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John Dorr
Born	John Hall Dorr (1944-09-22)September 22, 1944 Lancaster, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died	January 1, 1993(1993-01-01) (aged 48) Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Alma mater	Yale University (BA) UCLA (MFA) American Film Institute
Occupation(s)	Director, writer, producer, film critic, gallery owner
Years active	1968–1993
Partner	George LaFleur

John Hall Dorr (September 22, 1944 – January 1st, 1993) was an American director, writer, producer, film critic and gallery owner, considered as a pioneer for video filmmaking in the United States. While he remained a mostly local figure in Los Angeles before his passing of AIDS in 1993, he received more widespread posthumous appreciation for his role in creating one the earliest video theaters with EZTV in 1982, and for his directorial work of feature-length videos Dorothy and Alan at Norma Place (1982) or Approaching Omega (1983).

Biography

Early life and education

Dorr was a noted scholar of D.W. Griffith.

Dorr was born in Lancaster, Massachusetts on September 22, 1944, to Dudley Huntington Dorr and Mary Murdoch Dorr. He graduated from Governor Dummer Academy in Byfield in 1962, and pursued his studies at the History of the Arts department of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. During his time at Yale, Dorr and fellow student Eric Sherman, son of Hollywood director Vincent Sherman, co-founded the Yale Film Society, through which Dorr programmed auteurist series devoted to Howard Hawks, John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock, and co-edited the Yale Film Bulletin.

Dorr moved to Los Angeles to follow his postgraduate education at the University of California (UCLA), where he studied the work of D.W. Griffith in preparation of a master thesis. At UCLA, he became a member of the Film Screening Cooperative, alongside future filmmakers Morgan Fisher and Thom Andersen, and continued to program retrospectives including a complete D.W. Griffith series. During his college years, Dorr also shot his first 8 mm films. In 1968, he was a recipient of one of the first nine fellowships given by the newly-created American Film Institute (AFI). Dorr eventually became a teaching assistant in the Theater Arts Department, participating in UCLA Oral History project by interviewing surviving Griffith collaborators as cinematographer Karl Struss and producer Raymond Klune.

Apprenticeship and criticism

In the early 1970s, as Hollywood's studio system underwent a recession and film school graduates found opportunities to make low-budget independent features, Dorr joined the production of The Second Coming, written and directed by fellow UCLA graduate Gloria Katz and her husband, University of South Carolina (USC) graduate Willard Huyck. Dorr worked as script supervisor on the eight-week shoot, which employed a crew of film school alumni including Morgan Fisher and Alan R. Howard. Following schedule and budget issues, the producers took control of the negative and released the film under the title Messiah of Evil in May 1973. Despite the experience, and nightmares occasioned by the demands of the job, Dorr was the script supervisor on six other low-budget exploitation films in the following years, among which psycho-biddy film Mama's Dirty Girls (1974), shot in seven days with Gloria Grahame, and two films by Larry Cohen shot simultaneously in Los Angeles: blaxploitation feature Hell Up in Harlem (1973) and horror film It's Alive (1974).

Transitioning from UCLA, Dorr also started publishing film criticism. He first became the regular Los Angeles correspondent to Canadian periodical Take One in late 1968, eventually contributing to Millimeter, Film Comment and the Los Angeles Times. Focusing on American independent filmmakers in the margins of New Hollywood (Roger Corman, Andy Warhol, Samuel Fuller) and auteurist European cinema (Jacques Demy, Werner Schroeter, Werner Herzog, Roberto Rossellini), Dorr was an early supporter of the Los Angeles International Film Exposition (Filmex), writing program notes from the first edition in November 1971, then working as a programmer and publicist. As a film historian, Dorr published lengthier pieces on D.W. Griffith and Allan Dwan, notably theorizing "the Griffith Tradition" : the migration of Griffith's technique through early commercial cinema, B movies and television. Dorr eventually held the coveted position of daily reviewer for The Hollywood Reporter during eight months in 1974 and 1975, before being ousted, according to him, for his lack of "reliably establishment views."

Dorr wrote several original screenplays during the decade, and searched for financing. While some of the scripts were optioned, none of them ended up being produced. Going through a difficult period in the late 1970s, Dorr briefly returned home to Massachusetts to leave the business, but found himself co-writing a screenplay and coming back to Los Angeles.

Creation of EZTV

Betamax features (1978-1980)

In 1978, a friend of Dorr presented him with newly-acquired Betamax video equipment, and a borrowed black-and-white closed-circuit security camera. At the time, Dorr was developing a satirical play about Hollywood, looking to produce it in Los Angeles' alternative theater scene, where queer plays such as Robert Patrick's T-Shirts, or Terry Mack Murphy's The Other Woman, were notably staged at the Deja Vu Coffeehouse. Dorr gathered several stage actors and shot Sudzall Does It All! over two days, for a cost of $50 to 300. Sudzall follows failed Shakespearian actress Cordelia Coventry (Irene Roseen) as she becomes the enthusiastic-then-reluctant star of « Sudzall » washing powder commercials, directed by a Sternberg-like filmmaker (George LaFleur). A subplot involves a gay serial killer, whom Cordelia's husband (Sirri Murrad) watches on « K-GAY » television, and features Dorr as the director's assistant. The video was shot without camera movement, and taped in sequence, as the crew believed editing was impossible. Once the feature was finished, Dorr saw the opportunity to keep on making videos at virtually no cost : « Once having finished that first one, there was never any question. That to me was the light going on, saying, 'All right, no one can stop you. You can just go ahead and make these [...] forever. »

