Bio - NY Times

September 19, 2003
By CHRISTOPHER HALL

THE elfin-faced boy with curly blond hair was ready for his close-up with Mr. De Mille. After making sure that the bill of his baseball cap pointed backward at just the right angle, he knelt on the pavement in front of Mann's Chinese Theater in Hollywood, placed his small hands in the handprints of Cecil B. De Mille, the legendary director, and flashed a winning smile at his mother, who was standing -- camera at the ready -- 10 feet away.

ON the walk back to the hotel, I stopped in front of the El Capitan, a 1925 legitimate theater that Disney refurbished in 1990 and now uses for premieres and long runs of its feature films. I was peeking through the theater's glass doors when an usher asked if I'd like to have a look around the East Indies-style interior. The ''usher'' turned out to be Dave Lerman, whose job in part is to give curious members of the public a free, short tour of the 998-seat theater. Dressed like a 1930's usher in a maroon pillbox hat and a mustard-colored jacket with black epaulettes and gold braid, Mr. Lerman led me along the lobby mural -- a pink and green Art Deco rendition of a Southeast Asian shrine -- and through the darkened auditorium, where a movie was being shown. Full of tales from Hollywood's heyday, he explained that the big names who performed live at the El Capitan -- Buster Keaton in a comedy review, for example, or Douglas Fairbanks Sr., in a reading of Shakespeare -- often did so in the hopes of signing movie deals, a number of which were consummated in the theater's wood-paneled smoking lounge.