2012 Heroes of Marin — Presented by the Pacific Sun and Circle Bank PHOTO COURTESY ROBIN COLLIER & JOHN KORTY
John Korty Arts & Culture by Dani Bu rlison
“I
came to San Francisco sight unseen, and it was the best blind date of my life,” recounts John Korty on a recent bright fall morning in Point Reyes Station. It was the winter of 1963 and Korty, a native of Lafayette, Indiana, and graduate of Ohio’s Antioch College, had enough in the bank to finally head west. He loaded everything he owned into an old beat-up VW Bus and drove to the coast. Soon after arriving in San Francisco, Korty moved north into Marin, where he found a Stinson Beach rental to accommodate him and his desire for studio space. That house on a hill cost him a whopping $125 per month. Intrigued with artistic expression from a very young age, Korty began illustrating and copying comics. But it had been back in high school where the lure of filmmaking really caught hold. “I had a great art teacher who was always pushing us to do unusual things. I came in one day and she was pulling the blinds down and there was a film projector and she said, ‘We’re gonna look at some films from a crazy Canadian,’” says Korty. “It was this amazing guy—Norman McLaren was his name.” McLaren’s direct-film animations— drawing and/or painting directly on film— triggered something in Korty that set him on the path that would lead to a pioneering directing career in the North Bay. After a short stint with his own small production company at age 19, Korty went on to produce a wide array of films—many for television—including several awardwinning productions among his dozens of
documentary, feature and animated films. It is difficult to pick which of his films are most notable, many have received wide acclaim. Some of his proudest moments came with ironic twists. “The last showing [for The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman screened on CBS in 1974] was in Washington, D.C., at the Kennedy Center. And there were senators and all kinds of very important people and we got a standing ovation,” says Korty. “And here I was, being put up in a Washington, D.C., hotel and I went back to my hotel and I’m there all alone in this nice big suite and everyone I know on the West Coast is asleep and I’m walking around all night thinking to myself, This is great! This is great! I couldn’t go to sleep and I was so excited with nothing to do with my excitement!” The night in 1978 when his documentary Who Are the DeBolts? And Where Did They Get Nineteen Kids? won an Academy Award was not much different. “People often ask, ‘What is it like to win an Oscar?’ And I say, ‘I was folding my laundry in a New York hotel room’ because I was in the midst of making a feature film for Paramount,” he laughs. “You know, you do the work because you really enjoy what you’re doing, not because you’re waiting for glory,” he says. And he most certainly loves the process of filmmaking. Korty is currently working on five film projects, all of which are tied closely to his love of Marin. “My problem is a surplus of ideas,” he says. “I wake up, I go to the shower and I come out with another idea for a movie.” < 14>
Hero FYI + John Korty made his directorial debut with The Crazy-Quilt, filmed in West Marin and released in 1966. At that year’s S.F. Film Festival, where the film received great reviews, he met three men on his way to a press conference. “We’re from L.A. and we’ve been trying to break
into the film business and we’re getting no place. We feel like we’re banging our heads on the wall,” they said. “How did you do it? You come along, you had no reputation, almost no money...how did you do it?” Who were those three men? Directors Tony Bill and Monte
John Korty—the father of the Marin filmmaking scene.
Hellman—and their actor friend Jack Nicholson. + Who Are the DeBolts? And Where Did They Get Nineteen Kids?, a Henry Winkler-narrated 1977 film about a California couple who adopt several children with special needs, earned Korty that year’s Oscar for best feature-length documentary. + Korty is often credited with introducing Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas to the North Bay. In fact he told a wonderful story last year to the Sun’s Greg Cahill about meeting Coppola and Lucas via a San Francisco filmmakers’ symposium and, later, showing them around his Stinson Beach film studio on July 4, 1968. Two weeks later, he said, the two future legends returned to scout out locations to establish their own studios in the North Bay. + Even though he was the youngest and least experienced contender
for the director’s role for The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Korty landed the job, he says, by reading a passage from his favorite book, James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, at the interview. + A wooden-boat lover, Korty recently completed a short documentary on the Spaulding Wooden Boat Center in Sausalito. + His current projects include a documentary on the late Arthur Okamura, a longtime Bolinas-based artist; a film about Marin activist and musician Pete Sears; and a documentary on composer Paul Chihara. + ln Korty says,“My favorite definition of what a director does comes from François Truffaut. He was so French... he says,“It’s very easy. A director stands around all day saying, too much. That’s not enough. That’s too much. And he’s absolutely right. It’s the most important thing!”
NOVEMBER 23 - NOVEMBER 29, 2012 PACIFIC SUN 17