August 10, 1938: Darkness descended on what would prove to be an inauspicious beginning for a media empire.
It was opening night of the first drive-in theater in New York State. Rain drummed the domed metal roofs of the six hundred cars creeping through the mud of the abandoned airport along the Sunrise Highway in Valley Stream, Long Island, threatening to blur the picture and drown out the dialogue of the feature film the intrepid moviegoers had come to see: Start Cheering, an antic Columbia Pictures musical comedy starring Walter Connolly and Jimmy Durante about a film star who leaves Hollywood for college. Aside from some jelly-legged tap dancing by Hal Le Roy, a few cameos by the Three Stooges, and the spectacle of vaudevillian Chaz Chase eating a book of lit matches, the film didnât have a lot to recommend itânot to mention that it had already been showing at indoor theaters for six months.
But as would often be the case for the drive-in industry for the next half century, the capacity crowd had come to the Sunrise Drive-In as much for the experience as for the movie itself. Coming in off the lonely stretch of highway along the railroad tracks just beyond the New York City limits, they had driven past the glowing marquee beckoning drivers to âSit in Your Carâ and âSee and Hear the Moviesâ for thirty-five cents, past the scrubby evergreens planted to keep outsiders from stealing a glimpse of the screen, past the five-story steel-and-concrete screen splashed with turquoise and terra-cotta. At the entrance, fresh-faced young men in pale jackets, black bow ties, and soda jerk hats guided the cars to their place in the concentric semicircular ramps tilted to ensure that no oneâs Chevy, no matter how big or boxy, blocked anyone elseâs view. These same young attendants went from car to car, delivering refreshments from enormous wooden boxes slung over their shoulders. For weeks leading up to the premiere, the theaterâs developers, the New York architectural and building firm led by Irwin Chanin, had been in the news, touting their latest creation as if it were the eighth wonder of the world.1 The Chanin Organization was already well known for building architectural marvels in Midtown Manhattan, such as the sumptuous Roxy Theatre, one of the largest movie houses in the world when it was completed in 1927, and the Art Deco landmark Chanin Building, the tallest building in Manhattan when it was finished in 1928. So when they turned their public relations machine to promoting the twelve-acre drive-in theater they had carved out of their vast Green Acres suburban housing development, it wasnât hard for them to get most of the press to print that their sixty-by-forty-eight-foot screen was âsaid to be the largest ever madeâ and âon the basis of ground area it may be considered the âlargestâ theater in the New York area.â2 âWorldâs Biggest Movie Screen for Outdoor Theater,â blared a headline in Popular Science, beneath a photograph of a man standing, for scale, like a tiny speck in front of an Art Deco ziggurat.3
But as the premiere approached, the task of drumming up interest in the drive-in fell to a far less known entity: Max Rothstein, a slight, soft-spoken Bostonian with piercing blue eyes, a long face, and a thick sweep of hair that made him look not unlike a movie star himself. Rothstein was the public face of Sunrise Auto Theatre, Inc., a hastily assembled, Boston-based corporation founded earlier that summer, just as the Long Island zoning officials had decided to approve the creation of a drive-in. On July 3, Chanin announced that he had leased the $50,000 theater âfor the long term,â according to the New York Times, to Sunrise, which would operate it. It was quite a coup for a thirty-six-year-old father of two who had neither the money to lease a drive-in nor any experience running one. Nowhere in all the press reports was there any word about how Rothstein came into that money. Not until years later would it emerge that he had a silent partner: Harry âDocâ Sagansky, a Boston dentist-turned-bookie, who at that point was five years into his career as one of the most famous illegal gambling figures of the twentieth century.
âThey were partners together for forty-four years,â said Saganskyâs son Robert Sage. âMy father helped put money into the theaters, starting with the Sunrise.â
But for obvious reasons, Sagansky remained in the background, and so it was left to Rothstein to be the barker. While Chanin, a developer to the core, went for superlatives and grandeur, Rothstein emphasized drive-insâ practicality and accessibility. Drive-ins mainly served the âfamily trade,â Rothstein told the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, with a high concentration of what the paper called âcripples and aged people who are not able to walk into ordinary theaters but who can be brought to the automobile theaters.â4 The Boston-area theaters were particularly popular, Rothstein noted, because they took cars off the street and reduced traffic congestionâa somewhat peculiar pitch for a drive-in located along one of the earliest tentacles of Long Islandâs suburban sprawl. Freedom to smoke and talk through the movie without annoying fellow audience members was, he said, another key advantage.
If it seemed like Rothstein was doing everything humanly possible to erase any mental images of necking teens before they even had a chance to form, thatâs because he was. He was well acquainted with the risks of doing otherwise. He pitched himself to the New York papers as an expert in drive-ins, having âbeen interestedâ in the operation of those that had popped up in suburban Boston in the last couple of years. But what he did not mention was that, less than a year before, suburban Boston had also been the site of one of the first and most ferocious community outcries over a proposed drive-in that the fledgling industry had seen. The previous October, 250 people had packed into the town hall building of Dedham, on the southwest edge of Boston, to protest a proposed drive-in at the intersection of the newly constructed Route 1 and Route 128. The chairman of the board of selectmen of Westwood, an adjoining community, said the proposed theater âwould be a menace and a moral danger to the community.â5 The plans were nixed. (More than a decade later, Rothstein and Sagansky would open up a drive-in on the site, which has since become the luxurious Cinema De Lux multiplex at Legacy Place that serves as a centerpiece of Rothsteinâs descendantsâ theater chain.)
