A LIFETIME SPENT WANDERING THROUGH CELLULOID HISTORY
Pete Romano tells of his experience growing up and working in a film studio that opened in 1920, writes
said. The Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields once worked there, Romano said, walking past carpenters as they built a wooden cellblock for Orange Is the New Black.
He passed through G stage, a police precinct house for Shades of Blue, starring Jennifer Lopez, and then onto J stage, where Sesame Street has been filming since 1992.
The show’s longtime sets had been tweaked over the years, he said. For example, Oscar the Grouch had to be persuaded to adapt to recycling, in accordance with changing sensibilities.
“Everything’s a focus group these days,” he said, walking beneath Mr Snuffleupagus, suspended overhead.
Although he has met stars while maintaining and running the East Coast’s most illustrious back lot, “I have never asked for one autograph,” he said.
Not even from Al Pacino, who stayed in character and in isolation while shooting the 2003 miniseries Angels in America, said Romano, who was rewarded with the glasstopped table from his dressing room for helping the actor.
Another prop, a painting of Reggie Jackson from Arthur, hangs in Romano’s office.
As a teenager, he and his uncle dressed as German storm troopers, working as extras in Woody Allen’s Zelig.
“My uncle fought in the Battle of the Bulge, so when they told us to say ‘Sieg Heil’, he said, ‘No way I’m doing this’, and walked off,” recalled Romano, who lives with his wife, Christine, and their son and daughter.
He entered a recording studio where Lady Gaga recorded duets with Tony Bennett, another Astoria native.
Bennett sang at the wedding of Romano’s parents, who ran a soda shop in Astoria. Young Tony would practise singing along with the jukebox, Romano said.
As for Lady Gaga, Romano was asked not to tell her about the 80,000 costumes kept by the Theater Development Fund Costume Collection in the basement.
“Her manager said, ‘If she gets in there, I’ll never get her out’,” he recalled, and walked through the Astor Room, a restaurant opened in recent years inside the studio’s original commissary, where Charlie Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino once ate.
Romano recently extended the dining outdoors, into the restored main entrance alcove where Adolph Zukor used to pull up in his limousine.
“I figured, I’ve been sweeping this space since I was a kid, so why not?” he said.
Then he said hello to his daughter, Alex, who waits tables there, along with his son, Sean.
Romano walked into the tiny Zukor Theater, just below Adolph Zukor’s old offices. He opened the studio in 1920 and used the cozy screening room to watch the daily rushes.
Romano keeps a popcorn maker there, and occasionally slips in with his family to watch movies.
When the army took over the studio to make training and propaganda films from 1942 to 1970, officials installed metal Faraday shielding “to block radio frequencies so the Germans couldn’t bug the room”, Romano said. He had the theater renovated recently, but kept the Faraday panels, not to preserve family secrecy, but for the same reason he preserves other remnants of Kaufman Astoria’s century in celluloid.
“I figure, you know, it’s history,” he said, and headed off into the studios with Blue.
(Pete Romano, 49, is the vice president for operations at Kaufman Astoria Studios.) NYT