October 27, 2010

• Memories of the El Monte Drive-In

  

  MEMORIES OF THE EL MONTE DRIVE-IN THEATER

  This is a memoir written for the ElectricMovies part of my website, AllThingsMike, in 2001. It was inspired by a Siskel & Ebert show where both Roger and Gene reminisced about their first experiences at the movies. The original webpage was part of  my first AllThingsMike site on Homestead and has been offline for a few years, but was once even featured on a website about Drive In theaters. I'm still on "hiatus" and don't know when I'll be writing new material. MFN/ppf

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  Among my first memories of the town I grew up in, El Monte, California, are of the wonderful El Monte Drive-In, which was located on Lower Azusa Ave. just east of Baldwin in the northern part of town. I understand that this icon has been bulldozed, and a Home Depot now stands on the site where I saw my first large screen entertainment. Besides being a sacrilege and shame, it just proves how much we take for granted here in the Los Angeles area, that even though we are the "birthplace of the movies" we have no sense of history whatsoever, and anything that is more that twenty five years old qualifies as fodder for the bulldozers.

  
  My family moved to El Monte in 1960, just as I entered the first grade. We moved a lot in those heady early days of my life, first from my birthplace in Nampa, Idaho to Caldwell, Idaho, to the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles, and then to Highland Park, off York Ave. to El Monte. By the time I was five, we had moved once every year, and in Highland Park we'd lived two years. In 1960, with the move to El Monte, my parents finally purchased their first home, and if memory serves, about one or two weeks after we moved, we went to the movies.

  
  The experience transformed my life forever.

  
  The El Monte Drive In Theater was an iconic drive in to begin with. The name of the city was lit in neon, and so was the Mexican Hat Dancing girl on the street side of the screen. Much has been said of the loss of the Drive-In movie screen, especially in California, and I really rather think it is fitting that my very first experiences of the movies were at such a place, rather than the old "movie palaces" like Roger and Gene remembered, because as a child of the sixties, rather than the thirties and forties, the drive-in was the fad of the age.

  
  When we pulled up, I still remember my excitement upon seeing that dancing lady. It's even hard to bear the thought of her passing. We seem to lose a lot of architecture and cultural history here in L.A. The neighborhood we lived in Highland Park has completely disappeared. It was called Oak Terrace, and was a tree lined dead end which overlooked the Arroyo Parkway. It disappered in the Seventies, because I tried to locate my former home when I was in college, and was thouroughly discomboboulated when I realized that the whole neighborhood had been bulldozed in favor of those famous cinder block apartment buildings that were so prevalent in southern California architecture well into the eighties. (I think they still build them. They just paint them southwestern pink and lime green.)

  
  I can still remember "Mommy", bless her soul, asking my brother, sister and I whether we wanted to go to the new Jerry Lewis picture, "Cinderfella". or her pick, the new Elvis movie. We chose "Cinderfella". (I'm thinking the Elvis movie must have been "G.I Blues" which was released in 1960, but it's somewhat amazing that I can remember the movie we went to at all, much less the other one, since this was over forty years ago.) I always thought that the other movie playing at the theater (they showed two movies for one admission, really, I'm not kidding.) was a Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee movie called "That Funny Feeling" which came out in 1965. That was when I "graduated" from the sixth grade, and had not only seen lots of films at the El Monte Drive-In, but was enjoying the Saturday matinees at the enclosed El Monte Theater on the "Mall" in downtown. Anyway, even though I can't remember the second feature, I do know that they showed one, and let me tell you, seeing a movie on a drive in screen from your car, when you're seven years old, is enough to make anyone harbor a passion for movies.

  
  Today, at forty-eight, (EDIT: I am now 57)  I have a passion for movies which never leaves me. I usually go to see at least one new film a week, and I have collected movies on all media available since videotape, including 138 movies on CED videodisc, over 350 movies on Beta tape, over 500 movies on VHS videotape, and over 400 movies on laserdisc. Of course now I'm collecting DVD's and have about 70 or so since 1998. This passion was started at the El Monte Drive-In.

