1917 — The Day the Screen Lit Up
(Age 16 — Cincinnati, Ohio)
"You don't wait for permission to dream.
You take the paper, the ink, the light—
and you make your own permission."
— Tyrone D. Jennings, interview recorded 1965
[ARCHIVE VOICE-OVER | Galaxy+ Docuseries, 2025]
They say the moment your life starts isn't your birthday. It's the day something clicks. For Tyrone Jennings, that was a damp Sunday in 1917, in the basement hall of New Hope Baptist on 12th Street, when a borrowed print of The Perils of Pauline stuttered to life and a boy decided the world wasn't big enough yet.
1) The Church Hall
It smells like starch and soap down here, like hymnals and wet wool. Pastor Hargree pulls back a curtain with a flourish that doesn't quite match the workaday room. Folding chairs scrape. Kids elbow each other. The old upright piano sits against the wall with a lace doily like a hat too fancy for the weather. Someone's Auntie says, "Hush now. You gon' miss the beginning."
Tyrone keeps to the aisle because he likes air and exits. He's tall for sixteen—elbows and ambition—wearing a hand-me-down coat that can't decide if it's for spring or winter. The poster by the door shows a lady tied to a railroad track and a man with a mustache you could use to sweep a porch. Adventure! it promises. Mystery! The ink is smeared where rain hit.
A clatter erupts from the back, where the projector's been set on a wobbly table with a bedsheet taped to the cinderblock wall. The man bending over it is pale and ruddy, red scarf tight around his neck, sleeves rolled up. Tyrone has been watching him since he came in. The man winded the crank, peered through the gate, blew dust. He's the only person in the room who looks like he's working a miracle instead of waiting for one.
Tyrone edges closer, pretending to fiddle with his bootlace.
The man—freckles, tired eyes—catches him. "You here to help or to stare holes through my skull?"
Tyrone grins carefully. "I can do both, mister."
The man barks a laugh, surprised he has one. "Eddie. Name's Eddie Valdez." His voice has a New York rasp that clings like smoke. "You wanna keep your thumb on that leg there. She skitters."
Tyrone does as told. The table steadies. Somewhere in front, a lady with a feathered hat says, "Lawd, Eddie, do we have all day?" Eddie calls back, "You got all God gave you, Miss V." The room laughs. The crank spins. The bulb hums. The world waits to catch fire.
On the sheet, scratches and dust float like snow, and then—motion. A riverboat, a woman running, a title card dressed like a parade. The room leans forward in one breath. Tyrone feels it—how people turn into one animal when they look together. His ribs burn with it.
He watches the edges, too: the top and bottom of the frame where things wobble, the gate where light blooms just before it settles. He watches Eddie's hand, the crank, the rhythm. It's not magic. It's work. That makes it better.
Halfway through the reel, the film shudders and squeals. The picture turns to a flashing rectangle, then nothing. The room groans like a single disappointed aunt. Eddie swears low enough to be respectful and pulls the film.
"Perforations chewed," he mutters. "Always the second reel. Always the Lord testin' me."
"Can I…?" Tyrone says. He doesn't know what he's asking until his hands are out. Eddie raises an eyebrow, then gives him the strip. Tyrone lifts it like a wounded bird, blowing gently on the hot edges and seeing—oh—pictures inside the strip itself, frozen like bees in amber.
He can't help it. "How they move?"
Eddie's laugh is softer now. He takes the strip back. "They don't. You do. Your eyes and this crank trick your head."
"That's lying."
"That's storytelling."
Eddie snips a clean edge, pinches, threads. "The trick is steady hands and knowing where the tear started. You see the tear before it becomes a hole, you save the day."
Tyrone files that away. He will remember that sentence for the rest of his life, will use it on budgets and screenplays and people.
The crank starts again. The hero jumps a horse across a ravine the size of Ohio. The room gasps. A baby squeals with the purest applause God ever invented. Tyrone watches the light through the doorway smear into a fog that looks like dream-breath. His heart taps a telegraph: Build this. Build this. Build this.
[INTERVIEW — TATIANA JENNINGS, 1998]
Tatiana (smiling): He told that story like a ghost story when I was little. He'd sit me on the floor in the War Room with that cigar going to war with the air, and he'd say, "Baby, I saw the trick. I saw the work. That's when I knew I could steal heaven with a screwdriver and a story."
2) After the Show
Outside, New Hope empties like a river finding channels. Men slap backs. Women exchange cake tins. Kids run circles around puddles that tried to be ice and failed. Tyrone hangs back with Eddie, helping wind the last of the film into its tin. The bulb ticks as it cools.
"You from the paper?" Eddie says.
Tyrone blinks. "Sir?"
"You keep lookin' like you're takin' notes with your eyes."
