As the Friday sun sets on West Indianapolis, a line of cars inches its way forward into a massive parking lot, gravel crunching under tires. Neon signs illuminate the concessions building at Tibbs Drive-In Theatre, where husband-and-wife owners Marcella Snyder, 41, and Jon Parkin, 47, and their staff cover trays of nachos with gooey yellow cheese and brown chili, and ladle golden butter into bags of popcorn. Meanwhile, apple cider slushies churn inside a transparent machine.

Snyder stands by the register with a walkie-talkie clipped to her shirt sleeve. She started coming to Tibbs when she was 2 years old and got a job there when she was 14. In 2019, she and Parkin bought the cinema. She has tattoos on her arm of classic movie-theater mascots like anthropomorphic french fries wearing top hats.

“We worked really hard to be intentional with everything that we’re doing,” Snyder says of the aesthetic they’ve constructed, which feels like a portal back to the last century, “so that you can get that feeling when you walk in that you’re like, ‘This feels really familiar, but also not run-down.’ It’s, like, a refreshing nostalgia.”

Snyder and Parkin represent a small but passionate group of savvy businesspeople reviving traditional establishments with blood, sweat, and loans.

As an enterprise, drive-in movie theaters are full of contradictions, the most important being that the film itself is not necessarily the draw. People come to see friends and socialize, let their young kids play in an outdoor space, and eat an affordable dinner. The hamburgers at Tibbs are priced like it’s 2003. (One patron, affectionately called “Cheese Pizza Lady,” comes, as you might guess, specifically to purchase cheese pizza.) Parkin likens the drive-in to a street festival, and Snyder says that, often, people just come to hang out.

“We were on the ‘Best Place to Smooch List’ last year for Valentine’s Day,” she says.

“You have a lot more freedom,” Parkin adds. “And we’ll say that, too. We’ll advertise and say, ‘Hey, there’s no shame in the drive-in, and no one can judge you for dipping your pizza in your nacho cheese, right? You eat what you want. Come by yourself; nobody cares. You’re in your own car. Text away. Have a phone call, you know? Just roll your windows [up], whatever.’ It feels like there’s more room for people to be how they want to be without infringing on other people. We don’t shine flashlights on people’s cars.”

Shortly after they bought the place, the couple faced what felt like an existential threat. “We had half of the season under our belt, and then COVID hit,” Parkin explains. “We’re just bleeding money and going, ‘What the hell did we just do?’”

But the pandemic didn’t end up hurting the business much at all. “We had never done a private event at the drive-in in the 20 years I’d been there. And then all of a sudden, we did, like, 70 in 2020 because it was all you had,” Snyder recounts. “We did church services on Sundays. We did two middle-school graduations. We did a fashion show where they pointed the cars towards each other so that the headlights would be the runway lighting.”

Richard Hollingshead, a New Jersey used-car-parts salesman, opened the first drive-in in 1933. He saw the kismet in combining two things Americans adored: movies and automobiles.

Indiana once had around 120 drive-ins, with 18 in Indianapolis alone. But as land prices rose and leisure options proliferated, the business got very hard. Today, there are only 20 drive-ins in the entire state, and Tibbs is the last one standing in Indianapolis.

“It really does take somebody who is a geek about the drive-in situation,” Parkin says. Both owners have full-time jobs away from the theater: He works in HR for a nonprofit, and Snyder handles quality assurance at a medical-laboratory company. “We live on the money that we make at our day jobs,” Parkin explains, “and the drive-in lives on the money it makes.”

Building and maintaining a loyal local network is an arduous task. “You really have to make that connection with the rest of your community in order to stay relevant,” Snyder says. “Most drive-in theater owners don’t want to do anything new.”

After they made improvements to Tibbs, the pair were delighted to hear from the previous owners. “They were like, ‘Thank God you bought it because we would have never done all of this stuff.’ We’re like, ‘Yeah, we know,’” Snyder says. “You’re seeing a younger generation come in and buy drive-ins. And every time they do, it starts becoming wildly successful.”

“I think if you had any kind of business analyst come in, they’d be like, ‘You guys are idiots,’” Parkin says with a laugh. “But I don’t want to turn it into, like, an Alamo Drafthouse, where you’re paying $18 for a burger.”

The drive-in “is very personal. It’s nostalgic,” Snyder chimes in. “Just kind of antithetical to, I guess, in a sense, good business. But I think we’re in a unique position there too, though, because you can’t make that space anything but what it is. So I get to be like, ‘Well, forget it. I’m going to be eccentric, and nobody’s going to care because this is all it can ever be.’”

Much like the owners, the people who work at Tibbs are there for more than just a paycheck. Everyone on staff has another gig elsewhere, too. “I know it’s corny because it’s a business, but these people are family to me,” says back-of-house manager Dakota Bond, who has worked there since it was under previous ownership.

As Snyder introduces me to her employees, it turns out many of them have relatives who worked here in the past; it’s a true family business.

“We have legacy employees,” Parkin says. “We’re like Yale.” ●