stories

The Halloween photographs in this post were taken by Tom Campagnoli in 1980. They were sent in by Phil Trumbo who found this site by luck. I hadn't heard from Phil in nearly 20 years.

As it was in the day, the theater’s lobby doubled as a gallery space. Trumbo had the distinction of having his paintings on the walls of the Biograph more often than any other artist. Trumbo was the leader of a pack of VCU fine art students/grads who painted in a cartoon style. His handbills for the band in which he was an original member, the Orthotonics, remain collector’s items today.

Phil and his then-partner Steve Segal directed a short sci-fi film (40 minutes of cartoonish footage known as pixilation), “Futuropolis,” that premiered at the Biograph in 1984. As I recall, it took them five or six years to make it, one frame at a time. Two of the Biograph's cashiers played the same part, because the first one moved away after a couple of years of it.

Later Trumbo was an art director for Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Now he's art-directing video games out on the West Coast.

This site has also brought in emails from others who have moved away from the Fan District and haven't been heard from in a long time, including David Giles, who was an usher/projectionist (1979-82) and a fine cartoonist in his own right.

Hopefully, as the word spreads and others stumble across the Biograph Archives, we'll have more pictures to put up and more stories about where they are now. By the way, for readers who wonder what is happening in the old Biograph building today, it is still standing and has been converted into a cyber cafe called Hyperlink.