San Francisco Film Society Oral History Project Interview with ...

CLAUDE JARMAN: He showed up occasionally, but we could not get him on the stage. He just
wouldn’t. He felt, he would be ridiculed in some ways by many, that he wasn’t that great an actor. But
that was it.
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: I remember seeing him once walking around without his toupee. He
wasn’t recognizable then. Let’s talk a little before we leave 1965 about some of these retrospectives.
Were there any that were particularly memorable, like John Ford, for example, whom you’d worked
with?
CLAUDE JARMAN: I think mainly what was memorable about it was actually having John Ford there,
because he was never one of those people who would do that. And Shirley actually was very helpful in
getting him. She and I pretty much herded him along. Obviously Gene Kelly was great. He was just—to
me, this was Albert’s input; he loved the music—the Busby Berkeleys and the Kellys. So when we had
the musicals they were really special.
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: How important do you think these were in the kind of renewed interest
in the films and the directors and the filmmakers?
CLAUDE JARMAN: Well, I think they were important, but I think if you went back and did these
today, you would have people standing on their heads to get in. We had to practically shout, “Come on
out, come up and see King Vidor, or come in the afternoon and I’ll give you a ticket.” We were just
embarrassed about not getting enough people in there. It was the afternoon. It was a Wednesday
afternoon, 1:00. Who can take the time to do that?
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: Especially for as long as they were.
CLAUDE JARMAN: Exactly. So it was a sales job that we had to do. We did not utilize a lot of people,
let’s put it that way, who I wish we’d had three or four years later.
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: Who were the audiences in those years?
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