Compare & Contrast: Walt Disney’s Pinocchio vs Easy Rider

You don’t spend six years in the Army, work for Stan Lee, Penthouse, and in Christian publishing without picking up a few wild and ridiculous stories to tell, but this one -- the wildest night at the drive-in theater where I worked as a teen -- predates all that.

In many ways, a harbinger of things to come.

First, let me set the scene: 
The theater was located on the outskirts of a medium size town in East Tennessee, roughly three thousand population.  Most people worked on farms or at local factories and retail businesses.  High school held roughly 500 students, there was a small junior college with maybe twice as many enrolled.

Carl was the owner / operator / projectionist of the drive-in.  Good size, spaces for 120 or so cars.  His wife Betty operated the ticket booth, another adult relative ran the concession stand with an unrelated young lady helping, I was the lot attendant, prowling for slip-ins, taking food orders, cleaning up messes.

My first job in show business, what can I say?

Typically we changed the bill in the middle of the week.  A movie would run Sunday to Tuesday, a new feature would start on Wednesday and run to Saturday unless we had a double / triple / quadruple bill on Saturday  night.

That week we booked a Walt Disney double feature Wednesday to Saturday, the wild life documentary Water Birds and the animated feature Pinocchio.

Sunday we scheduled Easy Rider.

Ya gotta understand, that summer Easy Rider was HUGE, boffo box office everywhere.  And while Carl was far from sympathetic to the youth culture of the time, he knew their money folded just as good as the most conservative hardshell Baptist’s.

The Disney double feature did well.  Being a working class town, attendance was okay Wednesday and Thursday, picked up on Friday since families could stay up later and not worry ab out school or work the next day, but Saturday was packed, filling up the lot with cars jammed with hard working, conservative, salt-of-the-earth churchgoing families.

Typically we got the movies the day before they were scheduled to run.  Carl picked up Easy Rider before opening the theater that evening.

I would stay with Betty in the ticket booth, handling the second line of cars on my side of the booth until the second reel of the first feature when I would go out to patrol the lot.

Water Birds runs without incident, the concession stand did land office business, and we sold out and closed admissions by the end of the documentary.

I’m sitting in the booth with Betty, waiting for Pinocchio to begin, when over the speakers we hear Steppenwolf sing: “Gawwwwwddamn the pusher man!”

“Oh, my God!” Betty said.  “Carl’s running the wrong movie!  Go tell him he put Easy Rider on instead of Pinocchio!”

I go charging across the lot to the concession stand / projection booth, a low one-story structure sunk halfway into the ground.  The concession stand occupied the rear portion, there were two restrooms on either side, and between them the entrance to the projection booth itself.

The projection booth was a dark, cramped, hellishly loud and hot room holding two huge arc light projectors, each about the side of a P-51’s engine and just as noisy.  Even in the dead of winter on the coldest sub-freezing nights, Carl worked the projectors in a sweat drenched T-shirt.

I run into the booth and yell, “Carl!  You’re running Easy Rider!”

Now Carl was a proud and contrary individual.  To this day I don’t know if he deliberately chose to run Easy Rider for perverse reasons of his own or if having made a mistake, he just felt too proud to admit it.

He looked at me and said, “I know.”

That flummoxed me for a moment.  I said, “They came to see Pinocchio…”

“They’re getting Easy Rider.”

I shrugged and went back to the ticket boot to tell Betty.  By the time I got there, the exodus from the drive-in was underway, everybody wanting their money back rather than watch Dennis Hopper’s magnum opus.

In less than an hour we sold out then refunded the entire theater.

But wait!  There’s more!

To console their kids, the parents who left the theater went to the A&W Root Beer and Hardee’s located nearby.

High school and college students hanging out there on a Saturday night soon learned Easy Rider was playing a night early at the drive-in and flocked over to see it.

We sold out the theater again, the last cars arriving just as Billy and Captain America get blown away.  They all settled in, expecting Carl to show the movie again since it was his practice to show a movie a second time up to the point where the last car came in.

There they sat, awaiting Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda.

And they got…

Pinocchio.

The lot emptied a second time and we ended up showing Pinocchio to ourselves.  We sold out and emptied the theater twice in once night, with nothing to show for it but a handful of concession sales.

Carl drove me home that night.  To my surprise, he really liked the movie and wished they made more like it.

It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I figured out he liked it because two good ol’ boys blow the hippies away at the end.

© Buzz Dixon