Meet two film fanatics who share a first name and an inexhaustible love for cinema

By Bill Newcott
Photograph by Scott Nathan
From the May 2024 issue

The two Robs had a dream. “We wanted to create a religious experience for film nerds,” says Rob Waters.

“Yeah,” adds Rob Rector. “Not just watching movies, you know. A communal experience.”

For the past eight years, like Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint hanging from Mount Rushmore in “North by Northwest,” the two friends have clung to that movie lovers’ vision. They’ve screened obscure cult classics — to full houses and nearly empty ones — at the Milton Theatre. They’ve braved the perils of COVID-19 to present open-air screenings at Hudson Fields. And they’ve put local filmmakers through their paces with their annual Horror Trailer Challenge.

“It’s a lot,” says Waters.

“Yeah … a lot,” Rector echoes.

But there’s no sense of film fatigue emanated by this pair. Quite the opposite: Sitting across a table from me at Panera Bread (“a sacred place,” Waters says), the two longtime friends seem like a couple of hyperactive third-graders as they recount the twisting tale of their diverse film program, which they call Revival House.

Waters and Rector are, to be fair, something more than just film nerds: Waters is a local film producer/ director. (In fact, he produces web videos for Delaware Beach Life.) Rector, chairman of communications at Delaware Technical Community College in Georgetown, was co-founder of the Rehoboth Beach Independent Film Festival, which got its 1998 start in a multiplex located in the old Rehoboth Mall, the Midway-area shopping center where Walmart stands today.

“A lot of people don’t remember that,” Rector says, “because a lot of people weren’t here.”

Those theaters were long gone by 2016, and despite the presence of multiple screens at the Movies at Midway and the Rehoboth Beach Film Society’s then-new Cinema Art Theater, Waters and Rector still had a nagging feeling that the outer fringes of cinema were not being illuminated locally.

“One day we started talking about this idea of a film festival experience that was more like a music festival,” says Waters, who teaches advanced filmmaking in Rector’s college department. “And we came up with this thing where we’d have a movie, but we’d also have a band playing and artwork and craft making.

“It was going to be a big cinematic party.”

It just so happened that the perfect venue had arrived on the scene: After years of neglect, the Milton Theatre was re-opening and hungry for bookings.

“This is when they were using folding chairs,” says Rector. “We got to know Fred [Munzert, director of the theater], and we told him, ‘Look, we have no idea if this is gonna work, but let’s give it a try.’”

That’s how Revival House got started. Initially, the plan was to have monthly screenings with a different theme each time. First up: “Your Roots Are Showing,” an evening that involved screening a modern film along with the vintage movie that influenced its creator.

Rector and Waters could have chosen, say, “Star Wars” and paired it with “Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe,” which inspired the later film’s look and storyline. Or “Taxi Driver” followed by John Ford’s “The Searchers,” the film Martin Scorsese largely modeled it on.

But for two self-proclaimed film nerds, such choices seemed too obvious. Instead, they went with “The Guest,” a well-regarded but little-seen 2014 indie horror movie starring Dan Stevens, whose character on “Downton Abbey” famously died in a car accident minutes after his baby was born.

“We loved ‘The Guest,’” Waters says. “We also love John Carpenter [director of ‘Halloween’], and you could see his influence all over it.”

For their initial offering, the Robs paired “The Guest” with Carpenter’s comedy adventure “Big Trouble in Little China,” starring Kurt Russell as a trucker who finds himself battling an ancient sorcerer. The film flopped famously in 1986 but has since become a cult classic.

“So, it was a double feature,” says Rector. “The idea was to show ‘The Guest,’ and then everyone would have a drink, and then we’d come back for ‘Big Trouble in Little China.’ We went on local radio and TV to promote it. There were articles about it. We threw everything into it. I even dressed up like Kurt Russell to introduce the films.”

The Robs had thought of everything, except for one detail: Their big night of obscure cult films had been scheduled in the middle of college basketball’s March Madness.

Waters sucks air through his teeth, as if in pain.

“Nobody showed up,” he said.

“Well, our friends and family did,” Rector interjects. “That was nice of them.”

Still, like plucky orphans in a Depression-era musical, the Robs didn’t give up. It helped that Milton Theatre director Munzert had patience.

Rector recalls, “He said, ‘Look, things take time. You gotta allow things to take hold and then grow.’”

The Robs presented Munzert with a monthly Revival House calendar of movie night themes: concert documentaries … women directors … teen dramas. Some months, filmmakers conducted post-screening Q&A’s with the audience via Skype.

But the breakthrough came when Revival House sponsored an evening called “Don’t Hassle Me, I’m Local” — a program of films created by area moviemakers.

“The place was packed,” Waters recalls. “At the time, no one was showing local films. If you were a filmmaker in Delaware, you had to leave the state to get someone to screen your work. And here they were. Every director showed up, every seat was filled.

“We looked at each other and said, ‘Wow — this is actually working!”

Adds Rector, “That was when our community really took hold.”

Perhaps the pair’s most ambitious project was to remove the soundtrack of the moody, minimalist science-fiction movie “Moon,” starring Sam Rockwell, and have composer/keyboardist Ariel Piazza, formerly of Lewes, create an entirely new score. The result was so successful they repeated the feat for Ryan Gosling’s “Drive” and Robert Redford’s “All Is Lost.”

This is the sort of project a major film festival or cinema society might commission and then take on the road to justify the time and effort involved. For the Robs, it was one and done, then on to the next month’s theme.

