In the movie Age of Adaline, the main character takes Ellis on a date to an old warehouse in San Francisco, which used to be a drive-in cinema in the 30s. She tells a story about it and shows how unique the roof of the warehouse is.
Is this cinema based on something real, is some part of this story based on true events? Or is it completely made up for the movie?
No.
TL;DR:
The actual location in the scene of the movie, the fact that it comes up as work carried out by vfx studios (Cutting Edge, Luma), suggests that it is not a real location at all.
Whilst the vehicle, actors, etc would have been real and filmed, they were in all likelihood filmed against a green (or blue) screen and composited with a matte background, which itself would have been animated for the scene.
In addition, the movie was shot in Vancouver, Canada, not San Francisco.
Filmed in Vancouver, the story of The Age of Adaline is set in San Francisco and required a variety of set extensions to convincingly place the story in California in both day and night scenes. Cutting Edge employed 2.5-dimensional techniques and modeled the buildings on low-density meshes. Digital matte painting techniques were then overlaid to add the finer details.
Thats not to say that the concept is not real.
There was a plan (now stalled) for covered drive in theatres, with starfield ceilings. So could it have existed before? Yes, but unlikely to be linked in any way to the movie in question.
Yes, the theater was real in the age of Adaline.