"I like how things fit," Tyrone says. He doesn't know how to say the rest: that when he watches a crank match a jump, he sees his own bones learning a new way to be arranged.
"Come Saturday," Eddie says. "Need a pair of hands at the Rialto. I can pay in nickels and knowledge. Sometimes knowledge is worth two nickels."
Tyrone nods like it's a binding contract. "Yes, sir."
"Don't 'sir' me. Makes me itch. You got a name?"
"Tyrone. Folks call me T."
"Alright, T. You show up."
They shake. Eddie's palm is rough where work has asked for too much.
Down the steps, a voice like a dinner bell: "Tyrone!"
His mother, Estella, barrels toward him with a coat over one arm and a grocery bag in the other. Her face is a map—that crease from laughing, that other crease from not. "Boy, you got me runnin' all over town. Pastor said you were back here fussin' with the Devil's lantern."
"It broke," Tyrone says. "We fixed it."
"You fix that algebra test yet?" She eyes the tin in his hand. "Mmm."
"He's good," Eddie offers. "Got wrists like a surgeon and eyes like a thief."
Estella gives Eddie a smile that says thank you and don't teach my child how to steal in the same breath. "He got chores. And school. And church. And my sanity."
"I'll have him back before any of those run out," Eddie says.
Estella looks at Tyrone. "You hungry?"
"Always," he says.
"Then help me home and stop starin' at light like it's gonna feed you."
He is, though. And it will.
[INTERVIEW — EDDIE VALDEZ, 1949, LOCAL RADIO]
Eddie: Kid walked like he was late for something that hadn't been invented yet. Gave him a broom and he turned it into a degree.
3) Streets Like Film
The city is a gray piano you play by walking—clang of cable cars, hiss of steam grates, a sax from somewhere private. Posters peel from brick. A mule cart farts as though laughter had a smell. Tyrone balances the grocery bag and the film tin as Estella talks about everything except the thing they both want to talk about.
"You hear from your daddy?" she says finally.
"He wrote from Memphis. Says the work is good if the bosses ain't lookin' too close."
"Mmm." She doesn't say, He wrote us a week later than he promised. She doesn't say, It's 1917 and men go away and come back as stories. She says, "We need coal."
"I'll ask Mr. Greene if he'll extend us credit," Tyrone says.
"Don't you be askin' that man for favors. You got hands. We got pride."
"We got cold," he says, but soft.
She stops, pinches his cheek like he's still ten. "We got you, and you got that look. The one says you gon' take this whole town apart and put it back together prettier. Just do your sums along the way."
He smiles. "Yes, ma'am."
They pass Greene's News & Tobacco. Mr. Greene lifts two fingers from the counter and points to a new stack wrapped in twine. "Fresh off the train, T," he calls. "Adventure tales. Don't you drool on 'em unless you plan to buy."
"I plan to earn," Tyrone says, and the word feels like a new tooth.
[INTERVIEW — HOWARD GREENE, 1979, Galaxy Weekly]
Greene: The boy didn't read like the other boys. He interrogated the page. "Why's the hero rich?" "Why's the villain ugly?" "Why does the girl scream and not swing?" I wanted to charge him double for the trouble, but you don't tax thunder.
4) The Talk That Becomes a Vow
Saturday at the Rialto smells different than church: butter and hot dust, perfume and sawdust. Eddie moves through the place like it's an instrument and he knows every chord. He shows Tyrone the arc lamp, the gate, how to oil the gear. He shows him the "do not ever, under threat of death" switch that kills power before you lose a finger.
In the afternoons, when the news shorts roll—men in uniforms across oceans, flags that look like other flags—Eddie lets Tyrone sit near the back of the booth and watch through a hole in a black curtain. Onscreen, a woman in a hat that could shade a farm looks fierce and pretty in that silent way that pauses can be dramatic.
Tyrone leans toward the light like it's a story whispering just his name.
"See how they cut?" Eddie says over the clack. "Long shot. Mid shot. Close. You pull the eye without the eye knowin'. You pull time like dough."
"Who decides?" Tyrone asks. "Like… the moment a man looks left instead of right. Who decides that?"
Eddie taps the strip. "Somebody did, days ago, miles away. You're just the messenger."
"What if I wanna be the… decider?"
"Director," Eddie says, and grins. "You get to be boss and servant. Best job in the world if you don't mind bein' broke or yelled at."
"I don't mind either," Tyrone says. He means it like a prayer. He doesn't know it yet, but that sentence is a seed that will crack a studio lot open.
Between reels, he sweeps, rewinds, picks gum out of the floor with a butter knife. He watches how the ushers shepherd drunks and how the ticket girl counts fast. He learns where the fire exits stick and how to unstick them. He files all of it next to the sentence about tears and holes: See the trouble before it opens.
