John Korty

• 1. Introduction

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  John Korty is a name that rarely surfaces in lists of great American directors, yet Leonard Maltin described him as "a principled filmmaker who has worked both outside and within the mainstream, attempting to find projects that support his humanistic beliefs." That description comes as close as anything to capturing a career that stretched from a barn studio in Marin County to the Academy Awards stage, from Sesame Street to Star Wars.

  Born on the 22nd of June 1936 in Lafayette, Indiana, Korty began making amateur films while still a teenager. He would go on to win an Emmy, an Oscar, two Directors Guild of America awards, and a Humanitas Prize. He worked with Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Robert Redford. One of the children who appeared in his animated shorts would grow up to become David Fincher.

  How did a filmmaker who built his studio in a barn become a quiet but persistent force in American cinema and television? And why does so much of his story remain just out of reach for most film lovers?

• 2. The Antioch Years

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  At Antioch College in Ohio, during his second year, Korty first became interested in animation. He wrote about this in a 1963 article for the Bolex Reporter, describing how he developed a cut-out technique alongside other imaging methods: scratching the film stock directly, painting on it, and pressing objects like photographs, string, cloth, and scissors into service as visual material.

  Using a Bolex H-16 camera, Korty collaborated with four other students to produce more than 30 television commercial spots while still enrolled. He graduated in 1959. The techniques he built at Antioch were not side experiments. They would run through his entire career, arriving at their fullest expression in his 1983 animated feature Twice Upon a Time.

  His 1964 short Breaking the Habit earned a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject, signaling early that Korty's work sat at the intersection of documentary instinct and formal experimentation.

• 3. The Barn at Stinson Beach

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  In 1964, Korty moved to Stinson Beach in Marin County, north of San Francisco. He converted his barn into a studio he called Korty Films, and over the next four years he made three feature films on modest budgets. The first was The Crazy-Quilt, released in 1966, a little-seen drama with narration by Burgess Meredith. The other two, Riverrun and Funnyman, featured performances by the comedy troupe The Committee Theatre.

  That barn would have an outsized influence on the geography of American cinema. George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola visited and were inspired to establish their own studios in the San Francisco Bay Area. Korty Films became part of what came to be called the "New Hollywood."

  Korty eventually became a tenant at Coppola's Zoetrope Studios in San Francisco. When Coppola raised the rents, Korty moved out. The company ultimately settled in Point Reyes Station, California.

• 4. Miss Jane Pittman

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  By 1972, Korty had shifted his focus to television, directing The People, a science-fiction film based on Zenna Henderson's novel The Pilgrimage, with Kim Darby and William Shatner, produced by Francis Ford Coppola.

  Two years later came the work that would define his reputation. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, aired in 1974, earned Korty the Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series and a Directors Guild of America award. The film traced the life of a fictional formerly enslaved woman and starred Cicely Tyson in the title role. The source does not name the network or detail the production, but the awards speak to the scope of the response it generated.

  Korty also served as cinematographer on The Candidate, the Robert Redford feature, demonstrating a range that moved between directing and the camera operator's chair.

• 5. Oscar for the DeBolts

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  Who Are the DeBolts? And Where Did They Get Nineteen Kids? is a title that stops people in their tracks, and for good reason. Korty's documentary on the DeBolt family won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, with the Oscar going to Korty in 1977. The following year, the Directors Guild of America gave him an award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary for the same film. In 1979, he received both an Emmy for Outstanding Individual Achievement in an Informational Program and a Humanitas Prize for the film.

  The Humanitas Prize was a shared award, pairing Who Are the DeBolts? with Farewell to Manzanar, his 1976 adaptation of the story of Japanese American internment during World War II. That film Korty also wrote and produced himself.

  Go Ask Alice, made in 1973, rounded out a period in which Korty took on some of the most charged social subjects in American life and handled them through documentary and dramatized documentary forms.

• 6. Lumage and the Children's Hours

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  In the mid-1970s and again in the late 1980s, viewers of Sesame Street and The Electric Company encountered something distinctly different from the rest of those programs: short animated films with an unusual luminous quality. Korty made these using a backlit cut-out technique he named Lumage, short for Luminous Image.

  For the Sesame Street work, he favored a synthetic fabric called Pellon, which gave the films a consistent visual texture. Some of the segments ran as short as 18 seconds. Improv actors ad-libbed much of the dialogue, and child performers appeared in some pieces. One of those children was the sister of David Fincher, who also worked for Korty during this period before going on to direct his own films.

  Korty also produced animated shorts for the first season of Vegetable Soup, working with Drew Takahashi and Gary Gutierrez. The Sesame Street segments included at least one adaptation of Aesop's Fables and featured a recurring character named Thelma Thumb.

• 7. Twice Upon a Time and Later Work

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  Twice Upon a Time, released theatrically by Warner Bros. in August 1983, was produced by George Lucas. The animated fantasy used the cut-out and Lumage methods Korty had been developing since Antioch. The film lost money, and Korty did not return to animated productions for more than twenty years.

  HBO aired it as a feature in June 1984. The gap between the theatrical release and the television broadcast tells something about the film's commercial trajectory. Still, the project was a rare convergence of Korty's Antioch-era techniques and a major Hollywood collaboration.

  His other feature work during this period included Oliver's Story in 1978 and the Star Wars spin-off Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure in 1984. In 1993 he adapted Rudyard Kipling's story "They" into the television film They Watch. He directed episodes of Sesame Street across a run from 1974 to 1993, a tenure of nearly two decades on a single program.

• 8. The Final Chapter

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  In 2006, Korty returned to the animation form he had first practiced at Antioch, producing two short animated pieces for the World Wide Web. The characters were named Brock and Throck, and they discussed the political landscape of the time. Korty explained in a news release that the design came from sketches he had made during his very first experiments: "One in particular was perfect for a dialogue between two characters - a single zigzag line that can function as the profile for either face. I had put it away, waiting for the right subject matter. The wait was fifty years."

  Korty died on the 9th of March 2022 from vascular dementia, as reported by his brother Doug. He was survived by his third wife, Jane Silvia, to whom he had been married for 32 years, and by three sons: Jonathan and David Korty from his second marriage to designer Beulah Chang, and Gabriel Korty from his marriage to Jane Silvia. He also had three grandchildren.

  The 2007 documentary Fog City Mavericks had included Korty among a group of San Francisco film veterans whose work helped shape the Bay Area film culture that Lucas and Coppola would later make famous.