I hitchhiked to Miami in 1953, and there were oranges laying on the road, black shantytowns, and marinas with nice boats. The museums were virtually empty.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
What's special about Miami is the collision of cultures. And the white sand beaches and fantastic restaurants.
I remember being so homesick and realizing that where I came from was not something that existed in the cultural imagination outside the city. People used to think Miami was just partying in South Beach all the time.
So that when I came from Panama... my family was exiled in 1973 and they went to Miami.
When I went to San Francisco in that cold late spring of 1967, I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around a while and made a few friends.
I went to UC Santa Cruz, overlooking the Bay of Monterey and Santa Cruz, in 1969. Back then, the city was part-hippie, part-surfer, but mostly retired chicken farmer.
Miami's my favorite art fair. I even surfed there one year.
When I was 19 years old, I hitchhiked across the country to San Francisco.
In 1958, I was shooting a movie in Florida, and I decided to go to Havana, Cuba, to see what it was like.
So I went to Miami in '74 with my family and while I was there it became obvious that we needed money and we needed to do something, because my family, we left without anything really, and we didn't have any money to begin with.
It didn't get any more glamorous than Havana, Cuba, in the 1950s. I used to go there when I was a waiter on a cruise ship.