At closing, the Rialto coughs up its last lingering couple. The piano man counts nickels. Eddie locks the booth. He looks at Tyrone like the boy's a component he's testing. "Why you watch the edges so much?"
"What?"
"You watch where the light isn't."
Tyrone shrugs. It feels like admitting a secret. "That's where the picture breathes."
Eddie laughs. "Alright, Director. Go home 'fore your mama writes me a letter with a knife in it."
They walk out into a city that's finally quiet enough to hear itself think. The sky is a sheet without a picture. Tyrone looks up and sees where things could go.
"I'm gonna build one," he says.
"One what?"
"A world you could walk into. Where the hurt doesn't get to be the only thing with lines."
Eddie sticks his hands in his pockets. "Big order, T."
"I've been hungry my whole life," Tyrone says. "I can eat big."
[INTERVIEW — TYRONE D. JENNINGS, 1965, The Independent Press]
Interviewer: Do you remember the first time you decided to be a filmmaker?
Tyrone: Decidin' isn't a moment. It's a crowd. A hundred small things you let through the door until you look up and your house is full. But sure. 1917, church basement. Then a week of sweeping the Rialto and eavesdropping on the projectionist. That boy—me—stood under the blank part of the wall and saw the rest of his life.
Interviewer: You make it sound like faith.
Tyrone: It is. With grease on it.
5) Kitchen Light
At home, the house sighs when Estella opens the door like it's relieved to find them again. There's a black iron pot on the stove that has kept meals alive when the pantry couldn't. Tyrone's brother, Nate, is asleep at the table with a math book as a pillow. His little sister, Lila, hums while she draws suns with too many rays.
Estella ladles stew into bowls and raises an eyebrow that says tell me. Tyrone tells her about Eddie, the light, the crank, the edges where the picture breathes. She nods like a judge, like a mother. The corners of her mouth can't help themselves.
"You finish that geometry, Director?" she says, teasing like it's a test.
He wipes broth with bread and says, "Yes, ma'am."
"And church tomorrow."
"Yes, ma'am."
"And coal."
"I'll go early," he says. "Mr. Shaw said he'd let us pay Friday."
Estella reaches across the table and puts her hand over his. "Build your worlds, baby. You still gotta fix this one when the pipe leaks."
"I can do both," he says.
"You better," she says, but it's not a warning. It's permission stamped in love.
[INTERVIEW — LILA JENNINGS-CORTEZ, 1987, FAMILY ORAL HISTORY]
Lila: He'd make up little silent movies with us. Put a sheet up, draw titles on paper, bang a spoon like a cymbal between "scenes." He cast me as a lady detective who didn't like men telling her where she could go. That boy knew.
6) The Handmade Miracle
A week later, Tyrone stands in Pastor Hargree's office with two glass panes, a cigar tin, and a plan he has only drawn in his head. "A magic lantern for youth night," he says. "No fire. Just lamp and glue." The pastor squints as though faith sometimes needs spectacles.
"You build it," Pastor says, "and if the church don't burn down, we'll let the kids ooh and ahh."
Tyrone and Eddie hunch in the back pews with tools borrowed and begged. The lamp is a jar, the lens is a magnifying glass hammered from a cracked picture frame. The film is a parade of hand-drawn figures on long paper run between spools. It is ridiculous and glorious. It takes all day. It works for three minutes exactly before the paper tears and the jar sweats with heat and the image goes sideways like a man slipping on ice.
And still the kids scream like they saw God wink.
Later, Eddie claps him on the back so hard Tyrone wheezes. "You're what they call a menace. Keep it up."
Estella watches from the door with her hands hidden in her shawl so no one sees her squeezing them together until they hurt.
[INTERVIEW — DR. HARRIET COLSON, FILM HISTORIAN, 2021]
Colson: The "lantern show" at New Hope is apocryphal to some, but we've verified two eyewitness accounts and a fragment of the paper strip preserved in a hymnal. What matters isn't whether it was technically impressive. What matters is that it proved to a sixteen-year-old that the gap between wanting and doing was bridgeable with junk and belief.
7) The Question That Opens the Rest
On a gray afternoon that can't decide if it's rain or thinking about rain, Tyrone waits by the Rialto's alley door with his coat buttoned wrong. He has a notebook now, too—thin pages full of boxes he draws when he should be sweeping. Little pictures in squares that move if you flip them. Men chasing things they shouldn't have stolen. Women who refuse to die when they're supposed to. Animals that talk just to say something true.
Eddie comes out smoking like the cold air offended his lungs. "You ever gonna show me what you scribblin'?"
Tyrone hesitates, then hands over the notebook. Eddie flips. He stops on a sequence of a woman cutting herself loose from a chair with the edge of a broken bottle.
"Who taught you this?" Eddie asks.
"No one," Tyrone says, then braver: "The movie did."
