Amanda Hagood
Tampa Bay is no stranger to outlandish pirate tales. Just ask the 300,000 modern-day swashbucklers who “invade” its waters as part of Tampa’s yearly Gasparilla festival. But local author and movie enthusiast Kevin J. Martinez spins a new yarn in his “Sight, Sound, and Sunshine: Tampa, Hell Harbor, and the Making of Modern Cinema” (2020, Authorship Media), laying out a careful history of “Hell Harbor”, a piratical picture filmed at Rocky Point in 1929.
The film features a rough island inhabited by the descendants of Captain Morgan himself, with a murder and daring escape plot. But more than just another pirate story, this film marked an extraordinary advance in movie making as one of the first “talkies” – using synchronized sound to blend image and voice. This was all the more extraordinary since it was filmed entirely on location in what was then a remote corner of the bay.
Martinez’s book is meticulously researched. It offers vibrant portraits of pioneering director Henry King, larger-than-life lead actress Lupe Vélez, and the other actors, technicians, and promoters who made this cinematic feat possible. It also sketches a city gripped in the autumn of 1929 by “Hell Harbor fever” that flared up in daily headlines covering the film’s ongoing production, local residents being “discovered” for roles in the film, lavish promotional events, and the film’s 1930 premier – the first ever to occur in a southern city – at Tampa’s Victory Theater.
For cinema fans, the most interesting sections might be those which treat the technical challenges of filming on what was essentially a desert island. To create a lavishly detailed, authentic pirate island and record with sound, some inventive solutions were needed: a fully enclosed, revolving camera booth that kept the lens trained on the actors while blocking out ambient noise of the equipment. Electrical cables strung across multiple small boats to film shipboard scenes on a schooner. And this was all before a hurricane showed up on the night of Sept. 30.
Though slim, the book is packed with information; readers looking for an easygoing amble down history lane may struggle with the dozens of names, backstories, and digressions offered in quick succession, and the lack of illustrations may send you flying to your nearest search engine to explore the colorful places and personalities Martinez describes. But the book is well worth reading for anyone who is interested in how films are made or how the city of Tampa grew during the pivotal era of the 1920s. And the next time someone asks you if there really were pirates in Tampa Bay, you’ll have a very good story to tell.
