and I know they want ‘Barbie’ or did I blow it by not running ‘Oppenheimer’ and what’s good for the drive-in and picking out the right repertory movies for it and that kind of stuff. I like to do double features, so I put a lot of thought into things like that.

Miller: Brian Francis and Michael Aronson, thanks very much for joining us.

Francis: You’re welcome.

Aronson: My pleasure. Thanks so much.

Miller: Brian Francis is the owner and operator of the 99W Drive-In movie theater in Newberg. Michael Aronson is co-director of the Oregon Theater Project and an associate professor of cinema studies at the University of Oregon.

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