Pickwick Drive-In

The Pickwick Drive-In in Burbank, California, opened on May 12, 1949, at 1100 West Alameda Avenue, on the corner of Alameda and Main. Its marquee promised a million-dollar grand opening with stars of screen, radio and television in person, and the first bill was Red Stallion in the Rockies and The Lucky Stiff. It parked 781 cars and had a playground and a picnic area in front of the screen. A projectionist named Malcolm C. Keele said he built it, and his photographs of the screen tower going up that spring survive. Cal-Pac Theatres ran it first, and Pacific Theatres ran it later. Frank Diaz, an usher when it opened, went on to become a Pacific Theatres vice president.

It sat beside the Pickwick Recreation Center, which had a pool, a bowling alley, an ice rink and riding stables. Those stables help explain its best-known night. In February 1974, Warner Bros. held an early showing of Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles at the Pickwick for people on horseback. A publicist named Marty Weiser came up with it. The theater's own ad called it the world's first movie preview for horses and their riders. Sound came through speakers fixed to the saddles, and a Horsepitality Bar served refreshments. Cars were not the point that night.

With the studios close by, the Pickwick often played itself on screen. It first appeared in He's a Cockeyed Wonder, a 1950 Mickey Rooney comedy, and later in St. Ives with Charles Bronson, an episode of The Rockford Files, and Blue Thunder and Christine in 1983. The drive-in scene in the 1978 film Grease, where John Travolta sings Sandy, was shot there.

The Pickwick closed on September 10, 1989, with Turner and Hooch and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade on the marquee, and it was torn down that October. A shopping center with a grocery store now stands on the site.