mitch_waldow's Blog

This is the first entry of the first blog I’ve ever written. I can’t promise it’ll be historic, but it will have a bit of history in it.

I’m going to tell you how the place where we tv folks work has a connection to surfers and the movies. And there’ll be an archaeological angle to it. – sort of. We’ll visit a place that exists in only two locations: peoples’ memories and archivists’ vaults.

I work at Fox Television Center, near Bundy Drive and Olympic Boulevard in West Los Angeles. If we were to set the ‘Way Back Machine to 1972, my desk would be about 20 yards from the back fence of a drive-in movie theater. Not just any drive-in, but the Olympic Drive-In, with its 775 parking spaces facing that Bundy and Olympic intersection. With a giant screen in front of them, of course.

On the traffic side of that screen, drivers saw a painting of two surfers, a man and a woman, perpetually riding a stucco wave.



Ahh, the Olympic. Never the ideal venue for critical moviegoers, but little ones and teenagers sure loved it. I must have gone there at least 100 times. The drive-in experience was just that – an experience. I think the last pictures that played there were hot rod flicks. Didn’t matter. They could’ve been running The Greatest Story Ever Told and at the Olympic it would still seem like a car flick, because through half the picture all you’d hear were engines. But that’s a key part of the drive-in experience.

In November, 1972 it was announced that the Olympic would be closing. The real estate was just too valuable for a drive-in. I had to take some pictures for posterity. I especially wanted to get some tight shots of that big mural. When the photos came back, I noticed how oddly proportioned the surfers appeared. It was the way they looked on their boards. I’m sure our own Rick Dickert, Carlos Amezcua and a few of our other resident surfers might have some thoughts on that.



I took those pictures because I realized that drive-in theaters in Southern California were on their way out. I wanted to document as many of them as I could. Especially this one. Little did I know that more than 35 years later I’d be sitting at a desk, at close to the same location where my car would have been – somewhere in the far back row – writing about it.

And the archaeological angle? Several years ago I picked up a couple of pitted, banged-up drive-in speakers – the kind you’d hang on your car’s window. Now they’re hanging on a wall in my garage. Every time I see them I think of the Olympic.