Highlander Drive-In
4331 Antelope Road,
Sacramento,
CA
95843
4331 Antelope Road,
Sacramento,
CA
95843
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Additional Info
Previously operated by: Blumenfeld Theater Circuit
Previous Names: Hi-Lander Drive-In
Nearby Theaters
Originally in North Highlands. Now part of Antelope an unincorporated area of Sacramento. The Hi-Lander Drive-In opened on April 13, 1961 with Cary Grant in “Houseboat”, Dean Martin in “All in a Night’s Work” & Peter Cushing in “Horror of Dracula”. It was closed 1975. Owned by Blumenfeld Theaters. The Highlander Drive-In site is now residences and Walgreens.
Contributed by
James Monroe
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Recent comments (view all 4 comments)
This opened on October 13th, 1961 as the Hi-Lander Drive-In. Grand opening ad posted.
The streets where the drive-in was are named after golden age actors like Hepburn, Garbo, Bogart etc.
Based on Google Maps' city borders, the Hi-Lander wasn’t very close to Sacramento, over four miles away from the city’s nearest corner.
Maps says that the site is across Antelope Road from North Highlands, an unincorporated, census-designated area that was the source of the drive-in’s name and which was contemporaneously used as its location. But Maps says old Hi-Lander site is currently in Antelope, yet another census-designated area.
Anyway, after a big run-in with Sacramento County officials over noise complaints and X-rated movies, the Hi-Lander “shut down in September” 1975, according to its lawyer’s remarks a couple of months later. He assured the district attorney “that it would be used as a storage area instead of a theater.”
Update on the Hi-Lander…BJ Nartker is a frequent YouTube-r who has done short documentaries on the North Sacramento area, and many years ago he did a feature-length documentary on the Sunrise Drive-in in Fair Oaks/Citrus Heights. Years before he conceived the documentary, he took home movie VHS footage of the many drive-ins in the Sacramento valley that had since closed, and the Hi-Lander Drive in was one of those drive-ins represented. You can see this footage as part of a piece Nartker did called “Remember the Sacramento Area Drive-Ins” (just do a YouTube search of it). The footage begins at 7:27 of the video, and it was taken in 1982, seven years after it closed. At the time, the deteriorating screen was still up, the marquee destroyed, and both the box-office and the snack bar/projection screen dilapitated. Again, this is a case of “picture in your mind what it was like to visit”.
No trace of the Hi-Lander remains today, as it is now an area of houses built on streets named after movie stars (a subtle reminder of what the theatre once was).