If the 1980s seemed like the last picture show for the great American drive-in movie theatre, the 1990s signalled the start of a renaissance for what was once as much a part of popular culture as baseball, hot dogs and beer in paper cups.

"There's no better place to see a movie than out in the warm weather under crystal-clear starlit nights," said Thompson, who belongs to a small but dedicated group of campaigners for drive-in theatres.

Squeezed by rising land prices and competition from home videos and cable TV, the passion pits of the 1950s and '60s closed down in their thousands in the 1980s. Nearly 1,000 were built over or abandoned to weeds just in 1987, Thompson said.

Now a new generation is discovering the joys of watching films on huge outdoor screens with the aroma of fresh-cut grass or the sound of crunching gravel as drive-ins open in Europe as well as the United States and the closure rate falls.

"Nostalgia is very popular at this time. It seems people want to go back to simpler times," said Kim Bialek, who runs the Drive-In Theatre fan club (website www.driveintheater.com) with her husband Mark. "They are tired of the way everything is so fast-paced and they are looking at things they can do with their families again."

Formed in 1993 with a handful of enthusiasts, the club now has 660 members. Fifteen drive-ins have reopened in the United States in the past four years, four new ones have been built and a Florida drive-in expanded to a 13-screen megaplex.

The current total of about 520 US drive-ins is a far cry from their heyday in the late 1950s, when more than 4,000 were a popular venue for the adolescent fumblings of millions of American teenagers.

(Agencies via Xinhua)