09/20/2019
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On the 50th Anniversary of the American Film Institute Conservatory for Advanced Film Studies:
“In the summer of 1969, on the terrace of Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills—then a near-ruin, where the last notable event had been the murder of its owner, the oil baron E.L. Doheny, by his butler—I sat being interviewed as a potential fellow in what would be the beginning of the American Film Institute Center for Advanced Film Studies. Among those peppering me with questions about The Movies was a handsome, smiling man who somehow conveyed to me the impression that he was on my side—that he was being interviewed as much as I was. This was Jim Blue, who, after the interview—which I was sure I’d blown, and would have to go back home to Kentucky—distracted me with a complimentary conversation about the student film I’d made. He was a country boy, too, he said, and he too was never much at ease out here. What current films was I interested in? Thinking I could show him I wasn’t as much a hick as he might think, I reckoned that I couldn’t wait to see a picture called ‘Cool Medium’ by a filmmaker named Wexell Hassler. It was a tribute to Jim’s great humanity that, instead of collapsing in laughter at this double-spoonerism, he quietly and almost invisibly corrected it. Later I learned that he had been largely responsible for my being accepted as one of the first American Film Institute Fellows at Greystone.
“In that original group of some-what single-minded careerists, I think several of us were dumbfounded at Jim’s generosity. His time, his talent, his brilliance—all were wholeheartedly thrown into the service of us! What was in it for him? It depresses me now to realize how very few of us were aware that we were in the presence of a great teacher as well as a great filmmaker. Jim had the usual and dangerous virtues of modesty and generosity—dangerous because in Hollywood that can be taken as weakness or naiveté—and, in the end, the filmmaker gave way to the teacher. We can only guess at the films Jim never made—a legacy of what might have been. But we have the ones he did make, and the thousands of students he taught have something more: the love, the passion for film, that passed from Jim to us.” --Tom Rickman, 1981.
