Photograph by Martha Williams
I turned off Moreland Avenue into the entrance to Starlight Drive-In, but its neon sign didn’t show me the way. On this dark Friday night in October, the lights in some of the letters were out, spelling in red “A-R-L-I-G-H-T.” I joked to my girlfriend, Sofia: “That’s where we are going—Alright Drive-In.”
I went to drive-ins as a kid in Missouri, and each visit was a memory made with my siblings. We reveled in what our parents’ $5 got us at the concession stand, and played hide-and-seek among the cars. When I moved here for college a few years ago, Sofia, an Atlanta native, introduced me to Starlight. At the time, I didn’t realize the tradition I was joining: a snack bar that often lacked snacks, the smell of weed wafting through the air, headlights that illuminated the screen. We’ve come back a few times every fall, eating takeout in the front seat as we talk one another through horror-movie jump scares.
This year Starlight Drive-In, an Atlanta landmark, quietly celebrated 75 years of operation. Over its seven decades, generations of Atlantans have grown up with Starlight’s double features and low prices. In 2018, Donald Glover chose Starlight for the hometown premiere of season two of his FX show, Atlanta, to honor the place where he’d watched movies as a kid with his family. Today, the drive-in is open seven days a week year-round, with ticket prices at $10 per adult and $1 for kids between five and nine. On weekend days, an expansive flea market takes over the lot.
Starlight’s story is one of survival through adaptation and location. The theater opened with a single screen in 1949, part of the drive-in craze of the era. It soon became the Starlight Twin, with a second screen to accommodate demand. When indoor movie theaters turned into multiplexes in the 1980s, Starlight stayed competitive, adding four more screens to become the Starlight Six. But business slowed in the ’90s and 2000s, as at-home entertainment and theaters inside malls dominated. Drive-ins closed across the country, but Starlight’s less-than-desirable location, surrounded by a truck service depot and a cemetery, with a federal prison nearby, spared it from developers. In 1998, the only other Atlanta drive-in theater, the North 85 Twin, shuttered, leaving Starlight the last of its kind in the city.
On that Friday night in October, Sofia and I arrived for the 8:00 p.m. showing of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. I careened my car over Starlight’s uneven parking lot, full of paved bumps like waves that allow viewers to angle their vehicles up toward the screen. We joined 50 other cars at Screen One and got out to go to the snack bar. I realized I’d forgotten to turn my headlights off and ran back to the car; when I turned back around, I couldn’t see Sofia. The movie hadn’t yet started, and Starlight’s lot, surrounded by the forest, is dark and soundless. My eyes hadn’t adjusted to the night, and I searched for her silhouette between cars and over cracked asphalt bumps. Even when I squinted, the bumps blurred into one another, like an ocean. I thought about hibernation. The lot was mostly empty, yet its bumps made it look alive. I thought about my own childhood memories, Sofia’s, and the thousands of others made there. I never saw the heyday of Starlight, but the waves tell its story: What else could this rising and falling lot be but a drive-in movie theater?
After my eyes finally focused on Sofia, we made our way to the snack bar, but it was closed. We went back to the car and waited for the movie to start, but it didn’t. Around 8:30, a cop let us know that the projector wasn’t working, and we followed a long line of cars to Screen Five. Starlight was living up to my “alright” nickname. Our frustration washed away when Beetlejuice Beetlejuice finally began. “The Juice is loose!” called the radios of dozens of cars, echoing over the waves.
This article appears in our December 2024 issue.
