Sunrise Drive-In
750 W. Sunrise Highway,
Valley Stream,
NY
11581
750 W. Sunrise Highway,
Valley Stream,
NY
11581
8 people
favorited this theater
Showing 26 - 50 of 65 comments
I wish someone, ANYONE had a photo of the small amusement park that was directly under the screen at the Sunrise Drive-In at Valley Stream. There were about five or six small rides and rocking horses on a spring that parents got to use with their kids BEFORE the movie began. Once the movie was ready to start the amusement section was closed and everyone had to return to their cars or concession stand. How about it guys and gals from my era, anyone have a picture of this? Email me at if you do. John
Here is a 1966 aerial image.
It looks like the drive-in’s final film was The Exorcist on the weekend of May 18th-20th, 1979, less than seven months before the Sunrise Multiplex opened for business.
Nice ad Warren.
I loved the sentence,
“$0.35 per person, your auto free"
I wonder how many people arrived in the trunk?
Thank you Warren for that interesting posting of The former Sunrise drive in, you are quite correct about the movies shown there, many of them were in their fourth or fifth runs. I recall seeing all of The Planet of the Apes series there. Despite that, it was always a treat to visit the drive in and see a movie with the family in the familiar surroundings of our car.
Ed Solero, Re:, The second feature being risque, being a pre teen at that time, If I was lucky to stay awake towards the end of the first feature, my mother would pass back the blankets and pillow, great memories indeed.
All members of my family were movie fans, but one of the most special times I had with my family was at the Sunrise, my father had a huge 63 Chrysler Newport, with an equally huge trunk, and of course a large backseat.The Sunrise was a comfortable drive in, and only one of two I ever visited. My experience there was when I was young, and have so many fond memories of it. My mother, who would make food, especially fried chicken,and stow it in the trunk, along with canned soda and those cheese wafer snacks that they still make today. I remember those tin can speakers, the large hill the car would sit on,the intermission ads for the concession stand, which were somewhat campy,and my favorite,the playground in front of the screen.
Ad for Drive In on Sunrise Highway in 1964:
http://snackbar-confidential.blogspot.com/
I love how a G-rated main feature was paired with an R-rated supporting film. As I recall, this was quite customary in the ‘70’s – particularly at Drive-In theaters. At least at the Drive-Ins you might reasonably expect the kiddies to fall asleep in the backseat before the 2nd feature got too risque!
I saw this double bill here
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Check out this block ad for Sunrise & Whitestone Drive-Ins. They were not open all winter like they were later on when they advertised electric heaters. Plus they bragged about letting the car in for free
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Thanks B'kylnJim… Appetite whetted! Poor Willis W. Smith! The little man – as ever – trampled under the corporate foot. I hope Hollingshead cashed in to his satisfaction. I fondly remember those intermission films! Sometimes that countdown clock wouldn’t move nearly as fast as I wanted. By the time I remember going to the Sunrise in the 1970’s those little films were chewed up pretty badly – I bet the countdown clock was off by more than just a few minutes due to the amount of dropped frames over the years. I remember the pizza at the Sunrise concession stand was about the worst slice of crap I’d ever tasted in my life! It consisted of a rectangular crust that seemed to be made of sheetrock, a dollop of brownish sauce and a smattering of shredded mozzarella. Sometimes the crust was so brittle, that a single bite would cause the slice to crack in half resulting in sauce spilt in your lap and the rubbery cheese topping hanging from your mouth after having slid off the sauce in one piece. Oh wait, was that the pizza in the Jamaica High School lunch room? My memories are so fuzzy!
EdSolero, while I still have a copy of Jay Allen Sanford’s “Intermission” handy, I thought I’d post several generic excerpts here for the Drive-In aficianados and perhaps whet your appetite for the complete timeline:
1932: Richard Milton Hollingshead Jr., a chemical engineer and oil and grease salesman, conducts his first experiment in outdoor viewing by nailing a bedsheet between two trees and putting a 1928 16mm movie projector on the hood of his car. He designs a ramp system to angle parked cars upward and tests the effects of rain on the windshield by using lawn sprinklers. By August, Hollingshead is ready to patent his idea (#1,909,537).
1938: Hollingshead sells his patent to Willis W. Smith, who franchises it and requires drive-ins to pay royalties. However, Loew’s Theaters (owned by MGM pictures) convinces a Boston circuit court that a ramp built into the ground isn’t an invention, it’s landscaping, and Hollingshead’s patent becomes unenforceable. With drive-ins now public domain, the industry now undergoes a growth spurt.
1955: RCA sells a complete drive-in package (with its own financing), including a sound system, projection equipment, and lights to mark the parking-lot pathways.
1957: Concession stands generate important revenue, as do “free for children” admission policies (the latter heavily protested by the film industry, which feels this “cheapens” their prestigious product). Most drive-ins utilize fondly recalled intermission films featuring singing snacks, dancing hot dogs, and countdown clocks, popularized by filmmakers at the Filmack Company.
1958: The U.S. has approximately 4000 drive-ins, while Canada has around 40. Quebec has none because the province has banned them on the advice of the Catholic Church, which calls ozones “pits of iniquity and sinful excess.”
