John Korty, an Academy Award-winning director and longtime Point Reyes Station resident, died on March 9. He was 85 years old. 

A pioneer of Northern California cinema, John convinced Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas that they could make movies in the Bay Area, away from the pressures of Hollywood. His love for Marin kept him firmly planted by the shores of Tomales Bay, and he carved a unique career path, creating an eclectic body of work that ranged from historical drama to documentary to animation. 

John’s directing style was understated, and his films weren’t pretentious or bombastic, but he quietly achieved the kind of independence many directors before him had dreamed of. His most celebrated works, including “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” and “Who Are the DeBolts? And Where Did They Get Nineteen Kids?” captured human stories that compelled audiences and won him awards. 

“Although he was gentle, he was very firm about what he was interested in and what he wanted to do,” said his friend Walter Murch, a three-time Oscar-winner who lives in Bolinas. “He was able to navigate in and out of those thorny bushes of occasionally working on Hollywood films, but always very independently.” 

John was born in 1936 in Lafayette, Ind., and went to high school in the St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood, Mo. An art teacher, Dorothy Vorhees, sparked his interest in filmmaking when she showed films by avant-garde animator Norman McLaren on the classroom projector. The 17-year-old was floored by the vibrant visual effects McLaren created by scratching and painting directly on 35mm film. “I just immediately thought, ‘Boy, that’s what I want to do,’” John told the Webster-Kirkwood Times in 2015. 

As a liberal arts student at Antioch College in Ohio, John made his own animated commercial spots for local TV stations. The distinctive techniques he used, including cutting out blocky Matisse-esque shapes and drawing on the film stock, would eventually make their way into his eccentric 1983 feature “Twice Upon a Time,” produced by George Lucas, and shorts created for Sesame Street.

Fresh out of college in 1960, John shot scenes of Quaker demonstrators at a peace vigil to protest nuclear escalation in front of the Pentagon. The footage became “The Language of Faces,” an early documentary about anti-war sentiment in the United States, several years before the upheavals of the 1960s. The film won 11 international awards. 

John’s youngest son, Gabe Korty, said “The Language of Faces” is his favorite of his dad’s films, and he felt its continued resonance at a 2011 retrospective at the Rafael Theater. “That was the last thing shown, and when it ended, there was this huge murmur that went through the whole audience,” Gabe said.

After landing in San Francisco in the early ‘60s, John was drawn by the beauty of the coast and began renting a place in Stinson Beach. He met artist Beulah Chang, on a road trip back to Antioch in his Volkswagen van. Beulah graduated in 1964, and John initially offered her a job in his new studio. “I never worked for him, and we started dating instead,” Beulah said. The two got married in 1966 and moved into a Stinson Beach home with a split-level living room and a painting studio. 

During the 1960s, John made a trifecta of low-budget movies from his drafty barn studio, the building that now houses Live Water Surf Shop. Inspired by French new wave directors, all three are idiosyncratic, undersung early entries in the movement that would become New American Cinema, and all three are gems of West Marin location footage. 

His first feature, the largely unscripted “The Crazy-Quilt,” is about the relationship between a dour termite exterminator named Henry and an idealistic, hippie-ish young woman named Lorabella. The New York Times called the 1966 debut “wonderfully funny” and “an example of the vitality of some of our independent filmmakers who spin dreams from shoestrings outside the Hollywood Establishment.”  

“The Crazy-Quilt” remains a favorite among a number of John’s friends. “It really shows his perception, his sensitivities,” said Hiro Narita, a cinematographer who lives in Petaluma. 

A follow-up feature, “Funnyman,” was another showcase for John’s animations. His third, the 1970 “Riverrun,” about a young couple that elopes to a remote sheep farm, got financing from Columbia Pictures, riding the success of countercultural hits like “Easy Rider.”

John’s early films caught the attention of another pair of young filmmakers, Coppola and Lucas, who were impressed with John’s success in carving out a niche in Marin. Coppola visited John’s studio in 1968, and Beulah remembered setting off fireworks with him by the Bolinas Lagoon on July Fourth of that year. 

Then, at a fateful panel discussion in San Francisco in the early ‘70s, John was set to speak alongside Coppola, who didn’t show up. “About 10 minutes later, this skinny kid comes running in, wearing tennis shoes and blue jeans and sits down and he whispers and says, ‘Francis couldn’t come. He sent me. Hi, my name’s George Lucas,’” John told the Light in 2011. 

John was a few steps ahead of Lucas and Coppola, but the three realized they had a common interest in starting a studio in the Bay Area. When Coppola opened a small studio, American Zoetrope, in an old warehouse on Folsom Street in San Francisco, the other two directors both got offices. Walter Murch remembered the first screening the studio had after getting the projection room up and running in 1970: John’s film “Riverrun,” which at the time was among the biggest movies anyone in the group had ever made, a year before Lucas’s breakthrough “THX1138” and two years before “The Godfather.”

