In 1932, Richard Hollingshead Jr. nailed a bed sheet to trees in his Camden, New Jersey backyard, balanced a Kodak projector on the hood of his car, and propped cars on wooden blocks to work out sight lines. The result was the patented terraced ramp layout behind the first official drive-in theater, which opened in June 1933 with room for 400 cars. This episode traces the boom, bust and unexpected resurrection of an entire industry.

The conversation covers the sound problem that sank Hollingshead’s own theater, RCA’s 1941 in-car speakers and the windows ripped out by forgotten cables, and the switch to radio micro-broadcasting. It follows the post-war explosion to more than 4,000 theaters, the bottle warmers and passion pits, the helicopter rides and caged monkeys, and then the real estate inflation, daylight saving time and digital conversion costs that nearly killed the format before guerrilla drive-ins and the COVID-19 pandemic brought it back.

• Why sound traveling slower than light created maddening lip sync delays in the back row
• The 29-acre Johnny All-Weather Drive-In in New York and the 5,000-car Loew’s Open Air in Massachusetts
• How the Spotlight 88 signed off after a tornado with Now Playing: Gone With the Wind
• Drive-ins capturing an estimated 85 to 95 percent of North American box office during the pandemic
• Calamari in Greece, a dynamite ban in Coober Pedy, and LED screens that show movies in daylight