When they were younger, our kids loved the large playground in front of the screen, which kept them busy while we waited for dusk so the movie could begin. The Family Drive-In has two screens, with the latest release projected on the original main screen and usually an older film on a screen in the back.Īnd it definitely has family appeal. He has extended the season on weekends in the spring and fall, and he shows first-run films on the weekend they come out. Opened in 1956, the Family Drive-In has been owned continuously by the Dalke family, but Kopp has leased it for the past two years, making some customer-friendly changes. You might think that drive-ins, which reached their zenith of popularity in the 1950s and ’60s, mostly attract aging nostalgia hounds, but in fact the overwhelming majority of attendees are families with young children, says Jim Kopp, who runs the Family Drive-In Theatre in Stephens City, just south of Winchester. My wife and I have enjoyed taking our now-teenage kids to these outdoor theaters over the years, and recently we thought it was time to take a couple of trips back, to remind them of what they’re missing when they just stream a film from Netflix onto a laptop. There are five of these outsize monuments to Hollywood and America’s car culture along Route 11 in the Old Dominion, with another on the Tennessee side of the border town of Bristol. But it does mean that the social forces at work have preserved a beloved facet of a bygone era: the drive-in movie. No, that doesn’t mean that your cellphone won’t work there or that you’ll need a time-traveling DeLorean to visit. But it also seems to traverse a few decades, as the rural part of the state it meanders through seems blissfully resistant to the passage of time. Route 11 slips through the western part of Virginia, skirting mountains and shadowing rivers as it travels from the West Virginia state line just north of Winchester to the Tennessee line in Bristol.
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