Miami Beach Visitors Center hosts Visual Memoirs Exhibit

A year in the making, the Miami Beach Visual Memoirs project opens its exhibit at the Welcome Center at 10th and Ocean, this week. The exhibit is a series of information panels that highlight the history and people that tell the Beach’s story. We produced a ten-minute video of recollections of the city’s transition from swampland to the “American Riviera.”

The Miami Beach Visual Memoirs Project is a joint venture of Close-Up Productions and the Miami Design Preservation League under a grant from the Miami Beach Visitors and Convention Authority.

Chae duPont, host of On Your Home

We’ve created a tease for a new television show that aims to inform and help homeowners deal with the housing crisis. How do you qualify for a new home? Should you should keep an “underwater” property — or cut and run? Chae duPont is a Miami-based lawyer specializing in foreclosure issues nationally. She already does a radio show. We were asked to help her move the information concept program, On Your Home, into a visually exciting television format.

Kathy joins the Association of Personal Historians as we take our

commitment to oral history and story telling to the next level. The

Association of Personal Historians is a national organization that has

codified the oral history tradition. Bringing our technical expertise

and documentary experience to the process will create a richer and

lasting alternative to traditional media.

The other big name in Miami Beach art deco architecture, L. Murray Dixon

L. Murray Dixon was the other big name in Miami Beach’s Art Deco architecture (Henry Hohauser being the first), credited with designing more than three hundred hotels, apartments, condos and family homes on the island during his career here.

Richard Dixon, son of L. Murray Dixon, during interview.

Richard Dixon, his son, was in Miami Beach to show his family around, and talk with us about what it was like growing up on the beach and seeing his father at work. His interview is part of the Miami Beach Visual Memoirs archive that we are currently working to create.

Paul Easton poses with me by the Gold Record Gallery in his studio.

On a shoot for the BBC to the West Coast of Florida, met up with Paul Easton, a record producer with a studio in Bonita Springs. His father had been the agent for a long-dead performer of the 60s, and 70s, Mrs. Mills, a stride pianist who tended towards the popular with pub music of the “let’s all come together” war years of deprivation. Without a family of her own, Mrs. Mills spend a lot of time at Paul’s house. She was not a women who liked to lose at Monopoly. With a revival of her records (check her out on YouTube) in the U.K. the Beeb is doing a doc on the Mrs. Mills phenomenon. A long trek from Miami to Bonita Springs for a day’s shoot, but Kathy came along for the ride and ended up doing the interviewing. A good time had by all and a welling up of our own nostalgia for London.

Setting up for the celebration at the Betsy

We celebrated finishing our first set of interviews for the Miami Beach Visual Memoirs Project at the Betsy Hotel last week. The Betsy let us use this great venue to show off some of the interviews on  Hi-def screens in a warm cabaret atmosphere. We had about 60 people here: participants in the project ranging from interview subjects to the funders and partners.

On the job you run into anomalies. Several months apart, I find myself covering the real “43,”former president “W” Bush — later the poseur, who also comes complete with “secret service” protection.

Russell Galbut talks about working as a teenager at the Fountainbleu, an experience which lead him to a career in hotel restoration and residential conversion. He is the Managing Principal of Crescent Heights real estate investment firm and the third generation of Galbuts doing business on Miami Beach. The interview will be archived as part of the Miami Beach Visual Memoirs Project.

We produced this brief video from the materials we are gathering to give brief look at what we are doing with the Miami Beach Visual Memoirs Project. This promo for the project is posted on-line as we raise funds to deepen the project and expand our reach in the community. The interviews are being carried out by Close-Up Productions in conjunction with the Miami Design Preservation League under a grant from the Miami Beach Visitor and Convention Authority.

Shooting our first set of interviews for the Miami Beach Visual Memoirs project at the headquarters of the Miami Design Preservation League, our partners, right on Ocean Drive. Fascinating stories of growing up as part of the beach scene — as it was in the 40s – 60s. We are shooting HD with a 2 camera set-up against a “greenscreen” so we can add create Miami Beach settings appropriate for the interviews. Note the producer — producer perogative in effect — in the lounge chair while some of us slave over hot cameras.