Pablo Vitar appeared in one film. In 1993 he turned up in the closing scene of The Sandlot as the grown up Benny “The Jet” Rodriguez, a part his younger brother had carried for the rest of the picture. Three years later he joined the Los Angeles Police Department. By the autumn of 2004 the force had made him one of two officers fronting its biggest recruitment push in years, and the following August doctors found stage four colon cancer. He died on 29 January 2008, aged 41.
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One scene in The Sandlot
The Sandlot, released in April 1993, follows a group of boys through a summer of neighbourhood baseball in early sixties Los Angeles. Benny Rodriguez is the best player among them, and in the film’s final minutes the story jumps decades ahead to Dodger Stadium, where a grown Benny steals home in front of a full crowd. That older Benny is Pablo Vitar.
Benny is played for the rest of the film by Mike Vitar, his younger brother by twelve years. The two never appear on screen together despite playing the same character. It was the only credited screen role Pablo ever had. Mike’s went on longer. He appeared in both Mighty Ducks sequels, left acting in 1997, trained as an ambulance EMT and joined the Los Angeles Fire Department in 2002, where he has worked as a firefighter since.
Berkeley, an agent and the family property business
Vitar was born in Los Angeles on 22 April 1966, went to Loyola High School and then to the University of California, Berkeley. By an account written after his death by Dena Seif, he got into the industry almost by accident on a visit home from university, when an agent offered to represent him. Modelling and commercial work followed, and he divided his time between acting jobs and scouting locations for his family’s property company, Westcoast Properties.
In 1996, after roughly a decade of that, he joined the LAPD and was posted to the Hollywood Division, working with the vice unit and with the Police Athletic League, which runs sport and youth programmes for local children. Those were the postings he talked about most, according to his widow, Gail.
How the LAPD came to put him on a billboard
The department needed officers badly by 2004. Chief William Bratton said it had to hire 400 in the coming year to cover retirements and departures, and recruiters expected to work through as many as 6,000 applicants to find enough who could pass the academy. What they settled on was three short films, each running about three minutes, shot to look like cinema trailers and built around a single call: a child abduction, a domestic disturbance and a hostage taking.
Weber Shandwick produced them and J.C. Barros directed, coming off music videos for Gloria Estefan and Enrique Iglesias. The department put in around $100,000 and took roughly $350,000 more in donated services from about a dozen companies. Filming ran through September 2004 at locations including the 6th Street Bridge and the Venice boardwalk. The finished films played before features at Magic Johnson Theaters and online at JoinLAPD.com and Monster.com, and the LAPD held a premiere for them, red carpet included, in the auditorium at Parker Center.
The campaign was carried by two officers, both picked from a casting call open to the whole rank and file, Detective Cassandra Britt-Nickerson and Vitar. Capt. Rick Webb, who ran recruitment, told the Los Angeles Times the pairing was deliberate. Britt-Nickerson was an African American woman and Vitar a Latino man, and the department wanted a campaign that looked like the city it policed.
Armando Azarloza, an executive vice president at Weber Shandwick, gave the paper the line the whole thing was sold on. These, he said, were “cops playing actors, not actors playing cops.”
The same report described Vitar as having acted in films as a child. He had not. He was 27 when The Sandlot came out, and the child actor in the family was his younger brother.
Britt-Nickerson got a banner thirty feet high hung down the side of Parker Center. Vitar, along with several other officers used in the campaign, went up on billboards around the city pointing recruits at the department’s hiring site.
The diagnosis, and a warehouse near Echo Park
Vitar was 39 when doctors found stage four colon cancer in August 2005, less than a year after the recruitment films were shot.
He spent much of what followed on something he had wanted for years. He took on a disused vending machine repair warehouse near Echo Park, along with a barn like building beside it, and turned the pair into BelleVarado Studios. Work on Stage 22, the soundstage, began in the spring of 2006. Studio 12 opened in February 2007, and Stage 22 was finished that October, three months before he died. Nearly all of the building work happened while he was having chemotherapy. Staff there said afterwards that he had watched Alicia Keys perform on the stage he built.
The obituary and the pension file
The Los Angeles Times obituary for Pablo P. Vitar ran on 3 February 2008. It described an illness of two and a half years and an eleven year police career, and it named the family he left:
- His wife, Gail
- Their children, Emily, Alexis and Dominic
- His parents, Pablo Sr. and Aurora
- His sister, Elizabeth
A rosary was held the following day, with the funeral service on 5 February at St. John Eudes Church in Chatsworth, in the San Fernando Valley, where the family lived. He was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills.
Board minutes from Los Angeles Fire and Police Pensions record him as a Police Officer III who died holding a service connected disability pension. The same minutes show the city paying survivor benefits to Gail and the children for years afterwards. Emily came off the file in 2016, at 22.
What his family kept going
Gail was raising three children in the San Fernando Valley when her husband died. She kept BelleVarado open with the staff he had hired, working alongside his mother, Aurora. The site was still in use in 2016, eight years after his death, hosting screenings during the Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival.
During his treatment Vitar told people the illness had taught him “how fragile life is, and how strong I was.” His mother repeated the line after he died.
