Tag: Matthew Martin

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Film Features Film/TV

The Last Night at the Drive-In

The last Time Warp Drive-In at the Malco Summer Drive-In (Photos: Chris McCoy)

By the time we got to the Malco Summer Drive-In, a crowd of cars had already gathered at Screen 4. That was not unusual for a monthly Saturday night dedicated to the Time Warp Drive-In series. What was unusual was that we were there two hours before showtime because it was the last weekend of the drive-in. 

The first drive-in opened in New Jersey in 1932. The concept spread to Memphis in 1940. After World War II, their popularity exploded. Postwar prosperity meant that more people than ever owned cars, and since most drive-ins charged by the carload, piling the family into the station wagon for a double feature was an affordable night out for working-class parents. Teenagers loved the drive-in as a place where they could go on dates and have a little privacy. The drive-ins’ reputation for illicit hanky-panky even spawned a hit song in 1957, the Everly Brothers’ “Wake Up Little Susie.” 

The drive-ins became a breeding ground for a certain kind of picture. Sure, you could find big-budget, A-list fare there, but those films existed next to cheaper movies, often made by independent companies outside the Hollywood mainstream, which were more daring with their subject matter. For every prestige title like Ben-Hur, there were a dozen flicks like Invaders from Mars. 

The latter were the kinds of films the Time Warp Drive-In celebrated. Pioneering Memphis indie filmmaker Mike McCarthy (who once called himself “a man without a drive-in”) and Black Lodge Video founder Matthew Martin booked vintage classics and non-classics alike for 12 years. Sitting in the front row of Screen 4, surrounded by friends in camp chairs and kids hanging out in open hatchbacks, the pair watched the animated retrospective of Time Warp art posters created by Lauren Rae “Holtermonster” Holtermann. An emotional McCarthy said the Time Warp had brought 105 films to the biggest screen in town. 

A few weeks ago, Malco announced that the sprawling drive-in was for sale after 60 years of operation. It was expected that the theater would complete the summer season, but a buyer popped up, and word got out that this weekend would be the end. No one blamed Malco. It was common knowledge that the Tashie family, who have controlled Malco for decades, loved the institution of the drive-in, even as the popularity of the format waned. This served the company well during the pandemic, when it was the theater chain’s only source of income. In the last five years, the Summer drive-in hosted the Indie Memphis Film Festival, the Southeast satellite program from the Sundance Film Festival, and Joe Bob Briggs’ drive-in festival. But while these big events and the Time Warp brought crowds to Summer Avenue, normal weekend nights were not busy, and the high overhead costs proved to be a drag on the company struggling during the post-pandemic cinema malaise which has only recently lifted. You can only lose money on something for so long. 

Photo: Chris McCoy

A funny thing happened over the last six decades. Films once considered drive-in trash are now the mainstream. A young Steven Spielberg saw Invaders from Mars at a drive-in. In 1977, he paid tribute to it in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, perhaps the most influential indie film of all time, was a drive-in programmer that spawned the entire zombie subgenre. Over on Screen 1, Sinners, the Ryan Coogler-directed smash which has been largely responsible for 2025’s box office outperforming 2024 by 10 percent, was playing to a full lot. It’s a direct descendant of Night of the Living Dead, and it’s leading the early conversation for Best Picture — something Romero could never have dreamed of. 

The final Time Warp was a Bill & Ted marathon. Martin tells me Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter’s goofy SoCal surfer pals who travel through time to save a utopian future had been scheduled to headline the Time Warp twice before, only to face rain- and snow-outs. This night, the weather is perfect, and a stream of cars is backed up on Summer Avenue as far as the eye can see. The dirty little secret of the three Bill & Ted movies is that, while their protagonists are a little thick in the head, the screenplays are extremely well-written. Our heroes don’t solve problems with violence, but through outwitting the humorless school principals and cop dads who threaten to derail the duo’s glorious future. It’s gold, smuggled in the trash. 

