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

had Z, on of his films, a couple years later. We had really good Yugoslavian and good Eastern European
films. We had another John Korty film.
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: Jacques Demy?
CLAUDE JARMAN: Special programs, Bambi—maybe that was the year we had Walt Disney.
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: Let’s go back, because there’s a quote from you about controversy,
probably to do with How I Won the War, and you said, “Controversy is nothing new to the Festival.
We don’t expect protests. We’re not in politics, and we’re not taking any stands.” What were some of
the controversies of that year?
CLAUDE JARMAN: If you sit back and think about ’67, ’68, it just seemed that everything was
controversy. You were going to find people on both sides of the fence. So anything you did was
controversy. If you had Henry Fonda, “Well, why do you have some old actor? Why don’t you have
somebody like Jack Nicholson, or somebody else?” So we always tried to have a certain mixture of
people that managed to provoke and antagonize everyone. (LAUGHS)
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: But it certainly was an odd choice to have something like How I Won
the War. Was that intentional?
CLAUDE JARMAN: I think it was just something that we wanted to do. It went with the times. We also
had this film, Festival, which was based on the Newport Folk Festival with Bob Dylan. It was a
midnight showing. We had a lot of people there for that. We tried to have continuous activity. We
always felt very strongly about trying to keep everything in one place. And I still believed in the movie
star image. We still needed to encourage people to come. We weren’t competing with the Pacific Film
Archive. There was a lot of people who wanted us to have a Tom Luddy-type festival, where you had
many varieties of films, and who cares whether people came or not? We had to care because the event
had to be paid for. One year we announced that the Festival had actually ended up with a surplus of
$8,000 to $10,000. The next year, the Hotel Tax Fund cut $10,000, because they said we didn’t need it.
And I said, “We will never, ever make money again,” because supporters like to feel that they’re giving
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