The Best Place in the World: Silent Running at the Drive-in, 1972
By GW McCandless
You know when I was a kid, I put a note into a bottle, and it had my name and address on it. And then I threw the bottle into the ocean. And I never knew if anybody ever found it.
— Lowell Freeman, Silent Running, 1972
What is it about the movies we see as kids?
What is it that can make our memories of them so powerful?
In the summer of 1972, my family got into our car and went to the drive-in. I was nine.
What remains of that night in my memories is fragmentary and dream-like, but so powerful that I’ve carried the experience with me for 48 years.
Silent Running, a beautifully filmed outer space epic produced on a shoestring budget of a million dollars — about six million 2020 dollars — was directed by the special effects master Douglas Trumbull. It starred Bruce Dern.
The movie is the story of a man’s desperate, ill-fated attempt to save Earth’s last remaining forest. Looking back, I can see how Silent Running shaped me, instilling a life-long love of science fiction and ushering me out of the protected cocoon of childhood into the shocking, free-fall uncertainty of adults.
Childhood Drive-in Memory Fragment 1
I am in the front passenger seat. My cold can of root beer is in the plastic cup holder hung on the side door. A bowl of popcorn sits in my lap. At some point I’m pretty sure my mom will be passing up candy bars from the back seat. I’m watching pirouetting ice cream bars and an announcer is all excited about Mr. Dilly, available at the concession stand. Mr. Dilly is a pickle. A big pickle! On a stick! Wow! There’s only three minutes left before the show! It’s getting dark. This is the best place in the world.
Television can be great, but it’s an activity, a thing that you can do. Movies are an event. And, when you’re a kid in 1972, drive-in movies stand alone as a super special event, ranking right up there with going on vacation and birthdays.
I have this image in my mind of our local newspaper, back then still important and still made of actual paper. My parents are holding the paper open and looking at the Show Clock, the only way besides calling a theater to find out what was playing. They tell me and my brother we’re going to the drive-in!
But our family, like many I imagine, didn’t just go to the drive-in. You have to prepare. There are things to gather: pillows, blankets, lawn chairs, the cooler. Things to do: popping popcorn, selecting drinks, picking up candy bars at the drugstore. And then we’re there.
From a distance, I see the giant screen. I can still remember their different names, The Preston, The Crescent, The Kenwood, The Twilight Theater.
Then waiting in the line of cars at the entrance to get in while my dad tells about how his friends snuck into the drive-in riding in the trunk! Crazy!
There are all the deliberations about where best to park in the filling rows of cars. We pull up onto our graded spot. Hand roll down the windows and maneuver to our preassigned positions. My dad hangs the metal-gray, grilled speaker on the driver’s side window, and music and the announcer’s resonant voice pour into the car.
It isn’t fully dark yet, so the images on the monolithic screen, that towers with all the power and mystery of the obelisk from 2001: A Space Odyssey, aren't clear. But I can make out every imaginable form of animated food — holding hands, dancing and singing, with the announcer enjoining us to, “hurry on over to the concession stand.” If you look at the bottom of the screen, you can see kids briefly appear and then disappear as they swing up and down at the playground.
You know exactly how long it is before the movie starts because sandwiched between the announcements to be careful driving home and don’t forget to put back your speaker, the spinning corndogs and fizzing cups of Coke count down the time minute by minute.
The way it feels right before the movies start. The cooling air, the comfort of settling back into the car seat, the scent and feel of buttered popcorn on your fingers, the hundreds of speakers all echoing up into the darkening sky...it’s something.
Childhood Drive-in Memory Fragment 2
My first drive-in memory. I must have been four or five. My paternal grandfather and his girlfriend have taken me to the drive-in. I’m up on my knees in the backseat, looking between their heads and out the front windshield to the distant screen. A man takes a pistol and pushes it into a woman’s white short pants. Then there’s a screaming man being dragged toward a pit. He’s going to be thrown in. The screaming man looks down into the pit. It’s full of snakes. My grandfather realizes I’m watching. He tells me to put my head back down. I do.
This memory forms a fragile bridge to another drive-in moment. I’m not sure from when. But there's a boy, crying. He has a rifle in his hands. He moves through a barn. He has to kill his dog. It's too horrible to watch. I put my head down.
And then Silent Running begins.
The divide between what I can actually remember about the film and what I've read in summaries and reviews (I chose to not re-watch the movie while writing this) is hazy at times. I’m certain there are things that I recall that are compressed, or just plain wrong.
To start with, all of the remaining US National Parks have been moved to geodesic domes orbiting Saturn.