“John was recognizably one of us and vice versa. There was an immediate bond there,” Walter said. “It was remarkable, as silly as it seems, to see a film that began with the old Columbia logo, the woman with the torch, and it was directed by one of us.’” 

When Coppola raised the rents at American Zoetrope in 1971, John moved his studio back to Marin, this time to an old three-story house on Miller Avenue in Mill Valley. He and Beulah and their first son, Jonathan, moved over the hill, close to the new studio. At Korty Films, John eventually had a crew of more than 50 working on the animated feature “Twice Upon a Time,” including onetime apprentice David Fincher, who went on to win three directing Oscars. Jonathan and his younger brother David, who was born in 1971, got to watch the action closely. 

“The animation had a lasting effect on both my brother and I because it was so creative,” Jonathan said. David, a painter, said he was inspired by his dad’s hands-on animation as a kid. “He really liked having his hands in what he was doing and I understand that,” David said. “It was about making direct contact and being in the moment.”

John was never interested in the kind of high-budget war and sci-fi epics that Lucas and Coppola would go on to direct—his son Gabe said he had an aversion to violence. And he frequently turned down big Hollywood projects, including “The Last Picture Show,” “Jaws” and “Coal Miner’s Daughter.”

But everyone needs a way to make money, and John found his by moving to TV, where he found the leeway to tell the stories that interested him. 

“Everybody assumes that in television you would have less freedom and that you would be pushed around even more,” he told Senses of Cinema in 2011. “My experience is just the opposite—in all the 28 films I made for television, I had a great deal of creative freedom. And I was almost always able to do things my way, whereas in feature films, because more money is at stake, the supervisors and the executives tend to really get into it more.”

An early TV foray emblematic of the era was “Go Ask Alice,” an adaptation of a popular 1971 book that purported to be the diary of a drug-addicted runaway 15-year-old girl. John shot “The People,” about a mysterious ascetic community, in Nicasio in 1972.

Soon after came John’s best-known and most influential film: the 1974 CBS special “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.” In a role that won her an Emmy, Cicely Tyson played a former slave who lived to see the civil rights movement as a centenarian. The film was one of the first to tackle slavery on television. Poet Nikki Giovanni wrote in a review at the time: “‘Miss Jane Pittman’ fulfilled my deepest expectations… That the show will spawn another film depicting other Blacks in other experiences is unquestioned. That it was a triumph of and for the enduring strength of Black people is also beyond doubt.”

John’s next movie also dealt with American racism. “Farewell to Manzanar” was a made-for-TV adaptation of a memoir by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston about her experiences at the internment camp during World War II. 

“His agent told him not to take on any more of these racially hot issues,” said Hiro Narita, who was the film’s director of photography. “But John said, ‘No this is an important project.’” 

The movie, along with Houston’s book, became an essential part of public-school curricula.   

In 1978, John won an Oscar for the genre of film that may have been closest to his heart: documentary. “Who Are the DeBolts? And Where Did They Get Nineteen Kids?” was a closeup portrait of everyday life for an East Bay couple who adopted 13 children, many of whom had severe physical disabilities, and raised them along with their own six kids. Beulah had found the story in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle. John watched his own Oscar win from a New York hotel room while folding laundry.

John’s approach could be contradictory and inscrutable. He directed “by osmosis,” friends said, but at the same time, he demanded total creative control. Once, Beulah said, he disappeared for months without a word while working on “The Crazy-Quilt,” committing totally to the film and dropping his relationship. 

“John was a study in contradictions, wanting complete independence and control but also democracy and equality,” she said. “Very difficult to reckon with.” 

John and Beulah divorced in 1985, and he moved to Sausalito, where he lived on a houseboat for some time. There, he met Jane Silvia, who had a business restoring boat seats. They married in 1989 and Gabe was born the same year. Soon after, the family moved to Point Reyes Station, where John could be close to Tomales Bay. His favorite place to be was in a rowboat on the water.

John lived on the mesa in Point Reyes Station for the remainder of his life, and he became a fixture in the village. For years, he continued to turn down major projects to spend time with family and make low-budget, locally focused documentaries. From his studio in the Creamery Building, he made documentaries about horses and their riders (“My Friend, My Horse”) and piano restoration (“Miracle in a Box: A Piano Reborn”). 

“He basically could just never stop making films even if they were tiny and totally independent,” Gabe said. 

In 2003, John started a film society and screening room on B Street, where for several years, he showed foreign movies and served popcorn to the community. 

“At one point he said to me, ‘This is just the perfect place to live. If you want to travel, go travel. I’m fine, I love it here,’” Jane said. “He loved the people.”