Tag: Thunder Road

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Film Features Film/TV

Thriving at the Drive-In

photo: Courtesy Joe Bob’s Drive-In Jamboree Joe Bob Briggs’ Drive-In Jamboree comes to Memphis.

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. No one feels the truth of that old saw like Joe Bob Briggs. Born John Bloom in Dallas, Texas, he has been celebrating low-budget horror, sci-fi, kung fu, and just plain weird films for decades. He holds a journalism degree from Vanderbilt University and adopted his nom de plume in the mid-’80s while writing humorous reviews of exploitation and grind-house films for Texas Monthly. From 1986 to 1996, he hosted Joe Bob’s Drive-In Theater on The Movie Channel, where he perfected his public persona. 

The films he featured every week were as viscerally thrilling as they were cheaply made. And if the plots were stupid or the acting subpar, well, all the better. On both the original show and his subsequent stint on TNT’s MonsterVision, Briggs rated films on how many scenes of badassery they contained. If, for example, a crazed killer used a pair of shears on his victim, Briggs would dub it as an incident of “scissor-fu.” 

The movies he championed were always associated with drive-in theater culture. The first drive-in opened in New Jersey in 1933, and the concept quickly spread across the country. During their peak popularity in the 1950s, drive-ins catered to families by adding playgrounds and featuring mostly kid-friendly offerings. But low-budget, independent filmmakers who produced more outré fare often found it easier to book their films in rural drive-ins rather than movie palaces in the urban core. During the 1970s, gas price shocks and the rise of home video took a toll on drive-in culture, and many of the theaters that survived into the 1980s did so by specializing in the kind of shocking exploitation films that couldn’t get on a screen anywhere else. For Briggs, this is true cinema, and more mainstream fare or art films are mere “indoor bullstuff.” 

Since 2018, Briggs has been a fixture on Shudder, the streaming service devoted to horror, with his new show The Last Drive-in. This weekend, July 8th-10th, Briggs comes to Memphis for the second annual Joe-Bob’s Drive-In Jamboree. “I love Tennessee, and I love Memphis,” Briggs says. “It’s the city of great music, great festivals, great barbecue, and the most hospitable people in the world.” 

The Bluff City is also home to one of the biggest and most successful drive-in theaters in the world. Unlike many other theaters of its kind, the Malco Summer Drive-In survived the expensive conversion to digital projection thanks to the investment of the locally based theater chain’s then-president and drive-in aficionado Jimmy Tashie. That investment paid off big time during the coronavirus pandemic, when the surviving drive-ins were the only places where an audience could safely watch movies together. Last year’s drive-in fest was held at the Mahoning Drive-In in Lehighton, Pennsylvania. It was such a big success that this year’s edition had to move to bigger digs. “We were bulging at the seams,” says Briggs. “When they called it the drive-in Woodstock, that included the mud! It was a wonderful event, but there were so many fans who tried to buy tickets and couldn’t get in. We’re adding screens, adding capacity, and adding a convention element in the daytime. And I couldn’t be happier about partnering with Malco Theatres, people who have been exhibiting movies all over the South for 107 years.” 

The weekend starts in Midtown on Thursday at Crosstown Theater with Briggs presenting his one-man show “How Rednecks Saved Hollywood,” with more than 200 clips of scenes tracing the evolution of the redneck stereotype from Thunder Road (a pioneering car-chase movie from 1958 starring Robert Mitchum as a Tennessee bootlegger running from the law) to Deliverance, Smokey and the Bandit, and Forrest Gump. The three-day drive-in culture convention will be held at the Hilton Memphis, with dozens of vendors and special guests. On Friday night, the Malco Summer Drive-In will host a cast and crew reunion for Halloween III: Season of the Witch — a film Briggs has long criticized because it doesn’t feature franchise villain Michael Myers. Then, on Saturday, Briggs and his crew will stage a live version of his Shudder show with a secret double-feature of blood-splattering exploitation goodness. On Sunday, Briggs will host the World Drive-In Movie Festival, featuring 10 indie productions that carry on the gonzo traditions of the drive-in. Briggs will present the filmmakers, who were chosen from hundreds of entries, with the Hubbie Award — a trophy made from an engraved Chevy hubcap. 

