“There it is, man, the magnificent Atlantic Ocean,” he said. “Just always there for you.”

He recalled biking around the beach and the boardwalk in downtown Asbury Park, trampling flowers and riding through backyards, in search of summer flings and cold ocean dips.

He hung out at the candy store his father owned on Springwood and Dewitt Avenues and was an altar boy at the local Catholic church that he attended with his parents and two older sisters. His first job was “putting the little kids on the rides” at a boardwalk amusement park on Ocean Avenue in Asbury. And he spent many of his teenage nights cruising around Ocean Avenue and Kingsley Street in a junky Buick that his friends polished to boost their dating prospects.

Hot-dog stands offered some of the best chances at finding dates, Mr. DeVito said. “It was really ridiculous,” he said with a belly laugh. “All these cars, just looking for girls, going around. Every once in a while someone kind enough who was of age would throw a beer in the car.”

But it was in the five movie theaters that operated in Asbury Park that he was bitten by the “acting bug.” His first date was at the St. James Theater; he called the Mayfair his “Taj Mahal” for its majestic fountains and decorative entrance; and he never missed a screening at the Paramount, sometimes sneaking through a side door in Convention Hall — even if the projector was mounted high in an office, which gave the films a distorted, trapezoidal appearance.

These days he has been pushing the state to adopt a tax incentive for movie productions. He pointed to the densely populated corridor between Asbury Park and New York as full of production potential, with engineers, technicians, carpenters, cameramen and makeup artists. (When he was a teen, Mr. DeVito himself briefly moonlighted as a beautician at his sister Angie’s salon in Asbury, where he was known as “Mr. Dan.”)