Barry Floyd; owner, Stardust Drive-In
Barry Floyd was with his family at the old Sumner Drive-In up in Gallatin one night in 1998. That theater, built sometime around 1950, has since been demolished, as have many of the old relics.
“They bulldozed it down, cut a road through it and called it Memory Lane,” says Floyd of the Sumner Drive-In. “They did! And they built a car wash and a liquor store there.”
But on this particular night back in ’98, Floyd had brought his wife and their two nieces to see the X-Files film. While they were sitting in the back of his pickup waiting for the movie to start, Floyd got what he calls a wild-hair idea.
“While we were waiting for the movie to start I went, ‘You know, if I owned a drive-in, at least I’d mow the grass,’ ” he recalls. “Or, ‘If I owned a drive-in, I’d fix that hole in the bottom of the screen.’ Or, ‘I’d actually put doors on the bathroom stalls.’ I just kept thinking about it all night long. ‘How hard could it be?’ And we were pulling out that night, and I turned to [my wife] Dawn and said, ‘What if we owned a drive-in?’ And she said, ‘You’re nuts.’ I said, ‘Well, yeah, but what if we owned a drive-in?’ … About four years later, she said, ‘Well, do it or quit talking about it.’ ”
So he did. Floyd — who also works as a civil engineering designer, and bears a mild resemblance to character actor Stephen Root in his younger days — opened the Stardust Drive-In in Watertown, Tenn., in 2003. These days, there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 operational drive-in movie theaters in the country, and roughly a half-dozen of those are in Middle Tennessee. Aside from Stardust, they include: Sparta Drive-In; the Moonlite Drive-In in Woodbury; the Macon Drive-In in Lafayette; the Hi-way 50 in Lewisburg; Pink Cadillac Drive-In in Centerville; and Montana Drive-In in Estill Springs. Each of those is about an hour drive or more from Nashville.
But on a traffic-free evening, you can make it to Watertown in 45 minutes or less. It’s a gorgeous drive, too, particularly once you take the Sparta Pike exit off I-40, the setting sun behind you as you pass rows of picket fences and pastures dotted with cows. The Stardust itself is a sight to behold as well, its two 60-by-25-foot screens facing one another a few hundred yards apart, a concession building in the middle. Stardust has what are known as microvicinity transmitters that broadcast the audio for the films on two separate frequencies — one FM frequency for one screen, another for the other.
On the Sunday evening I drive down to visit, Stardust is showing Avengers: Endgame and Shazam! on one screen, and a computer-animated box-office bomb by the name of UglyDolls (by most accounts, a stinker) on the second. The second screen was added in 2005, and Stardust converted from 35 mm to digital projection in March 2013. For the first few weeks of the season, they’re open only on weekends. But starting Memorial Day weekend, they’re open seven days a week, and that’ll last until Metro schools start back, sometime in August.
By the looks of the stream of folks rolling up for the Marvel-DC double-feature on screen one, Stardust will do plenty of business on the night I visit. Between its two separate lots, Stardust can fit somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 cars total, and from time to time, it hits max capacity. They’re doing well. But Floyd’s dream of opening a drive-in almost didn’t come to fruition at all.
After years of research, traveling to drive-ins throughout the Southeast and beyond, Floyd and his wife bought 12 acres off Carthage Highway. But when they went before the county board of zoning appeals, dozens of people showed up to protest. The protesters, by Floyd’s recollection, said, “All they’re gonna show is porn!” and “What’s gonna keep these people from leaving the drive-in at night and coming across the street and swimming in my pool!” He was flummoxed. He tried again with a different property in Wilson County, which had previously been a drive-in, but his plan was once again met with resistance. “The same 80 people showed up to protest — ‘I don’t wanna see no 50-foot naked women right out my kitchen window!’ ” He’s not sure why people were so convinced he’d be showing skin flicks. He says folks went on and on about ruined property values, showing up with signs that read, among other things, “Stop the drive-in,” “Save our neighborhood” and “Protect our children.”
News of the protests made it to NewsChannel 5, and Watertown’s mayor and chamber of commerce president saw the report. “That was on Friday,” says Floyd. “Monday night, the chamber of commerce president from Watertown called us at home and said, ‘Why don’t y’all come to Watertown tomorrow night, and sit down and talk to me about the drive-in?’ We got down here, and he rolled out a map and said, ‘Wherever you want to put it, we’ll make it happen.’ ”
And so, after plenty more planning and work, they did. It can be a challenge sometimes, Floyd explains, competing with theaters that offer things like online ticket sales, stadium seating and IMAX features. But spots like Stardust are still around, he says, because they can offer something the corporate cineplexes can’t.
“When I walk out in the field and see car tags from Davidson County and Williamson County and Sumner County, I know every single one of those people drove past four or five other movie theaters to get here,” says Floyd. “They’re coming here not just for the movie — they’re coming here for the drive-in experience. The movie’s a plus.”
