Outside is a totem pole in tasteful traditional colors.
Update: I visited the place for the first time on Saturday, July 22, 2000. Not only do they still have real speakers, but they have red glow-tops and lights shining down from each pole to the ground. The poles have been newly painted white to stand out against the gravel lot. Most of the speakers were painted red to match the top, but others have name stamps that read like an itinerary of other drive-ins of the area: Midway, Holiday, and Starlite.
I went to the snack bar and asked for Ken Layton, and when he saw me he knew it was me without even asking. (Who else would be looking for him?) He took me up to the booth, which immediately smelled of electronics, like a television studio or a power plant. It must be the vacuum tube amplifiers used for the field speakers. On the wall were snippets of frames left over from movies through the years, including some from the days when the Skyline was an adult theater. (!) I got to see Ken thread up and start the projector, and observed how a platter pays out film from the inside of a reel: an arm regulates the platter rotation depending on of the film is loose or tight. I was hoping the place would be overflowing with old preview trailers that I could take home, but I only saw a few old family film trailers from Disney and other studios, such as a preview for Toy Story 2 that I would have liked.
Because it is a platter operation, Ken had lots of time to show me theater pictures he hasn’t sent me yet, on his laptop computer. He discussed at length how theaters have been chopped up and neglected by bean counters and even incompetent live-theater groups. He explained the economics of multiplex theaters and how single-screen neighborhood theaters can still make money—by being there in the first place and not needing to be built from scratch.
Even though I paid $5 to get in, I didn’t see much of the first movie at all. Later in the second movie Ken got caught up in repairing a speaker top that got bashed in by a truck, so I watched the rest of the film in my car.
View from the top of the screen, probably as a result of the new maintenance and painting done recently, per the article below. Both submitted by Skyline projectionist and drive-in fan Ken Layton.
Box office, submitted by Ken Layton
I took this picture myself, shortly after logging started on the hill behind the screen
Ken Layton found this photo of the Skyline projection booth, probably from the late 1960s. It shows Peerless Magnarc carbon arc lamphouses and Motiograph pedestals.
film-tech.com has pictures, inside and out, of the Skyline; but the wonderful folks at Film-Tech have put in an anti-bookmarking feature that prevents you from reaching that page directly from here.
Now Showing at the Skyline, from NowShowing.com
Opening Announcements (96k) by projectionist Ken Layton. This was the weekend that he had brought in the non-working speakers from the field, so the projection booth was overrun by spiders spending the winter in the speakers. Thus the reference to spiders in the annoucement for "Along Came a Spider"
Closing Annoucements (52k) by Ken Layton. Oops!!
Both audio clips are in non-streaming Real Audio
Update: Opened in 2003 under new management, the same as the Auburn Valley Drive-in. The good news is that they were open seven days a week. The bad news is that Ken Layton says they had the same presentation problems as that at the Valley: shows breaking down, reels run out of order, no fresh food at the snack bar, and so on. The new management has an option to buy the land. Take this theater off the long-term future list
Microsoft Terraserver Satellite Image:
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