When Pamela Friend said she was born at Montrose’s Star Drive-In Theatre, she’s hardly exaggerating.
“My parents put me in a cradle in the back room,” she said, wearing one of the theater’s signature tie-dye shirts over her lean frame as she quickly went from task to task in the brightly lit concession stand.
It was hours before the first show, but there was no time to waste. Friend knows in her bones how much effort it takes to keep this place going.
“When I was five, I started running tickets out to the ticket office and stocking candy and popping corn and doing little things that I could do,” she said. “So I've been here forever.”
So has the theater. Friend’s parents opened it in 1950. They had Friend two years later. She started running it — herself — when she was still a teenager.
The Star Drive-In isn’t just a beloved local hangout, it’s the country’s oldest continuously operating drive-in theater that’s still run by its founding family. Friend is its sole projectionist. At the height of summer, when the drive-in is open every night of the week, she sometimes doesn’t leave until the wee hours of the morning. During the day, she works her farm and produce stand.
“But just keep going, like the Energizer Bunny,” she said.
A troupe of tie-dyed teenagers work alongside her. The drive-in has been the first job for generations of Montrose kids, grilling burgers, selling candy and greeting the cars and trucks as they roll into the big gravel parking lot. That evening, folks had started lining up long before the gates opened for the double feature: “Deadpool & Wolverine” and “Twisters,” which had been going gangbusters for many nights already.
Bridger Covington, 7, watched both of the other “Deadpool" movies at home that day today to prepare, but he said he liked being at the drive-in more. What makes it better?
“That it’s outside,” he said. “You get fresher air than inside.”
He was sitting alongside his older sister and 2-year-old brother, who was shouting happily and jumping up and down in their pickup truck bed before the show started. Their mom, Maxine, said if she brought them all to an indoor theater, they’d be running up and down the aisles and joked that probability gives her a lot of anxiety.
“So it's a lot easier to throw them in the bed of the truck and shut the tailgate and just tell 'em to hang out and play within this area.”
They were surrounded by acres of other families, many in camp chairs. At least one group was lounging on an inflatable bed as the screen ran local ads against the colorful desert sunset.
Samantha Peel says it all looks pretty similar to when she was growing up in the 1980s and 1990s. It feels the same, too.
“It's bigger than a movie theater. It's huge. You're in the night sky. It just feels so much more real. It's bigger than you,” she said, sitting in a Deadpool shirt next to her husband Jason in their new convertible.
“I just kind of think of it as it's basically a slice of lost Americana,” he said.
The drive-ins he grew up going to near St. Louis have all closed — an increasingly common story. Once a staple of American summers, they’ve largely died out, though there are just over half a dozen still in operation in Colorado.
When the Peels moved back to Samantha’s hometown after years away, it felt important to make a trip to the drive-in. They were one of the first through the gate and scouted out a cherry spot right in the center of the screen. This is where Samantha Peel first saw “Bambi” and spent the night after prom watching movies until nearly dawn.
Even though Montrose has grown a lot since then, “you feel like it's still home,” she said. “This makes it feel like you're still home.”
The Star is a local institution, one that its owner has seen through decades of challenges, from a tornado blowing the screen down in 1974 to a corn popper catching fire and burning down part of the concession stand. In the 1980s when VCRs came to Montrose, Pamela Friend remembers playing movies to six cars in the desolate parking lot. Then there was that time she had to spend $100,000 on a new digital projection system, then the threat of streaming, then COVID.
But all that was nothing compared to a few years ago when Friend lost both her daughter and her husband within months of each other. Coming back to the drive-in was both comforting and painful, with her regulars trying to offer support.
“Cried a lot at first,” Friend said.
Before her death, her daughter April was going to take over. Now, Friend doesn’t have a plan for the drive-in’s future. She keeps it going for the community. Even though it’s so much effort — backbreaking work, she said — wintertime feels long, lonely and empty without it.
“It is fun to see people step up and say, ‘I've never been to a drive-in!’ and that occurs every night,” she said, before rushing off to get the projection room set up.
After the sky got dark, “Deadpool and Wolverine” blasted onto the screen. Movie-goers grabbed last-minute hot dogs and sodas at the concession stand and cozied up with their kids. For Friend, those moments make carrying on her family business worth it, for now at least.
“But that’s me. I don’t give up easy,” she said.
The Star Drive-In runs weekends through September — two shows a night, just like it’s been for 75 years.
