Small Hours at the Starlight

The Starlight Drive-In stood a mile east of Kestrel, Nebraska, on the north side of U.S. 30, where the town gave up and the corn and the alfalfa began.

In daylight it was nothing much: a gravel road off the highway, a ticket booth like a tollgate with a striped awning, and then a great fan-shaped field of black cinders, laid out in curved ridges like the rows of a theater, with a post every few yards holding a pair of gray metal speakers on hooks. At the far end stood the screen, a huge white wall of painted boards on a steel frame, four stories high, with STARLIGHT spelled across the top of its back in tall red letters for the highway to see. In the middle of the field stood the concession building, low and square, cinder block painted pale blue, with a hot-dog counter and a popcorn machine and restrooms inside, and on its flat roof, like a small house set on top of a larger one, the projection booth.

That was where Mara worked, that summer of 1962.

Mr. Ansgar Thorsen, who owned the Starlight, had hired Mara in May, after the old projectionist retired to Arizona for his lungs. He had shown Mara up the narrow wooden stair at the back of the concession building, through a door with a sign on it that said BOOTH — NO ADMITTANCE, into a room the size of a farm kitchen, hot as an oven, smelling of machine oil and warm metal and the sharp, clean, electric smell of burning carbon.

"Two machines," he had said, laying a big freckled hand on each of them in turn, the way a farmer touches his horses. "Simplex, nineteen forty-eight. Carbon arc lamps. Twenty minutes of film on a reel, so you run one machine, and when the reel's nearly out you start the other, and you change over on the cue marks so nobody in a car ever sees the join." He showed Mara the little round marks that flashed in the top corner of the picture, twice, near the end of every reel. "First mark, you start your motor. Second mark, you throw the changeover. Miss it, and four hundred people honk at you." He smiled. "You won't miss it. You've got good hands."

There were two small square windows in the front wall of the booth, the ports, one for each machine, and through them the beams went out across the dark field to the screen. Beside them, a third window, larger, with a stool in front of it, looked out over the whole field: every row, every car, every speaker post. In the back wall, over the rewind bench, there was one more, a little square window that looked north, over the back fence and the alfalfa, toward nothing much at all. A projectionist, Mr. Thorsen said, saw everything at the Starlight. That was half the job.