Here’s a review in the San Francisco Chronicle by Mick LaSalle.

Here’s the story in The Los Angeles Times .

And here for Academy consideration is the aspiring song “Imaginary Friends”.

John is the original Bay Area maverick filmmaker who lured Coppola and Lucas up from Southern California to see his West Marin operation where he made his first feature film “Crazy Quilt”. The posse formed and shared offices at the early incarnation of American Zoetrope on Folsom Street in San Francisco. Korty returned to Marin and John Korty Films in Mill Valley was the incubator for the careers of the following filmmakers: David Fincher, Henry Sellick, Rick Goldsmith, Trip Gruver, Gary Guitterez, Drew Takahashi, Doug Haynes, and the animation director of the Hershey’s Kisses commercials who introduced himself to Korty with a business card that read “Carl Willat- Teenager”.

Korty at 75 is still embracing the new edge in the technology and always has. He took to color grading with a Hazeltine video analyzer while some of us film timers were still eyeballing negatives and guessing how to print them and he cut down the number of prints he needed for the final answer print to one.

Korty was in the front row of the demonstration in 1978 of One Pass Video’s Rank Cintel telecine, newly arrived and ready to transform color finishing in the Bay Area for the next generation.

And now Korty, fullly engaged in the era of digital filmmaking, gets it when I show him what you can do with the color tools in Final Cut Pro.

I hope to see you at the premiere of John Allair Digs In! Its a red hot boogie woogie piano show.

Around this time in say 1970 filmmaking friends and I founded a high school cinema club and brought to our Midwestern milieu The Kinetic Arts Film Festival out of California. In the reels of short film offerings that nearly got me expelled by pious school administrators were Jean Cocteau’s “Egypte, O Egypte”, Terry Riley’s “Music With Balls” and Jordan Belson’s new film “Samadhi”. (And A French New Wave spoof called “Sweet Wounded Bird” with a topless blonde required sober adult monitoring lest a bacchanal broke out in the High School Library where we screened it.)

Well, I was quite taken with Belson’s film, a cosmic mandala printed on celluloid triacetate 16 millimeters wide. Within a year Gene Youngblood wrote about Jordan Belson in his book “Expanded Cinema”, connecting Belson to the “2001: A Space Odyssey” intergalactic gateway as a birth canal to cinema of cosmic consciousness. I so enjoyed even the rump end of the Sixties as the acne healed.

You will understand then the magnetic pull of the San Francisco experimental cinema of the 1940s-1990s that lured this prairie dog out of his Flatland burrow.

With great delight I met Jordan Belson at my first job in the San Francisco post production industry at W.A. Palmer Films in the middle 1970s. I was a laboratory film timer apprentice and Belson was the singular filmmaker customer who “timed” his own films. Belson brought in multiple rolls (alphabetically ordered from A to D in his case) of 16mm film he had assembled, along with the index cards that marked the footage count and the intended printer light he had assigned himself after my lab colleagues had instructed him to do. It was my task to examine his A-D rolls in a gang synchronizer over a light table, inspect his application of the silver foil tab between the film sprocket holes that would trigger an advance of the computer punch tape I would make that governed the Bell and Howell Model C printing machine that spun color and light into a Kodak Ektachrome emulsion numbered 7390. I was entrusted with assuring the artist’s printing program would work and that the multiple rolls would fade in and out overlapping each other in mechanical rhythms of 16, 24, 32, 48, and 96 frame length dissolves, photochemical musical scoring to me.

When the film was printed and processed I then inspected the results, the first eyes on the artist’s work. In my twenties it was an incalculable thrill.

Belson continued to operate from his Montgomery Street hermitage on Telegraph Hill to generate optical wonders on film, most popularly demonstrated in the Phil Kaufman film “The Right Stuff” when Chuck Yeager escapes the earth’s atmosphere and briefly glimpses the Van Allen Belts on the modern wings of Daedulus, as imagined by Belson.

I moved on from W.A.Palmer Films, out of the lab and into the telecine world where I met Jordan Belson again twenty years laster as the trained painter turned cinema artist was warily looking at video as the repository of his life’s work. He was recalcitrant and suspicious of the video medium.
A patient sherpa had guided him into Western Images where I was flogging our new Sony High Definition Telecine. Jordan could not get past the experience of the film he made illuminated by television phosphor light instead of by projected film. I did not make the sale and I respected him for it.

When he died, I posted a You Tube link to his last film on my Facebook page. When I later read that he had expressly forbidden this form of exhibition I was ashamed of myself.

Therefore, I note and promote the memorial event at Pacific Film Archive October 19 at 730PM when Jordan’s films will be projected in the best light as he would have wanted.

