“What are people in cars watching a movie supposed to do during the monsoon—keep the wipers on?” This was among the milder insults tossed toward Mumbai’s first drive-in theatre before it was born in 1977. Not everyone in Bandra owned a car then and Bandra-Kurla Complex—the commercial counter-magnet to bursting South Bombay—was a mere newborn yet to be nicknamed BKC. Beyond the mouth of Mahim creek, a revolving restaurant had manifested atop a luxury hotel built on the rocks even as low-income housing promised for slum-dwellers on both sides of the Western Express Highway during the Emergency preoccupied the city’s conscience. The ’70s everyman viewed the eight-hectare-wide imminent cinema experience meant for privileged car owners with the scorn outsiders now reserve for cine dynasts. Today, a multiplex player is looking to invest in a drive-in theatre at BKC as a safe mass entertainment option.

But back then, “frivolous”, “decadent”, “criminal waste of land”, “project of the upper classes” were the expressions used by the press and the public to greet the 1,000-car monolith. Doomed to controversy from birth and fraught with villains ranging from mosquitoes to resentful hutment dwellers, the arc of the city’s first drive-in theatre in the marshy heart of Bombay is the stuff of OTT docu-dramas.

For one, the ‘bhumi pujan’ happened in 1970 at the hands of then revenue minister HG Vartak even before the commencement certificate was issued for the plans submitted in 1971 by the Indian Film Combine Limited (IFCL) — a company owned by two Gujarati men who ran drive-in theatres in Nairobi, Mombasa and Ahmedabad. An area behind Kalanagar had been leased that year by the collector of Bombay. As it was the first proposal of this type in Bombay and no rules were framed for it, the plan was kept pending. The rules finally came in 1973 and the plan was approved in 1975. The state offered the plot on lease to IFCL for a mere Rs 6 lakh a year.

Rumour had hyped the imminent BKC drive-in to be the first in India though that distinction belonged to Ahmedabad, which boasted a 700-car drive-in theatre. Soon after the theatre was inaugurated by then CM Vasantrao Patil, Janata Party volunteers staged demonstrations against the project whose construction work had been largely completed during the Emergency. “Whom is the drive-in supposed to cater to?” balked a TOI article. “Certainly not the rugged urchins who lived in the shanty towns all around the reclaimed land on which the theatre is coming up.”

The three-tier theatre housed a restaurant that could seat 1,000 people. It had an amphitheatre-like auditorium to seat around 2,000 patrons. Screenings were initially at 9pm daily. Bandra’s Neale Murray recalls getting “plastered with the boys” while watching Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau movies, and octagenarian Jayant Shetty says they took chairs along to watch the 6 pm show of ‘Muqaddar Ka Sikandar’. But mosquitoes from the marshy area and the TV and video boom of the ’80s put off many visitors from paying Rs 20-odd for a movie. Then, apart from deliberate intervals to make patrons buy dosas and samosas, the sudden hail of stones pelted by rioting workers of a political party would supply unscripted drama. At times, when the canteen staff would leave at midnight, entire reels would be omitted and hordes would start their cars not knowing how ‘Namak Halaal’ ended.

Shetty guesses it was probably the damage to property caused by drunk patrons who would steal speakers that caused the theatre’s undoing. When it failed to rake in profits, the Maker Group of Enterprises, one of the city’s biggest builders known for their clout with the government, bought the place and ran it for two decades before it shut down in the early noughties without fanfare or redemption, its end an omitted reel.