1960: In Texas, a few drive-ins have horseback hitching posts. The Theater Motel in Brattleboro, Vermont, rents rooms facing the screen and wired for sound.
[Lots more through present day. Enjoy! Thx, Jay!]
[Rats! I hit the #@%&!?* “Submit” button too soon…]
Ed, last month in a local paper was a superb re-cap of drive-ins in San Diego County, all but two of which are gone. Author Jay Allen Sanford has provided The Reader’s archive link on the Campus Drive-In page (10460) for anyone who’d care to read it. More importantly, he also listed his e-mail addy for the nationwide timeline history of drive-ins, which was not included in the paper’s link. He’ll send the text to anyone who requests it. The Quebec/Catholic Church story alone is worth the effort.
Love those ads, Ed! The only ones to jumpstart my brain were “Parrish” (Troy Donahue, last seen as Merle, the pathetic boyfriend of Connie Corleone in “Godfather II”), “Village of the Damned” (well done chiller by the Brits) and “Flipper” (whom I always remember whenever I order Mahi Mahi). “Larry of Batavia” (almost 4 hours of it) was excellent in any format, but I preferred to see that in NYC upon its initial release.
I cannot recall the name of that Port Jeff Drive-In, but I suspect any heaters they may have had were on the fritz. Never went back…
Some other ads from the early ‘60’s… Any of these jog your memory Jim?
Daily News 9/21/63
LI Star Journal 11/23/63
LI Star Journal 11/25/63
And for good measure, at the bottom of this 1978 clipping, the Sunrise is listed as showing Neil Simon’s PG-rated romantic comedy “The Goodbye Girl” paired with the sordid R-rated 1975 adaptation of Jacqueline Susanne’s “Once is Not Enough”:
Daily News 1/25/78
Here’s a ‘64 vintage ad, BklynJim, to compliment your last post:
LOA – LI Star Journal 5/18/64
So, “Lawrence of Arabia” hit the drive-in circuit 18 months after its initial release. “Amazon Trader” is listed on imdb.com as a 41 minute short feature. Was the general release print of LOA significantly shorter than the roadshow version? Even with teh 20 minutes edited after the London premier, the film ran over 200 minutes. That makes for over 4 hours at the drive-in for this particular show.
“Free Elec. Heaters” advertised at the bottom of the ad.
My first experience with a drive-in theater was during the summer of ‘61. Neighbors on the block were bigtime movie aficianados and knew that the Sunrise was just over the Queens line in Valley Stream. We got to see the sprawling re-make of Edna Ferber’s “Cimarron,” with Glenn Ford and Maria Schell. (Was Whit Bissell in THIS one, too??? He may have been!) A bit on the long side, and too lengthy a timespan (these epics were Ferber’s forte in novels, such as “Giant” and “Ice Palace”), it still held my interest overall. And the Sunrise was a fun place for all the nuances involved. (The URL posted just above is a hoot! Large thx, RobertR!)
I later learned the downside of drive-ins in ‘64, out Port Jefferson way. Never trust any theater’s car heaters, especially in March. Our breath condensed on the windshield and instantly froze!
The one I just posted above is demented if you think about putting cartoons about people breaking into houses. Your at the drive-in to relax and then you start thinking about your house LOL
This one is awesome !!
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The Sunrise always ran these
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B. O. Bill… No it wasn’t “Ulysses.” It was set in the 18th or 19th century and was made on a more modest scale and budget then that much older film. Actually, I just flipped over to IMDB.COM to figure it out (don’t know why I didn’t think of that earlier) and the film is “Scalawag” from 1973 (which makes sense on the bottom of a double bill with 1974’s “Golden Voyage of Sinbad”). The movie is described as Treasure Island set in the Wild West — “He’s Long John Silver and Jesse James rolled into one!!!” Apparently, it was also a musical — not that I recollect any one breaking out into song, but as I said, my memories are fuzzy. And odds are I was fast asleep in the backseat long before the film was over.
EdSolero—
I wonder whether your memory of a movie with Kirk Douglas was of “Ulysses,” with Sylvana Mangano and Tonyt Quinn— that would have been a great Sunrise Drive-In movie!
This drive in, built by Michael Redstone, was the beginning of what would become National Amusements.
Flea Market, well at least there is some remnant.
I saw a few films here while we lived in nearby Laurelton, Queens when I was a pre-teen. I remember seeing The Omen here in ‘76 as well as The Golden Voyage of Sinbad in '74. I wish I could remember the names of the supporting features. If I’m not mistaken, the 2nd film with Sinbad was a movie with Kirk Douglas where he played a pirate who was stranded on a tropical isle somewhere… Very hazy memories. I remember playing in the small playground at the base of the screen and then the sound of car-horns honking to summon us back to our parents when the movie started to play. Sometimes they’d start those movies before the sky was dark enough – particularly deep in the summer. I can recall straining to see what was going on for the first 5 or 10 minutes of The Omen.
I also remember a re-release of The Exorcist being among the last films to play here.
My last memory of this place is of the partially demolished structure that had the screen on one side and the neon signage on the other. Someone had scrawled “Goodbye Cruel World” in large letters with a can of spray paint on the side that faced Sunrise Highway. The Flea Market that had been held by day in the Drive-In parking lot for years and years is still taking place every weekend, last I knew.