Jamie Jobb's Backstage Pass: August 2017

In poorly-aimed selfie, Jamie Jobb imagines Kilroy Was Here

Sneak Peek Behind the Silver Screen

by Jamie Jobb

High-school students who worked as movie ushers in the 1960s understood something about motion pictures that movie watchers never had an opportunity to know. Our inside secret was so unique, we passed it on to every new usher who came to work at our theater – the luxurious Loew’s Riviera in South Miami. This included a fellow student named Jonathan Demme who worked there briefly our senior year before he left town to win an Oscar two decades later for his own brilliant work upon the silver screen.

At the time, The Riviera was among America’s first “shopping center” movie theaters, located conveniently across Dixie Highway from University of Miami. Actually, it was just a strip mall, but the theater was huge. As Loew’s ushers – all uniformly dressed in tux, tails, white gloves and dickies with little black bow ties – we knew we could only introduce new coworkers to our secret knowledge after they’d worked at the theater a while, and settled into the scene that required separate matinee-green and evening-black tailcoats.

And only then, after the seats were full and the movie was running, would we take the new guy backstage, behind the movie screen where suddenly two facts of our job became clear to our fraternal “pledge”, the new usher:

1. The screen was so full of tiny holes, you could actually see the movie playing on the wall behind the screen! The explanation for this odd fact of light was quite simple: projectors in the booth upstairs were fueled by carbon-arc rods which gave off too much bright white light, so the screen had to be perforated in a regular pattern to allow excess illumination to bleed through. Filtered by these thousands of small pinpoint holes, the movie appeared simultaneously as “half-tone” on the backwall behind the screen! This was common throughout the industry; The Movies demanded lots of light – on the set and on the screen. And much of it was wasted behind the scenes.

2. Furthermore, when ushers went backstage behind the screen and looked outward, we could actually see through the screen to watch the audience without any among them knowing they were being observed! This knowledge was very useful to those of us who had to enforce our rules of no running in the aisles nor storming the stage during Saturday children’s matinees. Our backstage spy position also proved useful on those nights when we had large lines around the theater and 1,281 seats full of rowdy college students, including lusty lovers lounging in the smoking loge upstairs. And we knew our manager Marvin Reed would strangle any usher who let some out-of- control suburban kid rip a hole in our gigantic silver screen, an Ultra Panavision 70.

Little did we know at the time that the movie industry would abandon carbon- arc projection before we finished college. And that by the time we aged from school seniors into senior citizens, a movie studio could be reduced to fit inside my garage and my own films could be distributed for free to run 24/7 on computer screens around the world. All our little and big home movies launched into cyberspace by You Tube, Vimeo, Facebook and The Internet Archive.

The kind of place where Mick Jagger could always find some “girly action”

South Beach: Center of the Entertainment Universe

Anyone who went to high school in Miami knew South Beach was where we’d cut our teeth as would-be adults for our first Night On The Town. Normally this happened at Senior Prom, where we couldn’t wait to leave the dull sock hop main event at the school gym and head straight for any Miami Beach night club that would look the other way when a large flock of underaged youth hit Ocean Drive and Collins Avenue with cash saved all year for our one night out with dinner and a show.

Miami Beach was North America’s entertainment mecca in the 1960s, especially after Arthur Godfrey and Jackie Gleason put that thin sandbar on the map. Elvis, Sinatra, Dean Martin, Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Nat King Cole to name only a few were regulars on the night club circuit. A guy who’d later be known as Mohammad Ali could be seen jogging in the fog at 3 a.m. outside Fifth Street Gym. Al Capone lived just offshore on a private island. Las Vegas had gambling, Miami Beach had the Mafia which Demme captured so effortlessly in his “Married to the Mob”.

We returned to South Beach for a high school reunion in the 1990s and got to see how the place had transformed from a community of predominately Jewish elders who’d fled the cold northeast into an internationally fashionable hot spot for night life and global gaiety – this is the setting for my one act play, “Vandals in Sandals”.

“Vandals in Sandals” or “South Beach Spell Check” is set in Miami’s famous South Beach. The story follows three septuagenarian insomniacs – Mortie, Bertie and Vinnie – as they try to make a living in hard times at the beach. And they seek a Higher Truth as Hebrews for Jesus who seek to practice what they preach.

The comic crime caper was presented for the first time in public at my "Night on the Town" on August 18, 2017. The play was read by Onstage Repertory Theatre veterans Sal Russo, Linda Sciacqua, Randy Anger, Ryan Terry, Edwin Peabody and Remmington Stone.

The staged reading was part of an evening of short video “home movies” – including improvised comedy sketches, photo essays, music videos and documentary moments all of which are posted on line. The Campbell show provided a rare opportunity to see these small-screen works projected onto a large screen.

The program also included a staged reading of “the bra scene” from “Joe Fish Ties The Knot” or “Last Gillnet on Grangers Wharf” my full-length play that concerns two fated lovers torn apart during the decline of commercial fishing along the Contra Costa shoreline. Jennifer Brown Peabody, Edwin Peabody, Ryan Terry and Harlan Bailey read Norma Jean, Joe, Mike and Huck, respectively.

Tech by Randall Nott. Production assistance by Helen Means and Onstage Repertory Theatre, the resident theater company at the Campbell which hosted this one-night-only program.