That’s how a lot of people feel about Memphis. But it’s a tough time in the 901. Martin’s Black Lodge, a combination video store, rep theater, and performance venue, closed last summer, a victim of out-of-control rents and pandemic malaise. Earlier this year, slashed arts grant budgets and reduced corporate sponsorships put the Indie Memphis Film Festival on hiatus. Two weeks ago, the Clayborn Temple, a Civil Rights landmark, burned to the ground under unexplained circumstances. Then there was the full-hand, slap-in-the-face of the acquittal on state murder chargers of three of the police officers involved in the killing of Tyre Nichols. The loss of the drive-in might have been a long time coming, but it couldn’t have come at a worse time. 

The last Time Warp is like a roving family reunion, a final gathering of the tribes. Parents brought kids for their first and probably only drive-in experience, and the kids, for the most part, were loving it. On screen, Bill and Ted defeat Death in a game of Twister, and then ask him to join their band. Several folks observe that if people showed up like this more often, the drive-in wouldn’t have to close. Keep that in mind the next time you’re wondering if you should go see a local band, or a film screening at Crosstown, or a play from Quark Theatre, or one of the dozens of other events we list in the pages of the Memphis Flyer every week. If you don’t use it, eventually, you will lose it. 

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Film Features Film/TV

Time-Warp Drive Returns with the Films of Stanley Kubrick

The July edition of the Time Warp Drive-In is devoted to a director whose work is more often associated with the art house than the drive-in. On the occasion of what would have been Stanley Kubrick’s 86th birthday, Malco’s Summer Drive-In will host an all-night marathon of the director’s work. Memphis filmmaker Mike McCarthy, who, along with Black Lodge Video’s Matthew Martin, programs the monthly events, says that Kubrick’s influence stretched far beyond film.

“Kubrick created worlds,” McCarthy says. “A hippie, like David Bowie, could enter the theater, inhabit the world of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and exit as something else.” The character of David Bowman, the astronaut who ends 2001: A Space Odyssey “lost in space,” inspired Bowie’s first hit, “Space Oddity.” Kubrick’s next film, 1971’s A Clockwork Orange, would similarly inspire the look of Glam rock and the attitude of punk rock.

The evening of films will begin with what is probably Kubrick’s most popular work, 1980’s The Shining, a masterful adaptation of Stephen King’s novel. With Kubrick, who started out as a photographer for Look magazine in 1946, the richness of his images conveys the richness of his ideas. A common criticism of Kubrick’s style is that the performances are flat or cold. But that is a misreading of what the director was trying to do, for it is not the actors who are emoting, but the man behind the camera. The Shining, while filled with luscious images, is an exception. In Jack Nicholson, Kubrick met his artistic match, much as he had 20 years earlier when he did Paths Of Glory and Spartacus with Kirk Douglas.

A Clockwork Orange

The evening continues with another literary adaptation, A Clockwork Orange. Anthony Burgess spoke more favorably of the film than King does of The Shining, but Kubrick made both texts jumping off points for his meticulous, arresting imagery. The near-future dystopia is dominated by Malcolm McDowell as Alex, a middle-class street thug obsessed with classical music whose path to redemption is almost as ethically queasy as his ritualistic ultraviolence.

Even though A Clockwork Orange was initially rated X for violence, its body count pales next to Kubrick’s masterpiece Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. In 1961, Kubrick set out to make a serious movie about the dangers of nuclear war. But the more he read about the Cold War doctrine of “Mutually Assured Destruction,” the more absurd it seemed. So Kubrick made the radical decision to turn his film into a comedy by bringing onboard writer Terry Southern and comedic super-genius Peter Sellers. Even taken apart from its Cold War context, Dr. Strangelove is a clear triumph and still one of the most important comedies ever made. That the civilization-ending mass killing is, in retrospect, somehow more acceptable than Alex’s mundane street thuggery is just part of the joke.