“That was a pretty crazy thing to try to pull off in a little town like Milton,” says Waters. “But the audiences around here can be really sophisticated.”

It was also exhausting.

“I mean, we had jobs,” says Waters.

“And young kids,” adds Rector.

“So we started to get a little burned out,” Waters continues, “especially when we put together what we thought was a can’t-miss program —”

“— Like the blaxploitation movie,” says Rector.

“Oh, yeah,” Waters responds, rolling his eyes. “Nobody showed up!”

“We had a musician signed up,” Rector says. “We had an artist; we took steps to make sure the whole thing was culturally appropriate —”

“— And nothing!” Waters exclaims. “It was almost offensive to us!”

The Robs were seriously considering cutting back the Revival House schedule when the decision was made for them: COVID-19 shut down movie theaters and, later, severely limited how many seats a theater could sell.

It was time to think outside the box. Or, more accurately, inside the circle.

“We noticed places doing outdoor events,” says Waters, with little pods of people sitting in circles on the grass. “Well, I know the Hudsons, who own Hudson Fields, and I do a lot of video work for Beebe hospital. So we came up with this really fast idea: We would screen my all-time favorite movie, ‘Jaws,’ on a 50-foot screen out in the open at Hudson Fields.”

“We called it JawsFest,” says Rector. “And it was awesome.”

It is useful to recall the state of the world in August 2020. At that point, people were still reluctant to walk past each other on bike paths, much less sit in groups, outside or not. In the case of JawsFest, the fact that it was being held as a benefit for Beebe Healthcare probably helped set people’s minds at ease.

“We kept explaining to them it’s really safe,” says Waters. “The Freeman Stage was doing it, the Lewes ferry was doing it. It’ll be OK. We’ll make it work.”

As it turned out, it seemed like virtually everyone at the beach had been dying to watch a movie. Rector and Waters opened the gates — and the people just kept on coming.

“We actually couldn’t enjoy it because we had to keep making more and more circles for people to sit in,” Waters recalls.

The height of COVID-19 is a dismal memory now, but Revival House’s summer fests go on: JawsFest was followed by JurassicFest followed by StarWarsFest followed by BatFest. This summer: GooniesFest.

But first comes the Revival House Slower Lower Short Film Festival on June 2. An outgrowth of “Don’t Hassle Me, I’m Local,” the Milton Theatre event will feature movies made by regional filmmakers.

And finally, in the fall, comes Revival House’s signature event: The Sixth Annual Horror Trailer Challenge. The rules are easy, but the task isn’t: Entrants get one week to create the trailer for an unproduced horror film, making sure to include a prop and a key phrase chosen by the Robs.

Last year, the phrase was “We’ve got company.” The year before that: “You really outdid yourself.”

It was Rector who came up with the idea of commissioning trailers rather than full horror films.

“I had to convince Rob to make it all about trailers,” says Rector. (The only time one is not confused about which Film Revival Rob is being discussed is when one Rob refers to the other.) “It was an exercise we did in one of our film classes at DelTech. A trailer condenses a larger film to its most basic elements, but you don’t need to go through all the plot twists.

“In a trailer, you don’t have to explain how a character got to the forest. But you can do all the cool shots you’d get in that forest.”

Waters was at first skeptical.

“I’ve done, like, a million 48-hour extreme filmmaking competitions,” he says. “But just doing trailers; it felt like cheating. Then, the more I thought about it, the more I liked it.”

Now, each year the festival draws between 15 and 21 entrants. There’s a cash prize, but the real reward is when a live audience goes nuts for trailers advertising fake schlock horror titles like “Swipe Left,” about the world’s worst girlfriend; “The 6th Governor,” about a misfit who’s literally hellbent on becoming the sixth Delaware governor from Milton; and “Zoltar Speaks,” which follows a young woman who gets some very bad advice from the Rehoboth Beach boardwalk swami.

Among the festival’s most successful directors is Lewes graphic designer Teresa Rodriguez. Her first effort, “Hell’s Pumpkin” — a grainy, black-and-white 1950s-style trailer featuring a killer jack-o-lantern — won the grand prize. A year later, Rodriguez’s animated trailer “Nightmare Girl” was voted the audience’s favorite.

“That audience award was super special,” says Rodriguez. “There’s nothing like sitting there and hearing people laugh and respond to something you’ve created. It’s so much work in such a short period, by the time it’s over you think, ‘I’m never doing that again.’

“Then you hear that response and go, ‘Well, maybe one more time ... ’”

Perhaps even better, Rodriguez’s Horror Trailer Challenge success led to her being hired to make honest-to-goodness trailers for local theatrical productions.

“It’s opened up a lot of opportunities,” she says. “The Horror Trailer Challenge was my gateway drug.”

From nonexistence to sponsoring three iconic area events, the Robs have brought Revival House a long way since 2016. There was no master plan then, and there really isn’t one now.

“We just want to keep having fun,” says Rector. “We enjoy this. Even the events that no one comes to, we can laugh about it and learn what we did wrong.”

Rector does feel Revival House has moved beyond being strictly a Milton-based operation.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he hastens to add, “we love Milton. We absolutely love that theater and the people. But I think we’re getting to the point where we can put our Revival House stamp on various outside projects, and that’s kind of interesting.”

The other Rob smiles.

“He’s more ambitious than I am,” he says with a laugh.