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EDEN - When the sun sinks below the hills, the Eden

Drive-In turns into something like a giant outdoor living room, with tall pines for walls and stars for a roof.

In the long minutes before the evening's double feature starts, it's easy to forget you're at an outdoor theater at all.

Still, there are reminders that this is not the local megaplex. For one, the night air is filled with the buzz of insects and the crunch of gravel under slow-moving wheels. A pickup parks backwards, so its occupants can sit in the bed to watch the movie.

There is just something different about watching a movie in your car, even for kids who grew up on the pull-down DVD screen in their parents' SUV.

Maybe it's the dissonance involved: I'm in a car, behind the wheel, and yet I'm watching a movie.

You wonder what people are doing in other cars in a way you don't about people sitting behind you in the theater.

It's light and sound and popcorn and cicadas.

Below, you can see the lights of the cars as they move along the highway.

The pink and purple sunset finishes fading to black.

The massive screen rising out of the red dirt looms in front of you, a monument to another era.

And then the projector light shoots over the roofs of the cars, and Will Smith is flying around Los Angeles with a bottle of wine in his hand, and you're right back at the movies.

It's the magic of Hollywood, on a hillside overlooking Eden.

Contact Jason Hardin at 373-7021 or at jason.hardin@news-record.com