Short Films Committee
George Figgs is a Baltimore film and music icon who was born in Hampden and began playing in bands by the age of 14. He was an activist in the Civil Rights and anti-war movements in the early 1960s, and then met John Waters and started a film career portraying characters in the early Waters films. Because of his ongoing work with Waters he is considered a “Dreamlander,” one of Waters’ regular cast and crew members. George traveled between New York and Baltimore for the next several years working in music and film, making an LP, and even signing with a record label and touring with the band performing it. He was involved in several more bands after that (including TBone Walker’s band in 1972), and then began working in revival cinema at the Orson Wells Cinema in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He eventually came back to Baltimore to pursue his own work in painting and creating stop-action animation videos. By the 1980s he was working at the Charles Theater, and forming his own ideas for a unique theater specializing in revival and art films. In 1990 he opened the Orpheum Cinema in Fells Point, and ran 1,000 films in the 10 years it was operating.
During that time George also became known as a dailies projectionist and ran dailies for the Hollywood feature films being shot in Baltimore, working with people like Sven Nykvist, Jodie Foster, Terry Gilliam and others. He soon became known as “the movie guy,” sharing news on the Baltimore film scene in regular appearances on talk shows like “Rodricks for Breakfast” in the late 1990s. In 2001 he began working at the Walters Art Museum where he ran the Graham Auditorium as projectionist and handled all visual medium presentations for the curators there. In 2018 his artwork was included in an exhibition at the famous AVAM in Baltimore. Today George is a film historian and archivist, and is considered an expert in the film noir genre of filmmaking.