by John Demont
That, alas, is just not the way the universe is going. Churches are closing and service clubs disappearing. Concert crowds have dwindled to the point where it’s hardly worth it for Mick Jagger to take his death rictus on tour. Video games, let alone video movies, outsell old-fashioned ass-in-the-seat cinema viewing. Anyone can see where this is inevitably headed: a society increasingly alienated from family, friends and neighbours; a species forgoing real human connection to sit at home in the eerie light of the computer screen, forming “meaningful” relationships online. A long time ago Yogi Berra declared, “If you don’t go to someone’s funeral, they won’t go to yours.” That pretty much sums it up for me. When I thought too much about the disconnected situation, I found my hand involuntarily reaching for the Lagavulin. Instead, I headed for the door to go find some real people. And that, in a roundabout way, was how I found myself at the Mustang.
WHEN Paul bought the Mustang, it looked like a place haunted by poltergeists: the single screen full of holes, the grounds a neglected grass lawn, the speakers mostly gone. The owners only booked old, B-list movies. The audience consisted mainly of bored local teenagers jazzed on Labatt Blue looking for a party. The first thing Paul did was to take out an ad in the Picton Gazette informing readers that the Mustang had a zero tolerance attitude toward alcohol on the premises. Overnight, business dropped from six hundred or seven hundred customers to just 150. Teens driving by on the highway heckled the new owners. Paul, who in a previous life worked with big-city street gangs, did a lot of the security himself. Sometimes it felt like he was a bouncer at some bucket of blood back in East Vancouver. He says, “It took a while to get the word out that the Mustang was a good, clean family place.”
You approach the Mustang now the same way they did then: through lovely countryside untouched by the wineries, herb farms, antique shops and intuitive energy healing studios native to Ontario’s Prince Edward County. The air tonight smells of birch, pine, dust, grass and distant thunderstorms. Beyond the fields and their utilitarian farmhouses loom woods known to hold coyote and wildcat. Arrive at the Mustang a few hours before the first carload, however, and the initial thought is deserted, not ominous. There’s only one way in: past the beaten-up 70 mm movie projector and the scruffy little garden with the miniature ceramic pagoda, and beyond the wooden sign so worn that it is difficult to make out (“Your licence number has been recorded. If a headset has been taken from the place you were parked, you will be contacted by the O[ntario] P[rovincial]P[olice]—The management”). Until you come to the old city-of-Kingston bus that serves as the ticket booth.
Things from here on in seem a little dreamy, a feeling exaggerated by the first objects visible inside the grounds: an aged fire truck; a vintage Coke machine; a retro Yamaha bike; rows of old speaker posts still standing like sentinels, even though the audio comes in on the car radio. Five years ago Paul opened up the wallet to replace the main screen. (It used to be maintained by men in chairs, anchored to a truck, who swung from side to side as they worked their way to the ground. Now he brings in a bucket truck, climbs in and makes the repairs himself.) Tradition had it that drive-in owners, to save a little money, used to live in an apartment within the A-framed screen. There’s nothing livable about the Mustang’s new forty-eight-foot-by-thirty-foot steel-and-plywood screen. Opening a door into its bowels, I look upward and, once my eyes have adjusted to the gloom, see metal crossbeams and dive-bombing swallows. Shafts of light, entering through ragged holes, crisscross. The ground is covered with debris—old reels and popcorn makers, Recommended as Adult Entertainment signs. The air is heavy and stagnant.
The screen out back is smaller. Thanks to the drive-in’s oddball business model, it is also more lucrative. Of the $10 ticket price, $1.50 goes to government taxes. Roughly $5.10 on a first-run movie like The A-Team or Date Night goes to the film company. Studios, in fact, go to great lengths to assure they are getting their rightful cut; whenever someone new starts showing up regularly at the Mustang, Paul’s first thought is “movie company flunky” checking to see whether he is underreporting the box office take. In any event, that leaves roughly $3.40 for the house.
