Page 55 - Southern Oregon Magazine Winter 2019

James Ivory, who grew up in Klamath

Falls, went to college in Eugene and

spends several weeks each summer at his

family’s Lake of the Woods cabin, heard his

name called at the 90th annual Academy

Awards ceremony in Hollywood last

March. After being previously nominated

three times for best director, he won his

first Oscar for best adapted screenplay,

Call Me by Your Name.

by Klamath Film. “I don’t know how many directors go back to
their hometowns and get a full house.”

Ivory grew up in Klamath Falls, graduating from Klamath Union High
School in 1951. While at KU, he planned to be a movie set designer
but didn’t know how to start. After a family friend suggested he study
interior architecture, he picked the University of Oregon because of
its architecture school. At Oregon, he designed stage sets for a French-
language play and created an architectural diorama that is still in the
Design Library’s permanent collection.

During a question-answer session at the Klamath Falls screening, Ivory
fielded a range of queries, including his process in writing the screen-
play for Call Me and his personal history in Klamath Falls.

“I think just generally seeing lots of movies,” Ivory says of going to
movies in an era when Klamath Falls had several movie theaters. “I
went to the movies constantly. The first film I went to see in Klamath
Falls was when I was five. It would have been the summer of 1933.”
He credited teachers at Sacred Heart Academy, where he attended
elementary school, with allowing him to develop an early interest in
drawing and painting. He told about a nun, who “taught me to paint
in the traditional way,” and a Klamath Union High teacher who was
“completely involved in theater.”

His family played a key role, too. While studying for his master’s degree
at USC, Ivory was given approval to make a film instead of writing a
thesis. When it was well received, in 1953 he began work on his first
documentary, Four in the Morning. It was financed by his father, Edward,
who owned the Ivory Pine lumber mills in Bly and Klamath Falls.
Because it was successful, Ivory made a second documentary in 1957,
Venice: Theme and Variations, which his father also backed financially.
Both made the New York Times list of best non-theatrical films.

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