Spend your lunch hour with actor, country artist and Cleveland native Rob Mayes in conversation with CIA Senior Professor of Practice Scott Lax as they discuss the state of entertainment in Hollywood, Cleveland and beyond. They’ll tackle the question of whether seemingly limitless streaming content has killed independent movies and character-driven TV shows, or if we’re possibly at the beginning of a new kind of Golden Age of screen entertainment.
Mayes and Lax's talk will take place during Lunch on Fridays from 12:15 to 1:30pm Friday, March 21 in CIA's Peter B. Lewis Theater.
Mayes will share stories of both the glamor of Hollywood as well as the realities of what it takes to remain a successful working actor in an industry wracked by pandemic lockdowns, writers’ and actors’ strikes, and natural disasters.
Lax and Mayes will also talk publicly for the first time about their producing partnership for the feature film version of Lax’s novel, Vengeance Follows, for which Lax has written the screenplay and in which Mayes will star.
Speaker Bios
Rob Mayes
Born and raised in Cleveland, actor and country artist Rob Mayes has achieved an amazing body of work. American Songwriter magazine compared Mayes’ excellence in both music and acting to that of Bradley Cooper. Mayes’ music has more than 10 million career streams.
His long list of films and TV shows include Netflix’s hit, The Neon Highway, starring Rob Mayes and Beau Bridges, as well as recent guest star turns on hit TV shows Tracker on CBS and Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan’s Lioness on Paramount+. Mayes can also be seen in the feature film 5000 Blankets, as well as dozens of other TV shows and movies, including the 2012 cult classic, John Dies at the End, in which he stars alongside Paul Giamatti.
Coming up, Rob Mayes can also be seen in several films, including Where the Wind Blows, a Western romance; Lost and Found in Cleveland, with Martin Sheen and Dennis Haysbert; as well as A Blind Bargain, a 1970s-era remake of the lost 1922 Lon Chaney silent film of the same name.
Scott Lax
CIA Senior Professor of Practice Scott Lax teaches writing, specializing in Screenwriting. He’s a recipient of a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference nonfiction scholarship, a Sewanee Writers Conference fiction fellowship, six journalism awards and four first-place film festival awards.
The Denver Post called Scott’s first novel The Year That Trembled one of the year’s “milestones in fiction.” The Boston Herald called the feature film that he produced, and which is based on his novel, “memorable and touching.” His recent two-act stage play version of that novel, 1970, ran for two weeks in the fall of 2023 at the Chagrin Valley Little Theatre in Chagrin Falls, Ohio.
Of his second novel, Vengeance Follows, which Lax adapted as a screenplay, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Ron Powers wrote, “Mesmerizing and masterful … gets inside the head of a lethal sociopath while maintaining a loving evocation of a quiet Ohio town with a Richard Russo-like respect for the human soul.”
A professional drummer since the age of 13, Lax has performed with Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee Bo Diddley, among many musicians locally and nationally.
Parking: Lunch on Fridays attendees may park in CIA's Lot 73 and Annex Lot, both of which surround our campus. Please note that signs posted around those lots correctly state that parking typically requires a CIA permit or visitor pass and that violators will be ticketed. However, to accommodate our valued Lunch on Fridays attendees, that policy won't be enforced during the program. Have questions? Please contact Reinberger Gallery at reinbergergallery@cia.edu or 216.421.7407.
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