The caveat is that the film company’s take declines—and the owner’s margins increases—the longer a movie is shown. Shrek 2, which had been out for nearly a month by the time of my visit, only nets 35 percent for the film company versus 60 to 70 percent in week one. Paul’s strategy, therefore, is clear: bring in first-run, big-name flicks on the big screen. Then, after a couple of weeks move them onto Screen 2, where they can have a good long run, and sort of watch the dough roll in. “The second screen paid for itself halfway through the first season,” Paul says. Shrek 2, for example, is still drawing them in. “The only thing close I can think of is Anaconda. People loved that movie. It was so cheesy. But people still showed up several times. That’s pretty cool.”
It’s also a canny business tactic. The drive-in movie industry, the story goes, is run by sentimental throwbacks who just can’t let go of the family business, even if it doesn’t make a lick of commercial sense. Paul’s laid-back sensibility seems to hide some hard-headed commercial instincts. Recently he and Nancy closed one of the two indoor theatres they own in the area. The cash flow from the Mustang and the Boulevard Cinema, the theatre they own in nearby Napanee, are helping to fund the acquisition of another indoor movie house by their daughter Hollie and one being built by their son Jamie.
Paul, at this moment, is fiddling with some machinery inside the Screen 1 projectionist’s booth: grey floors covered with old reels, tool boxes and rectangular film cases; clashing green and white walls bearing switches labelled with masking tape (“exciter lamp,” “supply pre-amp,” “moving volume”) and a wooden sign that reads “Mustang Drive-In home of the triple feature.” The gear—big projectors, crinkly silver air conditioning pipe—emits a vaguely dystopian aesthetic. It smells like machine oil, solvent and popcorn in here. In other words, it is just as you imagined it.
Within the booth, Paul explains, things have changed. Generally, though, the basics of showing films are the same as they’ve always been: films still travel in large cases consisting of about seven or eight reels. The reels each hold about twenty minutes of film. Paul used to use two projectors: as reel one was ending, he’d start reel two on the second machine. As reel two was playing, he would then load the third reel on the first projector. And so on and so on.
Time was when the ways a projectionist could screw up were myriad. There were blackouts. The highly flammable film burst into flame if it stalled in front of the ultra-hot carbon arc lamp. Projectionists put reels in backward, or in the wrong order. (Although during long, boring films entire reels were sometimes mysteriously left out with no one in the audience the wiser.) If the transitions were sloppy, the audience would let you know. Being an old-time projectionist had other hazards too. A lot of the carbon arc lamp houses weren’t properly ventilated. Those exhaust fumes were toxic.
Now, using a small X-Acto knife, Paul simply splices the reels together into one giant reel—an average-length movie like Date Night uses about a mile of film—that is wound around a rotating table called a “platter.” The film is then fed vertically into the top of his Xetron projector. Gear-like wheels pull the film frame by frame through the projector. Instead of carbon arc lamps, Paul’s projectors now use 3,000-watt bulbs containing xenon gas, which are positioned in front of a reflective parabolic mirror. Without the shutter—a small propeller-like device that rotates twenty-four times a second—everything would flicker or look out of focus. Instead, when the image appears on the screen, it looks true to life, magical.
The new platter system is automatic. But not perfect: if the projector jams or the shutter is left open, the film will still burn, although only a single frame of it. Some lousy splicing, leaving the picture out of focus, and the crowd screams for the projectionist’s head. A screw-up of any sort means you’re off-screen for a minimum of twenty minutes. That’s often enough
for car engines to bark to life and customers to make for the exits.
Over the clamour of the movie audio, the projector motor and the air conditioning, Paul says that adding another screen would help pad profit margins. That’s just not who they are. If money was the be-all and end-all, he and Nancy would have stayed with the industry-wide practice of playing the night’s big feature film last to keep customers on the premises and spending as long as possible. Instead, he leads with the bigticket item, so that families can enjoy it and still get the kids home to bed on time.
