n. An impromptu and unauthorized drive-in movie theater, particularly one set up in an unused urban space where the movie is projected against the side of a building.
2017
Drive-in theaters have come a long way since the outdoor Theatre de Guadalupe in New Mexico first welcomed cars to join seated crowds at screenings in 1915. But decades of growth up through the 1950s and 60s gave way to decline in the 70s and 80s. A recent “guerrilla drive-in” movement, however, has begun to reinvent the concept, using new technologies to create mobile open-air theaters in the hearts of cities.
2015
Jeff Hull, an artist who owns a production company in San Francisco, came up with the idea for Oaklandish in the late 1990s. He wanted to create an ongoing public art project dedicated to uniting the city…He hosted guerrilla drive-in movies in abandoned parking lots where he would screen documentaries about Oakland.
2009
The roots of the guerrilla drive-in movement has been traced to Santa Cruz, Calif., where Wes Modes started a collective to screen outdoor movies around 2001.
2001 (earliest)
Combine the exacting bad taste of “Mystery Science Theater 3000" with an abiding love of vanishing Americana. and you've got Atomic Shock Theater. The group's Guerrilla Drive-In Series has featured such classic B-movie fodder as the moonshine-and-muscle-cars epic “Dixie Dynamite” and George Romero's “Night of the Living Dead."