AUSTIN, Texas — An Austin drive-in movie theater is recovering after its owner said much of the equipment at one of its locations was stolen.
Josh Frank, the owner and creator of Blue Starlite Mini Urban Drive-in, said on social media Wednesday that 80% of the theater's operations equipment at its Downtown Austin location was stolen in the night "by a well planned heist." The post states that the suspected thieves broke into all four of the projection trailers at the San Antonio Street location and gutted them, taking almost everything.
Frank told KVUE on Thursday that he learned about the break-in from his employee who runs the downtown location.
"I went downtown, and as I'm driving downtown, I'm getting these horrible texts saying, 'They got all the projectors, they got all the generators, they got all the laptops,'" Frank said. "And so, finally, I just said, 'Why don't you just tell me what didn't they get?' And he wrote back, 'There's not much left.' So I get there, and it was true."
Frank said he believes it would have taken a large vehicle to move all the stolen equipment – which amounts to around $20,000 – and it would have taken the perpetrators time to move everything out.
The theater's Mueller location remains open, and Frank and his staff hope to reopen at least one screen for public movies, as well as its private screen, at the downtown location by the weekend.
"We just started sort of like, you know, doing what we do, which is how do we keep the show going? And we figured it out and we said, 'OK, we'll be open on one screen downtown, business as usual at Mueller,'" Frank said. "We'll start figuring out how much it's going to cost us to get at least the starter parts that we need to get our new movie screen back open and to get everything functioning as it was before and on some level."
Frank said while the business could survive on a smaller scale, special occasions bring more attendees than one location can handle and he also wants to keep his employees working at the same pace the currently are. He also said Blue Starlite's audience has split between the two locations in the last few years.
"Once we opened downtown and gave this whole different experience – the city view experience – a whole new generation of people started coming to the drive-in," he said. "We always had our Generation X-ers and our Boomers coming to our old-school ... our old-school Austin vibe [at the Mueller location]. But when we opened the downtown one, we got like, you know, the millennials and Gen Zs."
Frank said the theater's goal is to get everything running in some sort of regular operation before Feb. 1 because the first two weeks of February are Blue Starlite's biggest and most important two weeks of the year.
"February 1st to 14th is where we make pretty much the money that we need to get through to the summer. And if we're not able to be fully functional, it could be huge. Catastrophic," he said.
People looking to help Blue Starlite recover can do so by buying a membership, buying movie tickets from either location or making a donation in exchange for "something special" from the theater.
"We've gotten a lot of support already from people writing in asking how they can help, and people have already started donating," Frank said. "Even if we just get, you know, a quarter of what we lost, it'll mean that – it'll make the difference between us being able to do our, you know, our important Valentine's weeks, as we always have, versus, you know, not being able to. Because it's the smaller things that that we need right now to keep going, and the bigger things I'll figure out later."
Blue Starlite's Downtown Austin screens are located on the rooftop of the parking garage located at 300 San Antonio St. The Mueller location can be found at 2015 EM Franklin Ave.