  
  Young people today probably can't imagine the impact of a drive-in movie. Imagine being stuck on the 405 (freeway or parkway of your choice), and a movie is playing forty or fifty feet in front of you above the other cars. The sound came from a tinny silver speaker which you hung on your window. (Just like you hung those trays with your burgers at  the A&W drive in restaurants, pre McDonalds.)  We had a 55 Chevy station wagon, the SUV's of the sixties, and later a 1960 Chevy Brookwood, which was the size of a small tank. and comfortably fit all three of us children in the back with the seat lowered. My brother and sister usually conked out early, but I couldn't get enough of the movies.

  
  It was also 1960, when "The Time Machine"  came out, that was a must see film for me, Just like Star Wars was for the kids in the seventies, or The Mummy films are for the kids these days. (EDIT: Or the current "Twilight" series.) "Time Machine", directed by George Pal, was highlighted in Forrest Ackerman's Famous Monsters magazine, and was part of the second movie double feature our family saw soon after we moved to El Monte. It was playing with a reissue of George Pal's "War of the Worlds" from 1953. (EDIT: and a much better movie than the "remake" with Tom Cruise) In those days,. the tallest building in Los Angeles was City Hall, and in "War of the Worlds", the martians destroy it. (much like later Martians in Independence Day destroy the nation's capital building! ) When I saw that scene, I really believed the martians were destroying Los Angeles. Seems funny to think about it now, but this really upset me, and my mother really had to convince me that what I was seeing was "only a movie".

  
  In "The Greatest Show on Earth" Cecil B. DeMille's epic about the circus, the "bad guy", Lyle Bettger,  is killed when he tries to stop the circus train, carrying his girlfriend,  Gloria Grahame, from being blown up, by driving on the tracks, and subsequently being tossed by the train, in what up to 1952 had been one of the screen's most intense special effects. (It's a model train and car).
  This is another instance when I was intensly involved in the proceedings, and got rather emotional about the outcome. (The biggest screen trainwreck up until that time. The movie won Best Picture oscar for 1952.)

  
  Seeing movies on the big screen, being young and somewhat impressionable, I was certainly impressed. In sixth grade, I was given charge of my sister and brother, and a family friend's son, aged the same as my younger brother, and we went to the Saturday matinees at the downtown theater. (With the kids throwing popcorn, and cartoons before the feature, another cultural activity that is sadly no longer in existence in American society.) I watched a lot of Elvis movies, and remember the thrill of "Jason and the Argonauts"  and "Jack the Giant Killer."

  
  But that seems later. The biggest thrill was seeing the movies on the Drive-In screen. The El Monte Drive-In screen. With the twirling neon senorita welcoming all to the show.

  
  It is truly a pity that this theater no longer exists. It is truly a pity that Los Angeles can't seem to find an architetural hold on any of it's early history. We are known to be "superficial" here in the city of the Angels (la ciudad de los angeles). You would think that given the presence of angels, we would harbor some sort of omnipresent ethereal quality, but that doesn't exist. All that exist are memories, and we can't even trust them.

  
  Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel hosted a program once, which detailed their early movie experiences. All critics usually write at least one column detailing what sparked their love of the movies in the first place.

  
  For me, it was seeing "Cinderfella" a not too good Jerry Lewis movie, at the El Monte Drive In in 1960. Because of this, I began a love of movies that till this day hasn't subsided. I used to watch Million Dollar Movie every weekend, which showed the same movie about six times every weekend, after showing the same film each night during the week. I attended film school at USC from 1971 to 1974. I shoot a lot of footage with my camcorder, and make little MikeVideo movies. I love films, and I loved the experience of attending double features as a child at the El Monte Drive In Theater.

  
  These are memories which shape my present. They are realities which warm my soul.
  Pity, again, that the physical presence of the theater can never be expereienced by anyone.
  But history in Los Angeles does not exist. We can't even keep the same gas stations on the corners of our intersections for over ten years.
  Now they're even tearing down the minimalls they just built in the late seventies and eighties.
  The movies still exist, however.
  I can put on a laserdisc of "The Time Machine" on my 60" bigscreen, dim the lights, smoke a little illegal herb, and reminisce about what wonders laid in store for my naive and malleable soul in 1960 at the El Monte Drive-In Theater. (EDIT: I stopped smoking the "illegal herb" a few years after I wrote this.)

  
  Michael F. Nyiri May 30, 2001

  • 5:51 pm
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