Pleasant Hill Motor Movies
2040 Contra Costa Boulevard,
Pleasant Hill,
CA
94523
2040 Contra Costa Boulevard,
Pleasant Hill,
CA
94523
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Closed on December 1, 1977 and demolished on February 27, 1978.
The pic is from a different Pleasant Hill drive-in: http://www.driveins.org/de-newport-pleasanthill.html
I lived originally at 40 Anelda Drive and the PH Motor Movies was directly behind our backyard. As kids, we’d sneak into the movies and turn on the speakers out near the fences really loud then sit on our roofs in sleeping bags on lawn recliners and have great outdoor movie experiences. The Motor Movies also had a playground below the screen and a little train that would go around a track that took it out through the wall around the backside of the screen, basically parallel to Contra Costa Highway (what it used to be called before I-680 was built) and back through the other side. When we got older and could drive, it was always the challenge to see how many kids you could sneak into the drive-in theater in your trunk. What was so funny about that was that it only cost a “buck a car load” ($1)!
This theater opened in 1947 as the Contra Costa Motor-In. Around 1958 the El Cerrito Motor Movies also operated by R.L. Lippert closed and they took the nice back lit reader boards changed the El Cerrito neon to Pleasant Hill and the Motor-In was now the Motor Movies. The old reader boards were just wooden reader boards lit with flood lights. The theater closed in late 1977 because of re-developement and declining business. Booth details: Motiograph AA with RCA 9030 sound heads and Ashcraft Super Power lamps. Sometime in the last 10 years the picture heads were changed to Century. The car capacity during the later years was a max of 768. If you watch the Drive in scene in “Grease” where Danny sings “Sandy” I would swear it was filmed at the Motor Movies even though I know it wasn’t.
1949 aerial at View link
Here is an aerial view:
http://flickr.com/photos/romleys/2519195323/
One of those drivein theaters that was constructed adjacent to a well-traveled highway (Route 680) and the screen faced the highway. It was a large drivein that played first run as well as 2nd or 3rd run, and some all-night shows. I saw many triple-bill horror flicks at this drivein. The snack bar was cavernous.
When first opened, it was called the Concord MotorIn, and was constructed just outside of Sherman Field, a large airfield.