Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1474752
Fall 2022 – LOCAL695.ORG 47 Paramount. My father went on to become Chief Engineer at Paramount and was responsible for about fifteen screening rooms and eventually, Head of the Projection Department. My uncle Tom's humble career started at Paramount, which had him working around Orange County on daily calls running all kinds of screening rooms. He got quite good. He was running shows at The Miramar Theater in San Clemente when the new young theater owner wanted to do some rock & roll shows there. Tom jumped at the chance to help. He helped build the stage and install all of the lighting and the sound equip- ment. After a successful run of music shows and similar work at the Orange County Performance Center, he eventually joined Local 504, Orange County Stagehands. He then landed a job as Head of Sound at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre, where he spent the next thirteen years. He would go on to be the go-to technical director for Disney when they came looking for someone with live rock show experience to help with some ambitious movie premier events. He worked with Disney as a freelancer for about ten years from Pocahontas in Central Park to Pearl Harbor on the deck of an aircraft carrier under way to Hawaii with a full orchestra and a giant screen that he designed to fold out of and back into a tiny box on the deck, complete with working curtains. Since then, he has done things for The Pentagon, a presidential inaugura- tion, and even the opening and closing ceremonies of the Summer Olympic Games in China, but his favorite was The Concert for Valor in Washington, DC. He was tasked with drawing up, planning, and pulling off a concert for seven hundred thousand people at the Washington Monument. As a kid, I loved art and learned how to make stained-glass windows with my dad and wire sculptures with a soldering iron in my hand. I also helped my friends who were talented musicians with their sound equipment at rehearsal halls in San Dimas. One of the first semipublic gigs I had was as a roadie for my friend Brian Duffield's band, Tygress, when they had two shows in a rented hall on the outskirts of Whittier with an unsigned local band called Slayer. I didn't find my calling for sound quite yet though. First, I took a job from music legend Ken Scott, who had worked on The Beatles White Album and later mixed for the likes of Supertramp, David Bowie, and so many others. At the time, he was bankrolling a Zappa spin-off band called Missing Persons and was also managing and recording them. He hired me to sell merch at gigs. I was a senior at Burbank Left: Grandad Harold V. Miller Below: Dad Robert V. Miller