Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In

John Bloom, born in Dallas in 1953, wrote as Joe Bob Briggs, a drive-in movie critic from Grapevine, for the Dallas Times Herald. Briggs first appeared in the paper's living section in 1982. The Times Herald was then owned by the Times Mirror Company of Los Angeles. The column covered mondo movies and grindhouse fare such as I Spit on Your Grave, Gas Pump Girls and Basket Case, and it often spent several paragraphs on the decline of drive-in theaters or the news of the day before reaching the movie. Briggs celebrated and cataloged the "blood, breasts and beasts" that other critics found over the top.

The column, "Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In," went into syndication in 1984, according to the Gale reference biography on FilmReference, which also lists a 1987 Delacorte book of the same name.

In 1985 Briggs published a satire of the charity single "We Are the World." Readers protested, among them John Wiley Price, whom the Dallas Observer later described as a newly elected councilman. Times Herald editor Will Jarrett ran a front-page apology announcing, "As of this moment, Joe Bob Briggs is dead," and Briggs lost the newspaper column. The Gale biography lists a biweekly newsletter, We Are the Weird, issued by the "Briggs Museum of American Culture" in 1985.

The column outlived its home paper's support. In 1996 the Dallas Observer carried it, distributed by NYT Special Features, with a Dallas post office box for reader mail. In 2000 United Press International ran it under a Grapevine dateline. Bloom took the persona to television as host of Joe Bob's Drive-In Theater on The Movie Channel starting in 1986, then TNT's MonsterVision from 1996 to 2000, and in July 2018 a 24-hour marathon, The Last Drive-In, on the streaming service Shudder. In January 2018 he brought his one-man show "How Rednecks Saved Hollywood" to Dallas's Texas Theatre, and in 2025 Fangoria announced a Halloween-night marathon he would host there. The Times Herald printed its last edition in December 1991.