My first concrete image from the movie is Bruce Dern, playing ecologist Freeman Lowell, dressed in a monk's robe and kneeling on the floor of a beautiful forest. I knew right away that Lowell was the Good Guy because he was trying to take care of the forest and protect it from the other crew, who damaged a plant by driving their fancy go-karts too fast through the woods. You could tell Lowell was an outsider, which is how I saw myself. I had never fit in at school. And wouldn’t for a long time.
Helping the crew maintain their ship, The Valley Forge, were three droids. I had never seen anything like them. They were so cool! Knee-high robots that waddled around on short legs servicing the exterior of the great ships, the cinematic ancestors of R2-D2 and Wall-E. These droids, whose gait and movements were so uncannily human and who played such a crucial role in the story, were actually humans. Director Douglas Trumbull hit upon the idea of casting four double amputees to act the roles. The actors donned specially fitted costumes which enabled them to use their arms as the droid’s legs. It was an essential part of a complete visual world.
Then the crew is in the ship's galley. Lowell is eating a cantaloupe which the others think is gross because it grew in the dirt. I distinctly remember the argument that breaks out and how angry Lowell gets and the feel of the galley, like it was really a space ship.
Silent Running was the first real science fiction movie I ever saw. It was gob-smacking amazing. I've loved science fiction ever since. Even nearly 50 years later, the movie's visuals hold up well. The reason was Trumbull. If you've seen 2001, The Andromeda Strain, Close Encounters, or Blade Runner, you've seen his Oscar-nominated special effects. He came up with innovative ways to film his outer space story on an extreme budget. The ship's interiors were shot on the decommissioned USS Valley Forge, an aircraft carrier that had been in service since the Korean War. The ship’s dark and tight quarters gave its space-faring counterpart an authentic feel.
Lowell hates that the parks are in space. He believes, passionately, that they should go back to Earth and says that he thinks the big announcement the crew is supposed to hear soon will be just that, reestablishing the parks on Earth. Dern’s performance made a lasting impact on me, notably his intensity and gentleness and earnestness. There's another crew member in the galley. I don't like him. He disagrees. He says things are great back on Earth. There's no hunger now. Everyone has a job.
I can still recall how it felt when Lowell retorts that everywhere on Earth it's the same temperature and that there are no forests or deserts, everything is exactly the same.
How could that be?
I was captivated.
The big announcement is not what Lowell was expecting. It's the opposite. The crew is told to jettison all the parks and destroy them with nuclear bombs. They start to do so.
There's an image I still have of Lowell's horrified and panicked face as he realizes they're actually doing it. The Acadia, The Glacier, The Yellowstone, all being destroyed.
He confronts an awful choice and makes a decision. He kills all the crew members so he can save the forest. But to me as a kid, Lowell was the Good Guy. How could he be the Good Guy if he was killing people?
Then, using the droids to stage a fake emergency, Lowell lies to the other ships about what's happened and decides to send the Valley Forge through the rings of Saturn to run away.
Silent Running was very much a movie of its time. The early 1970s saw rising ecological awareness in the US. Earth Day was founded. The EPA was established and the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts passed. Other dystopian movies like Soylent Green, released in 1973, the ending of which completely caught me by surprise when it aired on TV when I was 11 or so, also depicted a dark future of a spoiled earth. These movies awakened in me the notion that nature was under attack from humans and could even be destroyed, and needed to be protected. It began my lifelong support of environmental causes. Silent Running, usefully I think, complicated its theme by also asking, was Freeman Lowell right? Was it right for him to kill five other human beings to save the last forest? Where's the line between preserving nature and meeting human needs?
Lowell, who was injured in a fight with one of the crew, programs the droids to perform surgery on his leg. The way Lowell patiently talks to them as if they were children, Peter Schickele’s emotive soundtrack, and the actors' use of body language to create a sense of intelligence and feelings in the droids — even without any human features — this is when I fell in love with Huey and Dewey and Louie, Lowell's names for the droids. I wanted to be a droid.
The Valley Forge passes through Saturn's rings and is nearly destroyed. Louie is killed. This is still a clear and shocking memory, the blackness of space and a hurricane-like force sweeping over the ship's hull, Lowell shouting at the droid to get inside and then the droid being ripped off the ship, cartwheeling away, a single remaining leg left attached to the hull. I was horrified.
Childhood Drive-in Memory Fragment 3
I have to go to the bathroom during a movie. My dad is taking me, so it's safe. He's brought a flashlight. I can feel the hard ground and gravel under my feet. We're walking past cars, voices fill the air above our heads. The bathroom has no door. Men are just going in and out. On our way out, I see it. A wedge of light raying out of the front of the building, shifting, flashing, flickering impossibly fast. My eyes follow it to the images on the distant screen. Magic.