For further reading about Jordan Belson, I refer you to the good scholarship of:

Gene Youngblood “The Expanded Cinema”
Scott MacDonald “Art in Cinema”
Scott MacDonald “Canyon Cinema”
Steve Anker, Kathy Geritz and Steve Seid “Radical Light”
Pauline Kael “For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies”

And for the curated film transfers Jordan finally approved of or submitted to:

Center for Visual Music “Jordan Belson: 5 Essential Films”
NTSC standard definition

Also, an excellent article about Jordan’s graphic artwork:
The Unseen Art of Jordan Belson by Ying Tan

So, my personal Steve Jobs story goes like this.

In the middle 1990s I worked for Western Images, a cutting edge film and television post production studio with rooms each equipped with about a million dollars of investment capital boxed into state of the art technology.

Across the hall from our office was a new company called Macromedia, and the fledgling made relatively cheap tools for the “amateur” media makers in the desktop computer for the delivery by way of the fetal form of the World Wide Web.

One day the Macromedia employees massed in the shared hallway and blocked my access to my office. They were quivering in gleeful anticipation of a visit by Steve Jobs, then the owner of PIXAR, one of my favorite clients at Western Images.

The Generation X crowd were going to show Jobs their software product “Filmmaker”.
Jobs soon after went back to Apple. Apple soon bought Macromedia’s Filmmaker and turned it into Final Cut Pro, the ascending film and video editing application until a recent un-Jobs like failure of vision turned this tool into an amateur filmmaker’s toy.

Before I get too far down the road of mocking the current Apple toy chest I will say that in 2001 the once far-sighted Western Images sank into the quicksand of the Dot Com bust a few weeks after September 11, 2001. Industrial poets call events like this “the creative destruction of capitalism”. Macromedia went on to invent Dreamweaver and Flash and were acquired by Adobe in 2005.

Jobs put his creative fingers not to destruction so much as transformation. He picked the bricks that went into the headquarters of PIXAR in Emeryville. I recommend his Stanford University 2005 commencement address to hear him speak about connecting the dots of his Reed College calligraphy class with what guided his designer course forward.

Jobs invented tools inspired by his reading of The Whole Earth Catalog . One of their mottos was “Access to Tools”. The last message from their publication when it expired was “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish”.

Jobs made good re-use of these expressions. He made Xerox Parc’s graphical user interface work in a democratized technological model, with elegant fonts, in a design award winning box.

He turned a micro storage device into an iPod music player and transformed the music industry after that via iTunes in a way that may have saved that business from its demise.

The iPad may yet save news journalism from its technological cement shoes,the printing press, in a digital delivery business model where maybe the writer will actually get paid.

The cinema, too, has been digitally re-invented by PIXAR and their peers and it is photochemical Kodak that is next to meet the inevitable coup de grace of capitalism’s scythe as it approaches bankruptcy.

Just as Jobs returned to revive Apple from its near pre-mature death, I am rooting for Final Cut Pro to make it back to a pro tool. It will take a corporate visionary to fix that one. And they don’t make the likes of them, like Jobs, very often.

(Typed on an iPad: 2011.10.05)

Mr. James Armstrong is a barber, a “foot soldier” and a dreamer whose barbershop in Birmingham, Alabama has been a hub for haircuts and civil rights since 1955. “The dream” of a promised land, where dignity and the right to vote belongs to everyone is documented in photos, headlines and clippings that cram every inch of wall space (and between the mirrors).

85-years-young, jauntily wearing a bowtie and suspenders, Mr. Armstrong will cut your hair while recounting his experiences as a “foot soldier”, citing the pictures on his wall as he does. In March 1965, civil rights activists began a march from Selma to Montgomery calling for voting rights. Mr. Armstrong, an Army Veteran, was the proud bearer of the American flag in that march, and it’s said that even as state troopers tear-gassed the crowd and beat marchers with billy clubs, he held the flag high. On the annual commemoration of Bloody Sunday he carries that flag.

He used his barber chair to educate: “If you want a voice, you have to vote; you can’t complain about nothing if you don’t vote.” Despite threats to his life and home, his two sons were the first to integrate an all white elementary school. “Dying isn’t the worst thing a man can do. The worst thing a man can do is nothing.” No one can accuse Mr. Armstrong of doing nothing; and on the eve of the election of the first African-American president, the barber of Birmingham sees his unimaginable dream come true.

Showing Sat. Oct 15th, 2011 @ 4:45 PM – Sequoia Theatre, Mill Valley, CA.

On the same program Paige Bierma’s “A Brush with The Tenderloin”.