The last film on the drive-in program is Kubrick’s biggest and most intimidating masterpiece. 2001: A Space Odyssey is not only the greatest science fiction movie ever made, it placed second behind only Ozu’s Tokyo Story in the 2012 Sight & Sound Directors’ poll of the greatest films ever. Every shot is a meticulous work of art in its own right, and taken together, they offer too much to comprehend in one sitting. But the pleasure of returning to unravel works of genius is part of what gives Kubrick’s films their enduring power.

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Film Features Film/TV

Time Warp Drive-In’s Hell on Wheels

Automotive and film technology came of age at roughly the same time, and cars have always been a particular source of fascination for filmmakers. When the first drive-in movie theater opened in New Jersey in 1933, it was the beginning of a potent and inevitable synergy between two of America’s favorite cultural forces. Movies sold the dream of freedom, and cars became the most prominent and expensive symbols of that freedom. People would pay to sit in their cars and watch movies about cars.

The theme of the next edition of the popular Time Warp Drive-In series (running the last Saturday of each month through October) is Hell On Wheels, which gave the organizers, filmmaker Mike McCarthy and Black Lodge Video proprietor Matthew Martin, plenty of choices for programming.

The night will kick off with George Lucas’ American Graffiti. The film was Lucas’ first big hit, made after the studio-destroying dystopian sci-fi film THX 1138 had all but ended his career. Few films can claim the deep cultural impact of Lucas’ Star Wars, but American Graffiti comes close. Its meandering, multi-character story structure bears a resemblance to Robert Altman or Richard Linklater’s work but is utterly unlike the Hero’s Journey plots that would come to be associated with Lucas’ later work. Still, Lucas’ techno-fetishism is on full display with the loving beauty shots of classic autos designed in the days before wind tunnels and ubiquitous seat belts.

Even though the film was set in 1962, the chronicle of aimless youth cruising around a sleepy California town kicked off a wave of nostalgia for all things 1950s. The pre-British Invasion rock-and-roll and doo-wop soundtrack became one of the best selling film soundtracks in history, and Ron Howard — who, as Opie on The Andy Griffith Show, was himself a bit of TV nostalgia — and Cindy Williams would ride the popularity of American Graffiti into starring roles on Happy Days and its spinoff, Laverene & Shirley. It also marked the big break of a struggling actor and part-time carpenter named Harrison Ford.

The second Hell on Wheels film, Two-Lane Blacktop, is a classic hot rod movie from 1971 starring James Taylor (yes, that James Taylor) and Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson. If American Graffiti manifested America’s longing for a simpler time before the social upheaval of the 1960s, Two-Lane Blacktop was one of the counterculture’s dying gasps. It’s an Easy Rider-like plot with muscle cars: Two nameless street racers heading east from California challenge a square (Warren Oates) to a cross-country race to Washington, D.C. The dialog is sparse and the performances fairly flat, but the real point of Two-Lane Blacktop is the wide-open vistas of a now-vanished America.

The third film of the night, 1968’s Bullitt, is similarly light on dialog, but it is the opposite of counterculture. Steve McQueen at his sexiest plays a homicide cop trying to solve the murder of a mob informant. McQueen’s Frank Bullitt is the prototype of the “playing by his own rules” cop that would become so familiar in later films, but the movie’s real significance lies in the epic car chase that sees McQueen driving an iconic 1968 fastback Mustang through the streets of San Francisco set to Lalo Schifrin’s swinging jazz score. The oft-imitated but never equaled scene is worth the price of admission for the entire evening.

The program closes with Robert Mitchum playing a Tennessee bootlegger in1953’s legendary Thunder Road. Mitchum co-wrote the screenplay and produced the movie, which tells the story of a Korean War vet’s turbulent return to the violent world of moonshiners and flophouses. The noir-inflected film served as the template for dozens of hot rod exploitation stories, taught greasers to emulate Mitchum’s laconic cool, and even inspired Bruce Springsteen to write a song about it. It’s a fitting capper to a night of burning rubber and tail fins.