Jet Drive-In

Kelby Toups Staff

For more than 40 years, Cut Off, Louisiana, was the home of one of the Bayou Region’s most popular youth hangout spots.

Jet Drive-In was a drive-in movie theater built in 1953, founded and owned by Richard ‘Dick’ Guidry and Lefty Cheramie. At the time of the drive-in’s opening, the Korean War had begun and jet aircrafts were the newest, modern thing. So, Guidry and Cheramie decided on the name “Jet” because of the short name that kept the price of their neon sign down.

“They would show one movie from Sunday to Wednesday,” says Dennis Guidry, son of the founder Richard Guidry. “They would have a showing on Thursday for ‘Bank Night’ which I never understood what that was. Lastly, [they] showed another movie Friday and Saturday.”

Dennis Guidry told a story about a movie called “The Moon is Blue,” a romantic comedy film released in 1953, that became very controversial for profanity throughout the film.

And while the movie was banned nationally, the drive-In showed the film for four weeks straight.

“It was unheard of, especially on the bayou,” says Dennis Guidry.

"It was unheard of, especially on the bayou."

Richard Guidry passed the drive-in down to Dennis Guidry who took ownership in 1980.

On opening night, they would show “White Lightning” with Burt Reynolds and the line went out of the parking lot.

Wade Fanguy, a Larose native, says that one of the last films he remembered seeing was “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”

“It was interesting because it was an audience participation type of show and I think there may be very few films that still do that,” he says.

Eventually Dennis Guidry sold the cinema and, under the new owners, it closed for good in the late 1990s. Currently, the building where the cinema used to stand is now the Greater Lafourche Port Commission.

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