The real money isn’t at the ticket booth anyway. Paul tells me the secret: every person who buys a ten-dollar ticket spends another twenty dollars on grub. A good night at the canteen takes in about $4,500. To gross that amount Paul spends about $1,500, which means that he nets about $3,000—a Warren Buffett-like 200 percent return on his nightly investment. “Movies are a popcorn delivery system,” he says. “The markups are so huge.” When I ask precisely how huge, he snickers and says that he would tell me, but then he would have to kill me to keep the secret. The most he will say is that the bag costs more than the popcorn inside it. Then he adds, “Oh yeah, did I say that nachos are a beautiful thing?”
He leads the way into the canteen—ten feet by twenty-five feet, festooned with movie posters. It is manned by his wife, Nancy, slim with reddish hair, and a pleasant young woman wearing a badge that says Charlene. The canteen is also a beautiful thing: the noir-ish glow of the slushies, the grandeur of the popcorn machine—where, nightly, sixty pounds of kernels along with special seasoning and canola oil are popped into bright yellow perfection—the possibility of the deep-fat fryer from which emerge French fries, onion rings, hamburgers, hot dogs and Pogos. A few feet away plastic containers full of onions, hot peppers, ketchup and relish await ladling. I ogle the kind of crap I haven’t eaten since I was a kid: Ring and Push Pops, Drumsticks, Pixy Stix, radioactive-looking cotton candy. My eye lands on stuff I’ve never seen at a movie house before—Nancy’s homemade fudge, mosquito coils, Frisbees embossed with the kicking-horse Mustang logo.
It’s the smell that really transports: frying fat, grease, cheese, onions and butter, or at least, something butter-like. The feeling it conjures is the bovine thrill that goes with the knowledge that when these smells waft through my nasal passages, something absolutely wonderful will follow. Somewhere in a back copy of the New England Journal of Medicine there could be a study concluding that people like to eat food laden with enough trans fats to stop a bull moose because it stimulates something deep in the brain stem. I just don’t want to know. Examining some things too closely plain drains the fun right out of them.
Okay folks, we’ll be back on-screen in ten minutes and in the meantime I’ll fire up some white screen for the kids if they want to try their hand at shadow puppets And let me remind you that there’s no point in taking any money home with you, so come on in and buy stuff. If you’re leaving, drive safely—if you’re staying, park safely—and I think you all know what that means. Canteen will close in ten.
There are two intermissions—one for each screen—at the Mustang. Back in the early days the teens would come staggering from their cars, looking for something, anything, to absorb the booze. Tonight kids in pyjamas and carrying blankets line up behind teenagers, all flushed and glassy eyed from a couple of hours pressed together in an airless vehicle. Paul doesn’t judge. He just stands in the doorway, working the room without actually moving, the trace of a grin on his face even when he’s not actually smiling.
Often it’s the sight of a familiar face. Like a black-shirted Crown attorney from a nearby town named Paul who saunters over along with his wife, a photographer named Anita. A woman named Amanda waves. A guy who summers in the area—and who once sought out Paul’s advice on his marital woes—tells him confidentially that the union is back on the rails. A Celt named Angus, hands full of canteen fare, makes a detour to pay his respects. A couple of college students from Ottawa, there in a Smart car, want to know if they can sleep under a picnic table if they’re too tired to make the two-hundred-kilometre drive home.
Paul speaks to everyone like they went to kindergarten together. “People just like to check in,” he says. “Sometimes I feel like a Wal-Mart greeter. But I’ve made some terrific friends.” The repeat business—the vacationers who summer in the Picton area and the locals coming since they were little shavers—speaks to that. Tammy, who has been working at the Mustang for twenty-one years, and Grace, with fifteen years of service, are more friends than paid employees. Some of his pals just show up and work free: Paul, the aforementioned lawyer, has been helping out since having to run interference for his namesake with angry patrons complaining about the lousy sound quality. His wife, who almost always ends up helping in the kitchen, has seen more customers than movies.