"You know what you're doin', right?" Eddie says. "You're making pictures that teach themselves how to be film."
Tyrone swallows. "You think someone would… watch these?"
"Kid," Eddie says, softer than he means to, "you keep chasing it like this, the country will."
Tyrone looks down at the pencil shavings in his pocket like they're gold dust he forgot he had. "Eddie?"
"Mm?"
"What do you call a story you can step into and carry out with you?"
Eddie smirks. "Church?"
"Funny."
"Movie," Eddie says. "And if you do it right—home."
[INTERVIEW — STAN LEE, 1985 ICCE PANEL]
Stan: I always say Marvel was the world outside your window. But Jennings? He wanted to build the window and the other side of it. He used to talk about "worlds you could carry out of a theater in your pocket." I didn't get it until I did.
8) The Vow, Out Loud
That night, Tyrone walks home by the river because he likes how the steam ghosts rise from the stacks and pretend to be mountains. He stops on the Walnut Street bridge and leans on the cold rail until his coat forgets it's supposed to keep him warm. He talks to nobody and everyone.
"I'm gonna do it," he says to the water, because water carries things farther than air. "I'm gonna build something that feeds people that kind of light. I don't want to just pass the crank. I want to decide where they look. I want… I want to give them a place to stand when the real ground goes mean."
A barge horn answers like an old man saying alright, then.
He thinks of Lila's pencil suns. He thinks of Estella's hands inside her shawl. He thinks of Eddie's sentence about tears and holes. He thinks of the frame's edge where the picture breathes. He thinks of the woman in the hat refusing to be a victim just because the story says so.
"Let 'em test me if they want," he whispers, and his breath turns to fog and walks away without him. "I'll fix the tear before it opens."
[EXCERPT — TYRONE'S NOTEBOOK, 1917]
The light is just a promise. The work makes it true. Make the work the prayer and the light will answer.
Cinema ain't a mirror. It is a door. Build a door that feels like home when you step through it.
Find more like me. Build a shop. Then a stage. Then a world.
9) The Morning After
He wakes to coal smell and Lila humming. Estella is already dressed without looking like she slept. Nate is splitting kindling with the accuracy of someone keeping score. Tyrone ties his shoes and thinks about how knots are just stories you trust to hold.
"We got enough?" he asks.
"For this morning," Estella says.
"I'll go see Mr. Shaw at lunch," he says.
"You go to school at lunch."
"I'll go after," he says.
She gives him that look that reads him like a page and decides not to edit. "Go on, Director. Bring home arithmetic and coal."
He walks out into a Monday that doesn't know yet it's about to be part of history. New Hope's basement window still has tape scraps where the sheet hung. The Rialto is shut until noon, but he can smell yesterday in the alley—cigarettes and cheap perfume and the sugar of spilled soda. He draws a little frame on his palm with his thumbnail. He lifts his hand and looks through it at the world.
It fits.
[INTERVIEW — DR. HARRIET COLSON, 2021]
Colson: When we teach "the Jennings Method" now—storyboarding emotionally before you storyboard visually—we always point to 1917. His notes are full of why before what. "What is the promise of this light?" he writes. "Who needs it?" That's the blueprint. Not cameras. Not budgets. Need.
10) Coda: A Day's Work
School bores him in all the usual ways and one surprising one: he resents sitting still when he's just learned that pictures can run. He does the work anyway. In the margins of his geometry he draws a woman cutting a rope with a bottle. His teacher raises an eyebrow that could puncture a tire. "Jennings," she says, "are we solving or are we imagining?"
"Both," he says.
After school, he takes Estella's shopping list and turns it into a route that wastes no steps. He talks to Mr. Shaw about credit and gets a week. He takes Lila to the creek and tells her about movie light without boring her, because he says it like gossip and not gospel. He writes down sentences on scraps and shoves them in his pocket, where they turn into lint that glitters when you shake it out. He thinks that maybe if he can get enough of that glitter together, it'll be a carpet to walk on.
At dinner, Estella tastes the stew and doesn't say it needs salt. She looks at her son and doesn't say she's scared of what big dreams cost. She says, "Pass the bread."
He does. He always will, in one way or another.
That night, he lies awake long enough to see the dark turn the color of water thinking about becoming day. He doesn't know yet about the companies he'll buy, the studios he'll build, the parks that will sing his characters' names. He doesn't know yet about bullets and awards and cigars and the car that drinks water like it's a secret. He doesn't know about the boy who will someday read Mercury Comet and feel less alone. He only knows that if he keeps his hands steady and his eyes ahead of the tear, he might just save the day.
He sleeps like he earned it. The city drums a little rhythm for him. Somewhere in a church hall, a sheet waits on a wall, tape ready to bite again.
Tomorrow is the next reel.
[END OF CHAPTER]