Totowa Drive-In

Bill, I also have work to do which unfortunately keeps me off the site for hours at a time. So someone might post a cool ad and by the time I get back to the site, it’s off the recent comment listing. And another thing is my company’s firewall prevents me from viewing these ads at work. I have to write down where they’ve been posted and take a look when I get home. What’s so cool is that the people posting these ads are doing them for the places I grew up with on Long Island AND where I now live (northern NJ). I get the best of both.

What I like best about the ads are the ones that are personalized by the theater owners or managers, with ad copy specific to the movies being shown. Like these for the Century’s Paramus and Pearl River Theaters:

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I too enjoy seeing the old newspaper ads, and am in agreement regarding the inability to keep track of recent postings made to existing theater entries. In fact, a couple of weeks ago I emailed the site editors the suggestion of adding a “more comments” link underneath the ten theaters on display in the margin (New Theaters and Updated Theaters have this option, so why not the Recent Comments, especially since the Recent Comments is the most popular of those three categories). This way, a longer list can be viewed which is helpful to those of us who do not live on the site 24/7. One visit a day or even every now and then would provide an opportunity to see what recent comments have been made. The way it is set up now, once a theater’s latest comment becomes the eleventh most recent comment, you’re out of luck.

A couple ways of getting around this: (1) select the email option so that when someone replies you’ll know about it (this applies only to those threads in which you contributed), and (2) go to your own profile (or someone elses) and click the theaters listed in an attempt to see if any new posts have been made.

Re the newspaper ads… Between Bill Kallay and myself we have hundreds of these things, some simply for our collection and most because of some particular form of research. I find it better to make a photocopy rather than simply taking hand-written notes while the microfilm is loaded (though this method is more expensive and results in a space and filing issue). We have ads for every advertised 70mm release over the past 50 years for the New York and Los Angeles regions plus many ads from other special process and roadshow type films and lots of theater grand openings (and scattered ads from other regions).

Bill and I never figured on posting these things, but if there’s sufficient interest…

Still open as of 1971 – thanks again Bill:
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Approx. address for this drive-in was 244 U.S. 46.

Part of the drive-in is occupied by Hoffman La Roche Printing.