The ad in the local papers for opening night summed up the pitch: âSunrise Drive-In Theatre. The latest thing on Long Island. New, open-air way of seeing the movies. Sit in your own car. No parking problems, no waiting in line, dress as you please, smoke, chat, be comfortable. New show every Sunday, Wednesday & Saturday. 35 cents per personâyour auto free. 8:30 and 10:30 nightly.â
And then the all-important words: âRain or shine.â6
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By 1938, drive-ins were not quite as novel as Rothsteinâs ad copy would suggest. The first one was opened just over the Camden, New Jersey, town line on June 6, 1933, by Richard Milton Hollingshead Jr. shortly after he received a patent for his design of terraced ramps that enabled cars to come and go without distracting their fellow moviegoers.
Hollingshead, the son of an auto products dealer, originally concocted his outdoor movie theater as a mere feature of a more grandiose plan for a Hawaiian fantasy-themed gas station, complete with palm treeâshaped gas pumps, but for perhaps obvious reasons, only the outdoor movie innovation survived. At least a dozen drive-ins popped up over the next five years, but Hollingshead had little luck getting them to pay him license fees for his patent without suing them. Among those tangled up in early litigation were two in the Greater Boston area that had likely inspired Rothstein: the Weymouth Drive-In Theatre in Weymouth, Massachusetts, opened in 1936, and E. M. Loewâs Open Air Theatre in Lynn, Massachusetts, opened in 1937. By the spring of 1938, the trade publication BoxOffice wrote of the New England drive-in industry: âThere are already more law suits on drive-in theatres in this territory than there are drive-in localities.â7
Many years later, Rothsteinâs son Sumner would claim that the Sunrise was âmaybeâ the third drive-in in the country. According to newspapers of the day and subsequent studies, it was probably closer to the fifteenth, with drive-ins in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas, Massachusetts, California, and Ohio predating it.
But what it lacked in novelty, it made up in size and style.
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The Sunrise was the first truly grand suburban drive-in in the country, built for five hundred cars but expanded to accommodate two thousand, with a playground for children and even a Ferris wheel.8
It was part of an ambitious suburban vision by Irwin Chanin and his brother Henry, who in 1936 purchased a 335-acre tract of empty land just beyond the New York City limits and carved it up into a unique âresidential parkâ community of eighteen hundred Cape Cods, colonials, and English manor houses, mostly on cul-de-sacs connected by footpaths, called Green Acres. Both the development and the drive-in were harbingers of a new mode of American life as the country emerged from the Great Depression, one built around middle-class families with disposable income, roomy cars, and easy access to endless miles of freshly built highways. Drive-in theaters would expand modestly to about one hundred across the country by the start of World War II and then stop dead, halted by tire and gas rationing. But as soon as the war was over, they took off, exploding to more than two thousand by the 1950s. Foreseeing this boom, Rothstein told the papers that his company was named âSunrise Auto Theatres,â suggesting there would soon be more of them, even though it was actually named Sunrise Auto Theatre, Inc., in corporate filings and land records.9 And though it took a decade for Rothstein and Sagansky to open their second theater, eventually their ambitions were realized. Despite what a New York Times reporter described as a âtorrential downpourâ and a still-primitive sound technology, the Sunriseâs opening night had been a success.10 The bad weather at the opening had proven that, as the Wave newspaper put it, âeven with the windows of an automobile closed the roof of the car acts as a sounding board to bring inside the sound from the battery of directional amplifiers located atop the 80-foot-high screen. Under all conditions the quality of sight and sound are equal to those in the conventional indoor theatre.â11 The Sunrise Auto Theatre became the cornerstone of a chain of drive-in theaters that would come to dominate the Northeast and, by the end of the 1950s, remake itself with an even more forward-looking name: National Amusements Inc.
Under the leadership of Rothsteinâs son Sumner, who worked at the Sunrise selling popcorn and soda during his teenage years, National Amusements would go on to take control of Viacom Inc. and CBS Corp. and build one of the worldâs largest media holdings.12 Along the way, it has shaped culture in immeasurable ways, defining global pop culture for generations and inventing the reality television format at MTV, giving platform to the leading satirical voices of the last two decades with South Park and The Daily Show, pioneering the very idea of a dedicated childrenâs channel with Nickelodeon, reviving the once-beleaguered CBS to a prime-time powerhouse with hits like Survivor and The Big Bang Theory, and showing Hollywood that critical acclaim and commercial success need not be mutually exclusive with hit movies like Titanic, Forrest Gump, and Braveheart.
It would turn Sumner Redstone into one of the richest men in the world, with a Beverly Hills mansion, girlfriends half his age, and a Rolodex of Hollywood royalty for dining companions. And ultimately, control of it would pass into the hands of Sumnerâs daughter, Shari, and her children amid one of the greatest boardroom battles that corporate America has ever seen. But before any of that could happen, Max Rothstein would have to become Mickey Redstone.
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Max Rohtstein was born on April 11, 1902, in Boston, the fifth of ten children raised by Morris and Rebecca Rohtstein, who were part of the great wave of Jewish immigrants fleeing rising anti-Semitism and desperate poverty in East...
