Word: missioners
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...slowly set on a recent night in June, 800 cars and a crowd of viewers in lawn chairs pulled up to one of the four screens on the 25-acre green of the Mission Tiki drive-in theater in Montclair, Calif. Lovestruck teens canoodled in back seats. Parents corralled children in minivans. It was a remarkable turnout for a business, born 75 years ago, that has been teetering on the edge of extinction for the past two decades...
...tickets at the Mission Tiki have started selling again, and at $7 per adult and free entry for kids under 10, movie-goers are re-embracing the affordable luxury of a night at the drive-in. "It's a family bargain," says Frank Huttinger, vice president of marketing for De Anza Land & Leisure Corp., the family-owned business that operates the Mission Tiki. "It's quality presentation. Our biggest problem is letting people know that we're still there...
That problem isn't unique to the Mission Tiki. About 400 drive-ins presently operate in the United States, a surprisingly large number in this age of personalized, on-the-go media, but many people don't even know they exist. Today, the industry is just a glimmer of what it was once. Back in the 1950s, at the height of the drive-in era, there were 4,000 theaters showing first-run films - it was a marriage of two great American passions: automobiles and movies. The drive-in appealed to everyone - tired parents, who didn't have to show...
Television, naturally, is largely responsible for the fall of the drive-in, but so are creeping suburbs, rising land values and the seasonal difficulty of operating an open-air business. Drive-in owners often can't rely only on theater income to make ends meet. The Mission Tiki's family manages swap meets to help cover costs. So, the theater's grounds do double duty - market by day; drive-in by sunset, four nights a week...
...Wesley has been recruited into the Fraternity, which its leader Sloan (Morgan Freeman, in another of his God roles) explains is a thousand-year-old sect of killers whose sacred mission is to end the lives of evil people before they can commit their worst crimes: "You kill one, maybe save a thousand." (It's a little like the Pre-Crime Unit in Minority Report.) The team includes a specialist in gun lore (Common) and a fat man (Konstantin Khabensky) who's sharp with knives. But Fox is the star, and in poor, confused Wesley, Sloan believes...