Filmmaker John Korty Looks Back – But Isn’t Done Yet

Oscar-winning Marin filmmaker John Korty takes center stage at the this month, starting with this week’s First Friday event for which he’s curated a number of experimental films.

But while the 75-year-old Korty will be back at the library throughout the month for a series of Monday Night at the Movies screenings that explore his more than 50-year career, that exploration could just as easily be a walking tour of Mill Valley.

Although Korty has spent the early and latter parts of his career headquartered in West Marin, Mill Valley served as the epicenter of one of the creative peaks of his career, he says. It all started at 200 Miller Avenue with a woman named Delores Stiveson.

“At our height (in the late 70s and 80s), we had 40 people working there and another 25 working at three other locations in Mill Valley,” Korty says. “It was crazy.”

Stiveson, the owner of 200 Miller at the time, also ran a bar that was across the street from the Hall of Justice on Howard St. in San Francisco.

“She was a tough cookie, but she was very soft on tenants,” Korty says.

Korty says a single mother and her children lived in the home prior to him opening his studio there. The mother had run out of money, fallen five months behind on rent and had burned all the interior doors for firewood.

“When I asked Delores why she didn’t intervene sooner, she said, ‘Well, I didn’t want to be a butt-insky,’” Korty says. "I love that line.”

Korty was living in Homestead Valley at the time he turned 200 Miller into his workplace and says he loved being able to walk to work each day and spend plenty of time with his two sons, longtime local musician and Vinyl co-founder Jonathan, and David, an accomplished artist.

Korty transformed one of the second floor bedrooms at 200 Miller into an animation station for a number of Sesame Street shorts he was doing at the time, while most of his time was focused on the theatrical animated feature Twice Upon a Time.

Korty’s career was the subject of a retrospective at the Rafael Film Center last November, a month-long series he calls “a wonderful experience.” Korty invited a number of people who had worked on the screened films to attend.

“For me it was like a series of little reunions, including some people I hadn’t seen for 25 or 30 years,” Korty says. “So that was great.”

Korty says he welcomes the chance to both show off his own past work and highlight unknown films worthy of attention. He says he picked the films he’ll be showing at the First Friday event in the context of how he viewed the medium as a fledgling 19-year-old filmmaker more than five decades ago.

“Most movies are just pictures of people talking,” he says. “What always excited me was other uses of the medium.”

To that end, he’s showing a film made entirely without a camera, a “hilarious” film of nothing but people inhaling and exhaling and one made for just $100.

“Each of them is a great piece of work and they’re very entertaining,” he says.

The First Friday event will be followed with screenings of some of Korty’s films on subsequent Mondays in April. The first, on April 9, is The Crazy-Quilt, Korty’s 1966 film that explores the “marriage of polar extremes” of a termite exterminator named Henry and butterfly-loving Lorabelle. The New York Times called The Crazy-Quilt a "wonderfully funny-yet curiously fey-comedy.”

On April 16, the library will show Farewell to Manzanar, Korty’s 1976 film about a dark chapter in American history from the perspective of the Wakatsukis, a Japanese-American family living in Santa Monica in the early 1940s and forced into an internment camp in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The film was just released on DVD for the first time, and Korty credits the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles for making it happen.

A pair of music documentaries follows on April 23, with Korty’s latest film, John Allair Digs In digging into the man who has been described as the original rock and roll piano player in Marin County, long before the arrival of the likes of Jerry Garcia, Carlos Santana and Huey Lewis. The second film is 2009’s Miracle in a Box, which traces the laborious and delicate restoration of a 1927 Steinway piano donated to U.C. Berkeley and used for the First Berkeley Piano Competition.

And while he reflects on his career and highlights lesser-known work, Korty says he’s as inspired as ever. His current project, under the working title Peaches, Masumoto, looks at a Japanese American family farm in the San Joaquin Valley as a way to both further explore the history of the larger community there and how those farms fit into the organic and slow food movements.

“I’m really excited about it,” Korty says.

The 411: The free First Friday event with filmmaker John Korty is at 7 p.m. Friday, April 6 in the library’s main reading room. A wine reception is before and after the event. The Friends of the Library present three screenings of Korty’s work in April at 7:30 p.m. in the Creekside Room.:

• April 9 - The Crazy-Quilt (1966)
• April 16 - Farewell to Manzanar (1976)
• April 23 - John Allair Digs In (2012) and Miracle in a Box (2009)