Ivory at the Ragland

Last night, the Ross Ragland Theater (now a lovely performing arts theater) kicked off its new Monday Night at the Movies series in grand fashion. Director James Ivory, a graduate of Klamath Falls Union High School many years ago, introduced his film A Room With A View and took questions for forty-five minutes after the screening.

Eat your heat out New York City. K-Falls is making a determined run at becoming the new American cultural capital. And the series is free. (Five dollar donation requested. I dropped in a twenty because I’m such a big spender.)

It was a fine evening. About six hundred people showed up to see the film and hear Ivory talk about growing up in Klamath Falls and coming to the Ragland to watch movies when it was an Art Deco-styled movie theater during the war.

After the showing of A Room, he answered a range of questions about directing, casting, his artistic vision, and growing up in Klamath Falls. Listening to him talk gave special meaning to the film we had just seen. And of all the questions, only one was truly stupid. Actually, three questions were truly stupid, but they were from the same woman. A touching moment, to be expected, came when the current drama teacher at KU said she has her students read A Room With a View and then watch the film. Ivory was featured in a recent KU yearbook, which she presented to him. Several of the questions were obviously from her students, most of them a variation on “how do I get started in the movies.” And his patient answers were always a variation on “watch a lot of movies, go to a good film school, work hard.”

A Room with a View is based on an E. M. Forester story, and I hadn’t seen it before. It’s a lovely film set in Italy and England, a light comedy of manners. Sadly, the sound quality was not great at the screening and I missed at least half the dialogue, but now I’ll just rent it to hear what I missed. (I usually have trouble with British dialogue anyway.) He also said his favorite personal film is Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, which I also haven’t seen, so I’ll have to start there in my plan to view all of his films.

Ivory is eighty years old but looks and acts much younger.

The series continues, not every Monday night, with planned screenings of The Hunt for Red October, The Philadelphia Story, and On Paper Wings. Various screenwriters and filmmakers are scheduled to introduce and take questions.

I look forward to more.