The Ritz Theater in downtown Marianna went up in flames in the darkness of the early morning hours during early March 1977. The firefighters had to wait after they knocked open the front doors until the stampede of terrified wharf rats finished fleeing the burning building. There is a reason all of us school kids called it The Ratz Theater.
When the fire was extinguished, Marianna had only one movie screen left: The Double D Drive-in on Highway 90 on the west end of town. In the days before DVDs and streaming, it was the drive-in or motor 30-someodd miles north to Dothan, Alabama, for a cinema fix. The drive-in would have to do when I got desperate for movies.
Scared witless in North Florida
I had been to the drive-in once before. My older brother, Randall, smuggled me in hiding under a blanket in a Toyota Land Cruiser when the hard R-rated “The Exorcist” (1973) film version finally made it to Marianna. I had read the Peter Blatty novel, so how shocking could the screen adaptation be? How I talked Randall into letting me tag along as a stowaway on his date, I will never know.
“The Exorcist” movie was scary as pluperfect hell. A young girl my age was taken over by an ancient demon. Flying furniture. Loss of bladder control at a party. Medical tests complete with spewing blood. When Linda Blair did her crucifix thing and turned her head 180 degrees while saying some unholy things, I wanted to go home.
Yet my foolish male pride would not allow me to show fear in front of Randall’s female date. I laughed in a nervous trill. She must have thought I had gone looney tunes, and the demon had jumped into my body.
Audience participation
After The Ratz burned to the ground, I became a regular at The Double D. I remember watching the bloodbath finale of “Taxi Driver” (1976) and wondering who this Martin Scorses director might be and would he make anymore pictures.
I took a date, Julie Brandon, to see a double feature of “The Kentucky Fried Movie” (1977) and “Car Wash” (1976). We laughed until our faces hurt. She a;so came along again to watch the prom-date massacre “Carrie” (1976), still my fave Brian De Palma flick, since Julie had been my prom date. The gotcha ending took years off our lives.
The final drive-in date I had with Julie arrived when the proto-slasher flick “The Town That Dreaded Sundown” (1976) finally wandered to North Florida in the late spring of 1977. The independently financed feature was based on a real serial killer who attacked students around the Texarkana border town in the late 1940s.
The killer wore a cloth-bag hood over his head. The most gruesome murder in the movie arrived on prom night (naturally) when the killer catches up with a female trombone player. The maniac tied her to a tree and then taped a pocketknife to the trombone slide. In the movie, the blade sequence really took its time.
Unbeknownst to us, as Julie and I were glued to the grisly trombone torture business, my classmate Brennan Glover slowly crept up to Julie’s passenger window. Brennan wore a hood identical to the killer’s covering. When the stabbing began on screen, Brennan jumped up and scared the grits out of us.Julie began screaming.
She may still be screaming these many years later.
On the ropes
Drive-ins began to slowly disappear by the time I entered college. The demise was thanks to a combo platter of reasons: the rise of cable TV, VCRs in every home, multi-screen cineplex choices, property values and changing taste in filmgoing habits.
Most of the drive-ins clinging to business made money on the side by becoming flea markets on Saturdays and drive-in churches on Sundays, anything to hold on.
The remaining handful of drive-ins had something of a resurgence when the COVID pandemic hit in 2020. Families felt safe sealed in their cars but were still out of the house, thank you God.
The last flick I caught at The Double D was the Robin Williams-Walter Matthau buddy comedy “The Survivors” (1983). Never heard of the story about two crime-addled New Yorkers who travel to a survivalist training camp in Vermont? That’s because it’s a laugh-free slog.
The Double D did not survive much longer.
Death at the drive-in
These days the property where The Double D used to be is a funeral home.
I know because the funeral home handled my father’s visitation and cremation in 2012. How fitting. The man who taught me to adore Universal horror pics (“Frankenstein,” “The Wolf Man,” “The Mummy,” etc.), sought out any movie starring Peter Sellers and thought the Errol Morris documentary “Vernon, Florida” (1981) explained the mysteries of North Florida got prepped for death at a former movie drive-in.
Roll final credits, indeed.
Months after my father’s passing, I remembered I saw the Burt Reynolds black comedy “The End” (1978) at The Double D one summer night. My date, Kim Jackson, was not a Reynolds fan but the movie was a departure for Reynolds, who was at the peak of his good ol’ boy Bandit fame.
He starred as a real estate agent in California who is told he has months to live thanks to a fatal blood disease. For the rest of the movie, he unsuccessfully tries to kill himself with help from a murderous mental patient.
At the end of “The End,” Reynolds swims out to sea with the intent to drown himself. Right before he is about to sink into oblivion, he decides he wants to live. In a voiceover, he barters with God. He promises to give a high percentage of his earnings to the church. As he gets closer and closer to shore, the percentages go down. The film ends with the mental patient chasing Reynolds down the beach trying to kill him.
My father would have loved it.
Mark Hinson is a former senior writer at The Tallahassee Democrat. He can be reached at mark.hinson59@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: The drive-in filled a void before it morphed into something else
Reporting by Mark Hinson, Guest columnist / Tallahassee Democrat
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