To some, the owner seems to enjoy a status far more rarefied than that of a humble movie projectionist. Five years ago, when a couple of regulars named Dale and Darla got hitched at the Mustang, Paul officiated. One Halloween he did the honours at another on-site wedding as a personal favour to another regular—a high school adolescent-care worker as well as one of the stars of a reality TV show called Outlaw Bikers.
Before visiting the Mustang, I went online and clicked on the guest book to try to get a sense of what it is that people like so much about the experience. For some it was predictably the bittersweet journey to a nicer, better time: “Our 39th Anniversary is Jan. 30, 2010,” writes Susie, “and when we were younger with 3 boys we used to pack them up and put them in our 1966 Oldsmobile and bring them here to watch the movies.”
“Some of my fondest memories are from my first summer job working at the drive-in, 1971 when i stayed with my aunt and uncle who ran it then,” writes Dogbytes. “Along with my cousins, I was part of the grounds and snack bar crew, and I learned to splice film, run the projector and re-wire torn off speakers … all great fun for a lad of 12.”
Tidrock1 just wanted to thank Paul “for bringing back all those warm, childlike feelings that i have not felt in so many years! If it was not for people like you an era gone long ago, an era of fun and youthfulness would be lost forever, please keep up the outstanding work, and let’s keep this ultimate form of movie going alive!!!!”
Some people dig the tunes (“Thanks for playing Bruce Springsteen all the time.”) and the grub (“Every weekend we are there watching movies in the middle row with my buttered popcorn and her French Fries. I don’t know what I would do with my summers if something happened to this place.”). Some seem to be actually there for the movies. (“During the winter months, we watch vintage drive-in intermission videos and count the days to spring and more Mustang memories,” one couple wrote.)
Paul is mighty grateful for everyone’s support. He gives shout-outs over the loudspeaker to birthday celebrants. He happily shares the nuances of the projectionist’s trade with anyone who walks in the door. He answers emails. He writes a semi-regular blog about his movie likes and hates—a spinoff from the movie reviews he does for a trio of Ontario newspapers. (FYI: his all-time favourite flick is American Beauty, with The Verdict, Three Days of the Condor, the Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now close behind.)
At one point during my visit Paul indicated two trees at the front of the property. One is dedicated to the late Katie Graszat, a teacher who volunteered at the Mustang more than she ever watched movies. The other tree is in memory of a young man named Jay Hoskins, another volunteer, who died in a car accident. He and his girlfriend used to come to the Mustang three or four times a week. Eventually Paul just said the hell with it and gave them a permanent free pass.
Paul, it must be said, seems to genuinely like the human race. Which may explain why he hasn’t entirely left his past life as a youth crisis worker behind. He’s written a book—and an accompanying interactive application—that follows four survivors of near-fatal suicide and asks the question: what if those who succeeded in taking their own lives had waited a day? He st
ill gets calls from old clients. One is a woman in her early thirties who was horribly abused from the ages of four to seventeen. Somewhere along the line she was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, an ailment that many specialists think is bogus. “My attitude is: whatever it takes you get through your pain,” Paul says.
Thirteen years ago she showed up at the drive-in and told him that she was going to kill herself. The two of them walked around the drive-in grounds for hours. Throughout, several different personalities surfaced. Paul talked to all of them before finally convincing her to check into a hospital. Today she’s a happy mother of five. Sometimes she takes her kids to the Mustang to watch the movies and catch up with her old counsellor.
The drive-in business, Paul likes to say, has turned out to be a really good way to make hours and entire days disappear. Running a drive-in may sound pretty idyllic to a sixteen-hour-a-day dairy farmer or an eighty-hour-a-week downtown lawyer. But the past five years he and Nancy have cancelled exactly two shows during their eighteen-week season—because of weather. They run four movies on All-Nighter Night. On P.J. Night, when every kid wearing jammies gets in free, the gate can swell to 550 paying customers. Usually Paul turns out the lights by 1:15. On Saturday evenings—Triple Feature Night—the last person doesn’t leave until 4 a.m.