Lowell, Huey, and Dewey head farther out into space. Lowell programs the droids to play poker and care for the forest. Things seem all right, but they’re not. Lowell starts eating the food he told the other crew members was bad. He neglects the forest. He seems lonely, even with the droids for his friends. He has done what he believed was the right thing, but it's weighing on him.
Then one day, Lowell is driving one of the go-karts, fast, the very thing he warned the others not to do. He smashes into Huey. Dewey looks on with unmistakable concern as Lowell tries to repair Huey. He can't. Huey is crippled. Lowell explains to Dewey, “I’m sorry. That's the best I can do for him.” I was devastated. A boy in 1972 knows he's not supposed to cry.
The accident is terrible, but even worse, Lowell discovers that the forest is dying. He tries to figure out what's wrong but is baffled. Then, the impossible happens: another ship, the Berkshire, finds him. They'll be rescuing him soon.
He'll be caught. What will Lowell do? I wondered.
Somehow, hearing from the Berkshire sparks Lowell’s comprehension of the forest's problem: light. The Valley Forge has gone so far away from the sun that the plants are dying.
A word here about movies and logic and dreams: It never occurred to me when I first saw Silent Running, but as others have pointed out in podcasts and reviews, it’s doubtful that an ecologist would forget that plants need light. But maybe movies don't always have to make sense to be meaningful, just like dreams don't have to be logical to be powerful. I can't prove this, but I think there's a direct connection between how we experience the fantasies, dreams and memories inside our heads and how we see movies. For me, the best scenes from movies feel like they're happening inside me, as if I'm imagining them, not seeing them on a screen.
I didn't see Silent Running when I was nine. I dreamt it.
The whole impossible story, forests in space, child robots, a man entirely alone with himself in the universe. It's a fairy tale.
Childhood Drive-in Memory Fragment 4
We're going home after the second movie. Incredibly, some people are staying for a third feature. It's very quiet. No more dancing hotdogs. Just a ghostly, black and white drawing of a man in a pinstripe suit and boater hat. He's inside a clock. His arms are counting down the minutes until the next movie. It's impossibly late.
Another memory bridge to… I’m about 13. My dad is gone on a business trip. My mom has a fantastic idea: we’re going to the drive-in. I think we saw a Disney movie, The World’s Greatest Athlete. My two younger brothers and sister must have been there. But I only have a sense of my mom, and that we had a great time. I can see her opening the cooler. This is one of the few experiences I can remember being happy and completely relaxed around my mom. It’s a good memory.
Lowell sets up a circle of lights on metal stands. The forest is saved, but Lowell can't go on anymore. He tearfully tells Dewey that he's going to be caring for the forest by himself now. Lowell will be leaving and taking Huey with him.
Something about Lowell disturbed and upset me. Maybe the story was challenging my sense of security—that adults could always be relied on to make sure things worked out. What I feel now, is that at nine, I already knew that wasn’t true. I just hadn’t admitted it to myself, that’s why seeing Lowell failing, even though he was saving the forest, was so alarming. One of my worst fears was being played out in front of me.
The forest dome is jettisoned into space with Dewey as its caretaker. Lowell and Huey stay on the ship. They sit together on the floor, and Lowell begins quietly arming a detonator.
Lowell was the Good Guy!
I remember Lowell telling Huey a story about putting a message in a bottle as a child and setting it off in the ocean.
Then, a screen-filling nuclear explosion; the boom echoes, rolls over the rows of cars.
I was dumbstruck.
How?
Up until that instant it had never occurred to me that there was such a thing as a story without a happy ending. A story where the Good Guy was just a Guy, trying his best to be good and suffering for his choices.
It was the first step out of the cocoon.
And finally, Joan Baez sings, bringing up a flood of emotions. I can see the dome, now with its circle of lights, and then Dewey, watering the plants with a child's watering can.
I remember turning my head, my eyes drawn out the passenger side window and up into the night, into the stars.
Childhood Drive-in Memory Fragment 6
Something? Something? What? I'm awake.
It's night. We're home. I'm in the backseat, wrapped in a blanket. I don't remember getting in the backseat or driving home. I'm so sleepy, half-conscious.
I'm lifted up out of the car by one of my parents. My head is against their shoulder. I glimpse the yellow porch light, glowing against the gold bricks of our house. This is the safest I will ever feel.
We start to move and I close my eyes, rocked in the swaying motion of my parent's gait, along the front walk, up the steps, through the door, to the bed I knew as home.
GW McCandless has written plays and radio dramas and produced two radio documentaries. He still loves to go to the drive-in with his wife and daughter.
For further exploration:
To see many of the drive-in theaters mentioned in GW McCandless’ story, check out this Courier-Journal photo archive retrospective, click here.
The author also recommends the documentary The Making of Silent Running.