Screen Towers: The Drive-In Theater in America
By Steve Fitch, with an introduction by Katherine Ware (photography curator and artist)
Hardcover, 136 pages, $45
Reviewed by Steve Spiegel
I’ve been obsessed with drive-in movie theaters for as long as I can remember. The first movie I ever watched at a drive-in was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in 1968 at a long-forgotten theater in Cincinnati, Ohio. I was five and watching that film from the comfort of our family’s Chevy station wagon, backed in with the rear door flipped open, which let me lie down with my blanket and pillow. This was the beginning of my love affair with drive-in theaters. I’ve been so obsessed that when eBay was a brand-new site, my very first purchase was a vintage drive-in movie speaker! (Yes, I still have it.)
Not long after I saw my first drive-in movie, photographer Steve Fitch graduated from college and began to focus his camera on those very screen towers that captured my imagination. As a kid, I was focused on the movies being shown on their screens, but Fitch was looking at them differently.
In his new book, Screen Towers: The Drive-In Theater in America, with the cover featuring the Star-Vu Drive-in Theater in Longmont, Colorado, captured in 1980, Fitch presents an incredible collection of his beautiful images taken between the late 1970s and early 2000s. These photos made me wish I had a time machine to go back and truly appreciate these architectural landmarks in their heyday. The book itself acts as a time capsule. According to Fitch, “The quintessential monument of the American landscape during the last half of the 20th century was possibly the drive-in movie theater.” And his book makes a strong case for it.
In 1971, he shot his first two drive-ins: the Round Up Drive-In Theater in La Jara, Colorado, and the Midway Theater in Ashtabula, Ohio. Admittedly, at the time he “hadn’t really given much thought to drive-in theaters” but was attracted to “the rather heroic structures: one made of shiny silver metal with a striking ladder climbing up the middle and the other a dramatic, Romanesque-like structure decorated with stars and a crescent moon and named the Midway.” He was using a 4×5 large-format view camera at that time.
As photographic curator Katherine Ware writes in her fantastic introduction, “Fitch recognized that photographing after dark revealed a starkly different vision of the world.” He “searched out the fast-disappearing drive-in movie theaters, which offered the largest and most flamboyant canvas for populist scenes and neon artistry.”
We are all fortunate that he did, as drive-in theaters had reached their peak of around 6,000 screens in the U.S. just a few years earlier and by the early ‘70s were beginning their fast decline to the few hundred we have left today. With his large-format camera, Fitch traversed the country from California to Pennsylvania, Texas to Minnesota.
The draw to the public was, of course, the movies being shown on those giant silver screens. Ware points out that “Less than magic was the opposite side of the projection screen, facing the road. This unsightly view could, however, easily be disguised. Many operators turned it into a wall or tower that could showcase a painted mural for daytime viewing. But, after sunset, the addition of dramatic lighting and vibrant neon set a theatrical mood.”
The towers became de facto billboards for the theater and the movies being shown. The painted murals were often nods to the local history or even the highway where the drive-in was located. Fitch recalls, “Many drive-in theaters had names and/or murals related to their place. The Van Nuys featured a large painted mural of a Franciscan friar on a bucking horse in front of a Spanish Mission, and the Tri-City in Loma Linda had a mountain scene of skiers presumably skiing in the nearby San Bernardino Mountains.”
In his early photographs, Fitch captured many of these fantastic and unique “outward-facing” screen towers, which were often lit up in neon. He states, “There was always something exciting about script neon, especially when it was huge.” And his black and white photographs of lit neon screen towers are absolutely dreamy.
Fitch purchased an old wooden 8 x 10-inch Kodak 2D view-field camera and switched to color negative film in 1975, and continued to photograph drive-in theaters into the early 2000s.
“Like a collection of beach-combed seashells, I built up a collection of outdoor screens with their supporting structures.” And this collection he presents to us virtually without text, save for the subheads telling us the name of the drive-in, the city, state, and the date he made the photo.
I appreciate that Fitch lets us absorb his beautiful imagery before giving us the backstory, intentionally letting the photos do the talking. The layout of the book is a treat as he gives each photo space to breathe, always just one photo on a single page, and often nothing but white space on the preceding page. Every so often, we will find an image on each side, but because it’s infrequent, it makes you stop to look at why Fitch might have done this. Comparison? Contrast? It’s up to the reader to decide.
The photos appear mostly chronologically from black and white to color as the book proceeds from the 1970s to the 1980s, 1990s, and beyond. By the time we reach the ‘80s, Fitch begins to make daytime shots. The theaters are empty, and often he focuses on the bright silver screen and the children’s play areas at the front. In the early color shots, the ubiquitous speakers can still be seen hanging on poles, awaiting that night’s bevy of cars. With these color photos, he begins to turn his camera from the decorated edifices to the screen sides, beautifully, sadly, capturing their slow decline.
As Fitch recalls, “I became increasingly obsessed with inside views of the screen. The pureness of the white rectangle tugged at my senses, challenging me to react, to acknowledge its serene, blank presence. All day, the screen waits passively for dark when the cars will start to file in and locate their viewing spot.”
Fitch states that the majority of theaters he photographed in the ‘70s were still operating, but by 1980, when he began photographing in color with an 8 x 10 camera, this was no longer true. “There were many more abandoned theaters than operating ones. These ruins were often repurposed as places to store cars, trailers, even tractors and other farm implements.” And as we page forward, this is precisely what he presents.
It’s not until page 123 that Fitch gives us a brief background on himself and what led him to capture these theaters. I was also impressed that, besides being an accomplished photographer, he also worked as a neon tube bender, which I’m sure was something that helped him capture the art form so exquisitely with his camera. He says, “When I learned how to fabricate neon in 1981, script letters were the most difficult of letter styles to make, and I was always pleased when I successfully did a well-crafted job bending them.”
Getting lost in these beautiful and sometimes sad photos was a pleasure, and I’m so glad that Fitch gives us both black and white and color. While the black and whites are dreamy and romantic, the color photography emphasizes the bleakness and the barren landscapes that these drive-ins inhabited, often at the outskirts of town. Ware puts it well in her intro, “The timeless, archival quality of the black-and-white photographs is exchanged for the color of contemporary times, the vivid contrast of night with neon is replaced by the faded colors of empty lots.”
Drive-in theaters with majestic neon screen towers are becoming rarer each year, and Fitch’s photography should
inspire us all to value these places because they might be gone the next time we pass by. If you love great photography of Americana and signage, and especially if you are a fan of drive-in movie theaters or grew up with them like me, this book is
for you.
Steve Spiegel is an Executive Story Lead for Walt Disney Imagineering and a photographer of roadside architecture focusing on neon signs (and sometimes drive-ins). He sits on the boards of the SCA and the Museum of Neon Art. Steve can be found on Instagram @colorbyspiegel
This book review originally appeared in the SCA Journal, Fall 2025, Vol. 43, No. 2. The SCA Journal is a semi-annual publication and a member benefit of the Society for Commercial Archeology.
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