A drive-in movie theatre in the US has announced a week of events celebrating Taylor Swift, in an effort to finally convince her to acknowledge that it is its screen that appears in the lyric video to her 2020 single ‘This Is Me Trying’.
Drive-in 32 in Greenville, New York inadvertently ended up in the lyric video thanks to a short piece of stock footage that the venue had seemingly been unaware of until it was used by Swift’s team.
“Somewhere during the winter of either 2018 or 2019, an overseas-based freelance photographer entered our property without permission and began filming”, the cinema’s management explain in a new Instagram post. “He then placed that footage with Shutterstock advertising [it] as ‘abandoned upstate NY drive-in theatre’”.
“Someone in Taylor’s creative team purchased a $75 license from the stock agency for the footage, enlarged it, slowed it down, stitched together fourteen loops of the original eleven second clip and then added the lyrics on our screen”, they go on. “Voila! Instant music video”.
That video has now been seen nearly eighteen million times on YouTube and the whole “scenario caught us off-guard as we were not even were remotely aware of this possibility”, the post continues. “It has taken us a little time to unwind what happened, but it is a distinctly modern tale”.
Three years on, they’d just like a little nod from Swift to acknowledge that it’s Drive-In 32 that appears in that video, but, they say: “We did attempt to reach out to Taylor’s team to politely ask if they might identify and credit the drive-in as the location for the music video. Alas, we have yet to receive a response from her representatives”.
There’s no bad blood though, as they note in yesterday’s Instagram post, which was posted on the third anniversary of the video going online.
“We’ve now adopted 24 Jul as our Taylor Swift Appreciation Day”, they declare, “and we’re making a week out of it. If you want to take it meta, we are hosting a Taylor Swift-themed karaoke night on Friday and you can sing with lyrics projected on the same big screen Taylor used. We might even do a group sing-a-long of ‘This Is Me Trying”.
“Thanks to Taylor for making ours the most viewed drive-in screen in the world”, they conclude.
