Dan's Drive-In Theater

What? Another festival rejection? Is scorn heaped upon you because your epic masterpiece is shot on video and not on film? You probably deserve to have your work seen by an audience larger than just the pre-screeners at festivals.

As a broadcast production professor at Cameron University in southwest Oklahoma, I constantly encourage my students to produce better programming. To gain a larger audience, the students and I decided to show their work by building a drive-in theater. Dan Perrin, a student and farmer, had a large open area in which to hold the event. We had the space to park the cars, but what were we going to do for a screen? Dan graciously volunteered to build the screen. The screen consisted of 4x8-foot sheets of plywood braced together by two-by-sixes. When completed, the screen's dimensions were sixteen feet by twenty feet.

Dan planned to drag the screen over to the barn, flip it over and raise it using the front-end loader on his tractor. This was harder than it sounded. The screen moved and even flipped over easily; however, as Dan raised the screen, two of the supporting legs broke. He cut off the remaining legs and finished raising the screen but it was now shorter than planned. Dan used household caulk to fill in the cracks and scuffs caused by raising the screen and then painted the entire surface with a flat white lat…