The Drive-In: Outdoor Cinema in 1950s America and the Popular Imagination

(Hardback)

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Guy Barefoot's The Drive-In explores the drive-ins reputation as a space for dating or delinquent teenagers and for screening subsequent run or exploitation films with the way in which it was promoted as entertainment for families and other audiences who felt excluded from indoor cinemas. The drive-in theatre first emerged in the early 1930s, expanded rapidly in the late 1940s, and was central to coming-of-age for millions of Americans in the 1950s. This book examines the relationship between the popular image of the drive-in and the historical evidence of production, distribution, exhibition and regulation that controlled the industry as a whole. Through a study of the drive-ins roadside locations, what facilities they provided, who attended and what they saw, The Drive-In provides a detailed picture of a particular form of post-World War II American cinema-going and an analysis of the complexities that underlie images of the American 1950s.

Author Bio

Guy Barefoot is Honorary Visiting Fellow at the University of Leicester, UK, where he was Associate Professor in Film Studies until 2022. He is the author of the books Trash Cinema: The Lure of the Low (2017), The Lost Jungle: Cliffhanger Action and Hollywood Serials of the 1930s and 1940s (2017), and Gaslight Melodrama: From Victorian London to 1940s Hollywood (2001).