Hollingshead opens a movie lot for 400 cars in Pennsauken; Wives Beware is the first feature

The summer of 1933 was not a boom time for leisure spending — the Depression had shuttered thousands of indoor theaters across the country. Into that market, Richard M. Hollingshead Jr., a chemical company magnate from Camden, New Jersey, opened a new kind of movie house on June 6, 1933, at 2901 Admiral Wilson Boulevard in Pennsauken Township: an outdoor lot with 400 parking slots and a 40-by-50-foot screen, where families could watch a film from their cars. The first feature was Wives Beware, starring Adolphe Menjou. Hollingshead had patented the concept the previous May, after spending months in his Riverton driveway nailing a screen to trees, balancing a 1928 Kodak projector on his car hood, and sliding blocks under his tires to figure out sightlines…