Shelton’s Skyline Drive-In is Keeping a Bygone Moviegoing Experience Alive

Under the Americana umbrella sits a special moviegoing experience only a drive-in theater can provide.

The number of theaters specializing in the niche has dramatically shrunk since the industry’s mid-century heyday. There were more than 4,000 in the U.S. in the 1950s; today, there are about 300 active locations. The oldest — Orefield, Pennsylvania’s Shankweiler’s Drive-In Theater — has run since 1934.

In Washington, there are five places you can go to park your car in a field in front of a giant white screen, blast your radio, and enjoy a feature film. There’s the Blue Fox Drive-In in Oak Harbor, the Rodeo Drive-In in Bremerton, the Wheel-in Motor Movie in Port Townsend, the Auto Vue Drive-In Theatre in Colville, and the Skyline Drive-In in Shelton.

“The thing that I really like, especially with family movies,” said Skyline owner Thomas Mayes, “(is that) you’ll see big ol’ trucks with thin blue line bumper stickers and American flags, and then you’ll see a little Prius with (a diversity-promoting bumper sticker) … you truly see every slice of humanity. That’s kind of cool. There’s so many subcultures in America, but somehow everybody still loves the drive-in. This is a very common experience; I think that’s what’s special about it.”

He has made an effort to stabilize the business and plans to augment it in ways that ensure the community can keep attending movies outdoors.

Dorothea was a German immigrant who worked at a local film-booking office. That’s where she met the original owner, Fred Thibodeau, who opened Skyline back in 1964.

When Thibodeau’s health began to decline, he entrusted Dorothea to take over the property. She purchased Skyline through a privately held note. After making payments over roughly 20 years, the final payment was sent in last spring, when she passed away.

“Having a German woman owning a drive-in is not usually how this works out,” said Thomas. “She was in the right place at the right time.”

A little later, the Mayes family acquired Shelton Cinemas as well — an addition Mayes said is good for film booking because it means they don’t have to compete with someone else in the area.

Around 2013, movie companies began making the switch from film to digital, which meant independent theaters had to upgrade their equipment as studios stopped distributing movies on 35mm film.

“That was a put-up-or-shut-up moment,” said Mayes.

Skyline faced an estimated $80,000 cost to make the conversion. After raising almost half of the money through earlier fundraising efforts, the theater launched a Kickstarter campaign in 2013 to reach the remaining amount.

Mayes questioned how fellow theater owners who were maybe just holding on, and not making a lot of money year to year, could afford a $40,000 to $50,000 piece of equipment. The easiest answer is what many did: sell the property to developers. The evidence can be seen at the former Star Lite in Lakewood or Valley 6 in Auburn, where a distribution center and an apartment complex now respectively stand.

This all-but-forced technological pivot isn’t the only difficulty drive-in businesses faced over the years. COVID was another hurdle to climb. Even though people were told to stay home, and businesses were forced to indefinitely close or revise their operations, there remained a longing for community. Many drive-in owners wanted their businesses to provide that need.

That’s when the Blue Fox Drive-In’s owner, Darrell Bratt, created a petition that asked then-Gov. Jay Inslee to allow Washington’s drive-ins to reopen, giving the community the ability to share something together again. The petition received more than 80,000 signatures.

“It’s not that we’re going to make a ton of money,” Dorothea Mayes said in a 2020 interview with Kiro 7, “but we’re serving a population that, at this point, has nowhere to go, and we’d love to have them.”

Thomas said that, post-COVID, things weren’t great, not necessarily because of turnout, but because, simply, there just wasn’t a lot of new films coming out, first because of the backlog of the pandemic, then because of the writers strike. There’s been a noticeable bump in business in the last year or so, however — and Mayes thinks it’s because the world has had enough time to get back to business as usual.

Part of Mayes’ plan to keep Skyline going is finding other ways to use the 14-acre property beyond showing movies. The drive-in has hosted swap meets (which he hopes to regularly schedule), added a power pole for live events, and puts on a kids’ event every year.

He’d also like to turn the unused land into an RV or camping space. The business sometimes receives emails from people traveling from places like Seattle and Hoquiam asking if there is somewhere they can stay nearby — and he wants to provide that service.

“If we get our way,” he said, “that would be the next step for the drive-in.”

Mayes is grateful for how much the community cares about keeping drive-in culture alive.

“We feel the love,” he said. “We’re here. We want to keep doing this, because people tell us all the time how meaningful it is.”