Digital Projection and Drive-In Theaters

Throughout the summer of 1982 I spent a summer working at the now defunct Cascade Drive-In Theater in Yakima, WA. Among my many duties of monitoring the field, pulling weeds and helping behind the concession stand, I had the enjoyable time lugging upstairs heavy canisters of film. Oh, how they dug deep into the palms of my small hands.

Projectionist Walter Becker gets a 35mm projector ready at the Cascade Drive-In Theater. | John Konstantaras~For Sun-Times Media

Nowadays, with the advent of digital projection, those heavy spools of film are on their way out, on the heels of cassette tapes, VHS movies and compact discs. However, this isn't welcomed news for most drive-in theaters, as explained in this article excerpt by David Gatham of the Chicago Sun-Times Media...

In recent decades, movies have been delivered to theaters in cans of film. Projectionists then had to lay these out on a “platter” some 6 feet wide and splice each reel together so the film could be fed into a projector.

Each can of film weighed about 9 pounds and contained about 20 minutes of movie. The film for a movie such as “Titanic” weighed about 100 pounds, required physically splicing together five miles of film, and cost its studio more than $1,000 each to copy.