“I started watching movies when I was five. We were living in Nyack, New York and my mother took me to movies in New York City. My first movie was “The Wizard of Oz.” I have been a movie guy my whole life. I went to a Woody Allen movie, “Take the Money and Run,” at an art house. I watched the manager run up the stairs and turn on the projector and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. 40 years later, I am the old guy who does everything. I am lucky in life. I moved to Biloxi when I was a casino executive. I came to Mobile in 1992 to see a basketball game at the civic center and saw this block on Dauphin and knew I was going to open a movie theater here. I started saving my money.  After that, I had a partner in Mobile and we were successfully restoring old buildings into condominiums and made a lot of money. We opened the theater in 2008, the year the market crashed and we lost all of the value in our company. We still opened the theater and I became the teenage kid I thought I was going to hire. I still do it all, clean bathrooms and sweep popcorn. If you have a problem sweeping popcorn, you better not be in the movie business. The first movie shown here was “Bottle Shock” and we had one person come the first night. I didn’t know what to choose, so I looked in the New York Times. Downtown has changed a lot since we have been here. We pull in people during the cocktail hour and they go to restaurants for dinner and drinks before or after the movie. The growth of restaurants and events like 1065 have been good for The Crescent too. I am a fan of the Stimpson administration, they are so cooperative.”

“My other love is graffiti art. I have an Instagram site called “thepumpdontwork.” It has 22,000 posts and 18,000 followers. Priest is a good friend of mine and he took me into the train yard 7 years ago and said this is your yard. He told me to take pictures and he set up my Instagram account. I was hooked and 100,000 photos later I am still going. I could make a book or movie. I go to the yard twice a day and take pictures of art on trains passing through Mobile. These kids are so talented and they paint at night and can’t take pictures because their moving canvass is gone, so I send pictures to them.  My house is filled with graffiti. They all send me stuff.”