Jo’burg loses its ‘passion pit’

Communist Alert! Johannesburg’s Top Star drive-in has closed after 48 years and will literally vanish without a trace over the next three years.

Remember, without eternal vigilance, it can happen here.

Joe Bob Briggs, the cult drive-in movie critic of Grapevine, Texas, concluded his reviews with a paragraph like that whenever a drive-in died to make room for a ‘six-screen indoor-bullstuff puke-plex”.

The last flik I checked at the Top Star was Sweeney!, which www.imdb.com says came out in 1977. Considering I haven’t been to the Top Star in nearly 30 years, I can’t claim to be filled with grief. Sweeney! was a film spin-off of a BBC series the SABC dubbed into Blitspatrollie. My parents were huge fans and wanted to see what the actors sounded like in their original cockney. The reason this movie stuck in my mind is it was cited as a major influence by cop-turned-bank-robber André Stander. It never inspired me to do anything great.

I’m no drive-in guy. I’ve never gotten my parents’ generation’s fetish about wanting to do everything in a car. Statistically, nearly everyone my age was conceived in the back of a car, invariably at a drive-in.

As a kid, I couldn’t understand why eating out meant the White Pigeon Roadhouse where fine dining was a waiter clipping a tray on the driver’s door.

Going to the movies meant the drive-in. This involved a sordid business of hiding in the boot with a horde of other kids. This was partly to evade the age-restriction police, and also because it was before the days of charging a flat rate per car. Once word got around that a family was going to the drive-in, every brat in the neighbourhood invited him-or herself along. So to keep things affordable for pa, kids got sneaked past the ticket office in the boot.

None of those 2 to 18 age restriction fliks had any ill effect on us six-year -olds. Apartheid censors cut all the nudity out and we didn’t watch the violence. We were too busy running around spying on other kids getting conceived in the backs of cars.

For those of you who mourn the Top Star, take consolation from its noble death. Some say drive-ins declined because they abandoned their specialty low-budget skop, skiet en donner for mainstream block-blusters. The Top Star’s last picture show was Running Scared, which, from its imdb.com description, sounds like a cert for Joe Bob Briggs’s four out of four stars. The Motion Picture Association of America slapped an R-rating on it ‘for pervasive strong brutal violence and language, sexuality and drug content”.

This flik met all four of Joe Bob’s criteria for an ace drive-in movie right there.

Furthermore, the Top Star did not die to make way for any ‘multi-screen barfo-plex”. Its new owner, JSE-listed DRDGold, expects to extract four tons of gold from the five million tons of yellow sand in its underlying mine dump. Clearing the mine dump will open valuable real-estate space in Selby.

It is also likely to raise property prices in the southern suburbs which in the past were blighted by the fine dust from surrounding mine dumps. I’m sure Joe Bob would agree that far from being a ‘Communist Alert!”, the Top Star’s demise is a victory for capitalism.

I have just one word for anyone who insists on getting weepy eyed over the Top Star: Velskoen. The Velskoen is now Johannesburg’s sole surviving drive-in, probably giving this city one more drive-in than Grapevine, Texas, now has.

Though columnist John Bloom still uses the pseudonym Joe Bob Briggs, he has long stopped writing in the persona of a redneck enthusing about R-rated zombie chainsaw-fu kak. The datelines of his recent columns are New York rather than Grapevine and are stock liberal politics. His earlier drive-in reviews are very funny and can be read on the web at www.joebobbriggs.com.

As someone who thinks the only good drive-in is one turned into a parking lot for a mall, preferably one with a Cinema Nouveau multiplex, I asked for comment from two people who might care — Joe Bob Briggs and Jeremy ‘Ag pleez deddy won’t you take us to the drive-in” Taylor.

Unfortunately, neither responded by deadline. Taylor seems to be doing the Chicago folk circuit at the moment, and his United States agent Rich Ball sent me this: ‘Sorry to hear about the Drive-In. We don’t have many of them left here either. Time was when fundamentalist preachers railed against them as dens of iniquity and passion pits. God has taken about half a century to answer their prayers. Well, God does move in mysterious ways …”