Tickets to individual events and VIP passes for the entire festival are available at joebobsjamboree.com. 

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

ThunderRoad Memphis Delivers Mason Jar Cocktails and More

David Parks and Jef Hicks of ThunderRoad Memphis

ThunderRoad Memphis is a “delivery service,” says founder David Parks. But even so, it’s not competing with FedEx or UPS.

The name came from “the old Robert Mitchum movie,” says Parks, who operates the business with Jef Hicks.

In the Thunder Road movie, which was released May 10th, 1958, Lucas Doolin (Mitchum) is a whiskey runner, or “transporter,” who delivers moonshine in his “tanker” — a 1950 two-door coupe — to Memphis and other areas.

Parks and Hicks deliver cocktails, with names like Tropical Deliciousness and Raspberry Sage Sipper, and food in a 1991 Isuzu Rodeo and a 1988 Jeep Wagoneer to people’s homes in Memphis and nearby areas. But the cocktails are transported in Mason jars. “Harkening back to the old days,” Hicks says. They also deliver wine, beer, and food. ThunderRoad Memphis began five weeks ago, “and it’s gone nuts.”

Parks is a bartender who was laid off at The Second Line because of the quarantine. Hicks was a bartender at Cafe Pontotoc. Since they were “no longer on the payroll,” Hicks says, they decided to do home delivery of their cocktails. They operate out of Midtown Crossing at 394 N. Watkins, where they are partnering with owner Octavia Young. They will deliver food from the restaurant. They also are partnering with local chefs.

Hicks and Parks contacted chef friends to join them and prepare food, which they can pair with their cocktails. “Sandwiches and small plates,” he says.

It was a way to help their out-of-work service industry friends “keep shelter over their head, their utilities on, and a little bit of food on the table,” Hicks adds. “We tried to give as many people a job as we could.”

The chefs include Jesse Parks, a baker who has been doing their bread; Jake Behnke, who was at Iris Etc. catering; and Amanda Hicks. 

They begin their day at 1 p.m. They load up about 2 p.m., and they’re done by 7:30 p.m.
ThunderRoad Memphis operates Wednesdays through Sundays. They recently added Germantown and Cordova to their route.

One of their most popular cocktails is the Tequila Mockingbird, a drink Parks created for a Mid-South Literacy fundraiser. It’s made of tequila, watermelon, lime, and a little spiced Agave. Another popular cocktail, Passionate Purple Drank, which was created by Hicks, is made with Butterfly Pea Blossom infused gin, lavender shrub, ginger syrup, and fresh lime juice.

As for the cuisine, Amanda’s brisket tacos are a big seller. It’s corn beef brisket in “drunken salsa,” which includes a dozen vegetables marinated in vodka for 21 days. The brisket is smoked by Brent McAfee, who was laid off from Cafe Pontotoc and Silly Goose. The barbecue pork butt sandwich with sriracha slaw on brioche bread is another winner.

ThunderRoad Memphis has a Facebook group, which now has more than 2,800 members. People take photos of ThunderRoad Memphis cocktails and food. Some people put the cocktails in their own fancy glasses for the photographs.

Hicks and Parks are pleased with the ThunderRoad Memphis response. “We built an enterprise that provides jobs, builds community, and reduces the instances of drunken driving,” Hicks says. “We need to change home delivery of cocktails from a temporary governor’s resolution to be permanent legislation.”

Parks says he’d “love to have a big, old ambulance and turn it into a mobile bar and we’d do your party.”

The ThunderRoad Memphis motto is “All this and a bag of chips,” Hicks says. “All customers are required to purchase some food item, be it chips, sandwiches, baked goods, etc. This keeps us legal. Also, we give everyone a fortune cookie and ask them to post their fortune.”

Customers have been returning the Mason jars, which are sanitized and re-used. “They get a discount if they return them,” Hicks says.

To contact ThunderRoad Memphis, call (901) 443-0502.

Categories
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.