August 2017
It’s a Saturday night in August, and in a field outside Lowville, cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks are lined up in ragged rows facing the giant screen at the Valley Brook Drive In. Tonight’s featured film, the animation Ice Age: Collision Course, is solid family fare; groups of kids sit on blankets laid out on the grass or dangle their legs outside the backs of station wagons, tailgate style. As I walk from my car to the snack bar to see if there’s any bug spray for sale—my boyfriend and I have been frantically swatting mosquitos–the rumble of male and female movie voices and the rise and fall of orchestral strings resound from dozens of darkened vehicles; crickets trill from the edge of the field. I open the creaky screen door of the snack bar and peruse the long counter on which hot dogs, slices of pizza, popcorn, fried dough and other comestibles, cooked up by a chef in the back kitchen, gleam in metal trays under the heat lamps. It’s a time warp of my childhood: Kool Aid is 75 cents a glass, while a small glass of milk or a cup of hot cocoa is $1.25. A hefty man in jeans and cowboy hat serves me a coffee and fetches the can of bug spray before I go back out into the balmy summer night, the disembodied, colossal images of cartoony ice-age mammals and fantastic rocky landscapes looming dreamlike against the dark and the car hoods glinting with reflected light.
Sixty years ago, going to the drive-in used to be a summer ritual, a fun family outing or titillating teenage date. The privacy of the car enhanced the intimacy of the cinematic experience, while the starry night sky and fresh smell of mowed grass invested movie watching with a folksy, rural ambience. Today the drive-in is a cultural vestige: there are approximately 340 working theaters scattered across the country, a fraction of the nearly 5,000 that existed during their peak in the 1950s. Valley Brook is one of several operating in the rugged Tug Hill plateau along the western border of the Adirondacks, but it is unique in that the entire facility—the plywood-paneled screen, wooden ticket gate, projection building, snack bar, white wooden fence and dozens of speakers, still hooked up to their posts—is original and still run by the same family.
Owner Mike Dekin’s grandparents, Michael and Betsy Matusczzak, built the drive-in theater in 1952 on one of their two dairy farms as a way for Dekin’s uncle, who had polio, to make a living. Though his uncle never did get involved, the business took off and was open every night from May until October and some years as late as November, “because back then there was no other entertainment anywhere,” said Dekin. By the early 1970s, the Matusczzaks had sold off their farms and were subsisting solely on the drive-in.
Dekin, who resides in Carthage and works in the cold-weather months as a full time employee for the Department of Defense at Fort Drum, has been involved in the business since he was a teenager. When he graduated from high school in the summer of 1983, the drive-in had closed because it lacked a cameraman. “My grandmother said ‘I have a business proposition for you. If we can train you quick enough would you like to be our cameraman?’” Dekin recalled. He took her up on the offer, and after he had undergone two weeks of intensive training, the theater opened in mid July—and has run every summer since. Each night it showed a first-run movie followed by a B-rated movie. In the early days, “some employees were very religious and threatened to quit because of the nudity,” Dekin recalled. In the mid 1980s, the drive-in switched to weekend evenings only. After his grandmother retired in 1990, Dekin and his mother and sister took over. It returned to a nightly schedule in 1997, but after four years, though attendance was strong, “we were burned out” and the owners returned to a schedule of weekend screenings only.
In 1989, the 52-by-64-foot screen, which consists of 72 plywood sheets supported on a metal framework, blew down in a windstorm. Dekin rebuilt it pretty much as it was. Regarding the rest of the structures, including the white ticket-taking booth with two extending roofs at the entrance and exit, “I haven’t touched anything, besides repainting the walls and adding aluminum siding over the brick walls of the projection building,” he said. In 1996, he installed a platter system in the projection room, which enabled all the reels for a movie to be put on one reel, and updated the camera. By 2010, it was becoming mandatory for movie theaters to switch to digital technology, and because digital projectors were expensive, it seemed the Valley Brook Drive In would finally have to close. But one day “I got a phone call from a legislator from Lewis County who said, ‘I know who you are and my wife knows you and you’re not going to close the drive-in,’” Dekin said. “We had some sit-down meetings at which he told me about some grants that were available.”
Dekin subsequently applied for and was awarded a Lewis County Industrial Development Agency grant for $27,000, which included a $7,000 loan. The money helped pay for a $59,000 digital projector, with Dekin dipping into his retirement fund to cover the $32,000 difference. It was installed in 2014, next to the two steel-gray original projectors, which remain in place. “They’re bombproof,” Dekin said. In comparison, “everything’s junk today and I hope I didn’t throw my money away.”
He books the nightly double feature two to three weeks in advance using a booking company based in New York City. “One to five movies come out each week, and I try to get the best of the best. The second feature is usually two weeks to two months old. We always do a two-week run.” Tickets are $6 for people over 12, $2 for children seven and over, and free for kids age 6 and under. Customers can tune into the sound through 88.9 FM or 600 AM on their radio dial, although a handful of the original speakers in the second row still work. Portable radios are also given out if needed. The drive-in usually opens on a weekend in May—exactly when depends on the weather; last year it was the first weekend—and closes on Labor Day weekend. The double feature is shown on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights, the time depending on when it gets dark.
Dekin said he prefers family-run movies—last year’s Finding Dory was such a success that it played for six weeks—although the second feature is often R rated, a rating “people know about in advance.” Dekin occasionally gets complaints.
“Some lady saw me on Facebook and she called me to tell me the second movie I showed was not appropriate for kids and kind of raunchy. She kept saying ‘I can tell you’re sincere.’ She was from the Christian right. I told her I don’t have a choice, and I try not to give out my number.”
The distribution company takes 60 percent of the profits for the first movie and five to 10 percent for the second feature. Valley Brook Drive In also screens classic movies for free every summer on three weekdays in a program sponsored by the Lewis County Arts Council, which covers Dekin’s expenses.
Dekin said profit margins are tight after figuring in the operating expenses. He has a couple of paid employees—in addition, two volunteers, his brother-in-law and former cameraman Don Mulligan, help out in the snack bar—and every year does maintenance touch-ups on the walls and concrete floor of the snack bar and projection room. Water is supplied by a well, which means Dekin needs a permit from the state Department of Health, “which takes a couple of weeks.” Last year there were “even more guidelines,” and because the building lacks heat and the pipes are drained, each year the water has to be tested in the spring to ensure the filters are working.
He also pays $100 each year to have the snack bar, fence and grounds inspected by a building inspector from Utica plus $100 rental fee for the large marquis located on a property on the other side of Route 12. “That’s New York State,” he said. “It’s just a rip off.”
In the old days, the drive-in would draw 300 to 400 people a night; these days, attendance is more likely to be around 100 a night. “Lewis County is pretty dead, with only 27,000 people in the whole county,” said Dekin, noting that the recent closing of a paper mill was an economic blow. Fortunately, he draws from a much wider region, with people, some residing in other states, coming from Brandreth Lake, Old Forge, and other Adirondack resort towns and even down from Canada.
Another drive-in in the vicinity was “torn down and rebuilt,” but Dekin said even if he won the lottery, he doesn’t think he would do the same. “I would have to conform to new regulations and go through drastic changes,” he said. “That’s one reason why it stays the way it is. Plus, I kind of like it that way, because you don’t see this kind of thing anymore.”