Judy Stone, Chronicle movie critic for 2 decades
By Ruthe Stein
Judy Stone, The San Francisco Chronicle’s movie critic who for two decades was a passionate and articulate advocate for the world of cinema outside Hollywood, died Friday morning at her home in San Francisco at age 93.
She died from natural causes, according to her cousin Lori Harrison.
“At an age when I needed to learn it — I was in my mid-20s — Judy Stone taught me the difference between personality and character,” said Chronicle Movie Critic Mick LaSalle. “As a personality, she was abrasive. She woke up every morning ready to get into a fight and often found one. But her moral character was deep. There are charming people that you wouldn’t turn your back on. And then there’s Judy, who didn’t go around smiling, but you’d lend her your life savings and then sleep like a baby, knowing there was no one more worthy of your trust.”
The 1960s and ’70s were a ripe time for international cinema with the work of titans like Luis Buñuel, Ingmar Bergman and Satyajit Ray infiltrating the American market. Ms. Stone had found her calling: explaining arthouse films to Bay Area audiences, both in her reviews for The Chronicle and in her interviews with foreign directors. She was tireless talking to them, sometimes spending several hours with a single filmmaker.
Her interviews with 240 filmmakers from 37 countries were collected in a huge book, “Eye on the World: Conversations with International Filmmakers.” Ms. Stone kept a couple of copies in the trunk of her Alfa Romeo Giulietta in case she ran into a prospective buyer.
Ms. Stone’s coverage of the San Francisco International Film Festival remains unsurpassed. She would watch almost all the 80 or so films and write critiques. A 4foot-10 dynamo, her intensity hardly subsided the rest of the year. Admiring colleagues would joke that if Judy were assigned a Polish film, she would learn Polish before watching it. In 1997, the festival would honor her with the Mel Novikoff Award given to “an individual or institution whose work has enhanced the film-going public’s appreciation of world cinema.”
Ms. Stone also championed the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival from its start in 1981. For years, she invited the Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers showing at the festival for a dim sum lunch. She called it “the peace lunch.”
Her journalistic instincts were in full force at the 1989 Moscow Film Festival. The San Francisco International Film Festival had brought a sampling of American independent films including “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” by local director Philip Kaufman, a friend of Stone’s. The San Francisco group accompanying the film worried about how Russian audiences would respond to scenes of the Soviets invading Czechoslovakia in 1968.
“The hall was packed, and during the sequence in which the tanks rolled into Prague, many in the audience of 2,000 rose to their feet and booed,” said Peter Scarlet, director of San Francisco’s festival at the time. “Judy filed a story noting that this was the first irrefutable proof any of us had seen that glasnost was for real and that the Soviet Union wasn’t going to last much longer.”
On a lighter note, Scarlet also recalls that at the same Moscow festival a “clearly very inebriated Gérard Depardieu got onto the dance floor with Judy and, perhaps mistaking her for the equally height-challenged (writer and director) Marguerite Duras, with whom he had often collaborated, whirled Judy around the room as though she were a ballerina.”
Kaufman first met Ms. Stone 40 years ago when he had just finished “The White Dawn,” his film about an Eskimo tribe that takes in a group of whalers with unfortunate results. He shot it in the Arctic, casting real Eskimos.
“Judy went up to the Arctic and met one of the Eskimos and stayed in touch with him,” Kaufman recalled. “She also came to Paris and interviewed Daniel DayLewis and Juliette Binoche (stars of ‘Unbearable Lightness’). Judy would just pop up somewhere.”
Assessing her impact, Kaufman said he doesn’t know whether Ms. Stone’s film coverage was influential within Hollywood studios. “But it was influential where my heart was. She was an appreciator and when she liked something, she really appreciated it. I think serious filmmakers make films to some degree for themselves so when someone appreciates it, it is really encouraging.”
Kaufman also remembers Ms. Stone as a dynamite cook who loved to bring interesting people together at her Potrero Hill home. Once a year, she would make chutney with a certain kind of plum available only at that time.
“It was the best chutney I ever had. I used to call her Judith Chutney,” Kaufman said.
Among the adjectives filmmaker Ron Levaco uses to describe Ms. Stone are “very funny, irascible, gruff, intelligent, pushy, irritating and lovable.”
“She went after the ‘story’ so tenaciously that she wasn’t above asking some person who blocked her unobstructed view of the screen to get out of her way ... please,” he said.
Ms. Stone was born in Philadelphia of Russian Jewish immigrants, who owned a dry goods store. She settled in San Francisco after working as a “Rosie the Riveter” during World War II making walkie-talkies in a Philadelphia factory and writing leaflets for union organizing drives.
One of her three older brothers was I.F. Stone, an investigative journalist famous for his leftwing self-published newsletter, I.F. Stone’s Weekly. Ms. Stone was enormously proud of him but wary of people who might want to get close to her to gain access to him.
Ms. Stone is survived by nieces, Celia Gilbert, Susan Kedem and Emily Stone; nephews, Christopher Stone, Barney Stone and Peter Stone; and numerous grand- and great-grand- nieces and nephews.
Services are pending.