After managing to buy a portable recorder a new color camera, Dorr used used the location of a brain research lab where a friend was working to shoot his second feature, The Case of the Missing Consciousness, during the summer of 1979. Based on a Corman-type screenplay titled Second Sight, written in the early 1970s with fellow Yale alumni Eric Sherman for up-and-coming producer Art Linson, the film was produced in the spirit of a low-cost TV series episode, with the same cast and crew conditions as Sudzall, and for a cost of $500. Dorr starred himself in the lead role of Nick Malace, a private detective involved in REM sleep and brain control experiments with two enemy scientific researchers (Sheila Day and Strawn Bovee).

To present the work, Dorr first envisioned the creation of a series of four-hour queer-centric screenings (then called « K-GAY », after the fake TV channel in Sudzall), which would have taken place in West Hollywood venues, and have been financed by selling ads to local businesses, and tapes of the evenings to the audience. As the idea wasn't gaining traction, Dorr shopped his first completed feature Sudzall Does It All! throughout 1979, to art galleries interested in video such as the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (LAICA) and the Long Beach Museum of Art, where he produced a 3/4" version of the tape. Arlene Zeichner, video curator at LAICA, eventually agreed to show both Sudzall and The Case of the Missing Consciousness, which Dorr was finishing in early 1980. The public screening of the pieces, accompanied by short subjects, took place on March 28, 1980, with Dorr's work featured in the LAICA Journal.

Pilot program (1980-1982)

While completing his features, Dorr first offered to lend his equipment to friends, hoping to create a group of DIY narrative video makers. Dorr's goal became to open a vertically integrated video center in West Hollywood (first called « VideoVisions »), to serve as a production site as well as an innovative screening space, sketching ideas at one point for a multi-screen system titled « Dual-Vision ». When friends took him up on his offer after the LAICA screening, Dorr found himself working on three projects from 1980 to 1982. He was the camera and sound operator on Richard Moyer's Rimbaud in L.A., helped with Ken Camp's three-part gay soap opera As the World Burns, and again operated the camera for Terry Mack Murphy's adaptation of his own play The Other Woman. Both Rimbaud and The Other Woman starred again Strawn Bovee.

Dorr himself a larger production, to call attention to the group. He turned to an unproduced screenplay about the chaotic marriage of writer Dorothy Parker and bisexual husband Alan Campbell. Eventually shot over two years, for a cost estimated between $500 to 3000, Dorothy and Alan at Norma Place starred Strawn Bovee as Dorothy, Dorr's partner George LaFleur as Alan, and a cast of nearly thirty actors composed of fellow filmmakers, actors and programmers. The bulk of the feature was shot in Dorr's own garage apartment on Norma Place, where Dorr ended up living after coming back to L.A. in the late-1970s, with the rooms being redressed and repainted in order to accommodate the historical recreation of Parker's life, from her 1910s appearances at the Algonquin Round Table to her later days writing for Esquire in the 1960s. The film was the first to use the name of « EZTV » as a production company.

In April 1982, Dorr rented the South Room of the West Hollywood Park Community Building, on San Vicente Boulevard, to run a six-weekend pilot program called the « EZTV Video Theatre ». His third feature, Dorothy and Alan at Norma Place, made the opening on April 24, 1982, and was followed during the Spring and the Summer by other features and short subjects completed by then. Dorothy Parker's name got interest at the pilot program screening, with the feature receiving several mentions in the press.

EZTV Video Gallery (1983-1985)

After the success of the pilot program and with a recent $25,000 inheritance, Dorr opened a full-time venue on Santa Monica Boulevard, the « EZTV Video Gallery », on June 15, 1983.

EZTV was then « a small space which housed a 40-seat screening area, and two editing systems. » While Dorr was behind the idea, thirty other artists, including Strawn Bovee and Michael Masucci contributed to the foundation of EZTV and its Do It Yourself strategy.

running experimental video to documentaries and performance art, produced in L.A..

Dorr was disappointed with attendance in the opening weeks, and looked for more distribution outlets. Within three months, he had spent the inheritance. He agreed to let EZTV become a production service, not relying on gallery and screenings sales.

Shot in the San Gabriel Mountains from 1982 to 1983, Dorr's fourth feature, Approaching Omega, was shown for the first time on November 3, 1983 at EZTV Video Gallery, and became the most-seen and best-received of his four narrative features.

EZTV's facilities become more sophisticated and larger. The company's income is derived from renting its studio and equipment. Dorr still says there aren't many places to show the work. Wide variety of programming (video art, computer art, performance art) with different crowds. The biggest hits come from the arts, such as the poetry. The EZTV Arts Foundation is a non-profit branch headed by Strawn Bovee. It sponsors Conversations in video. It has part funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. EZTV shows Tanner '88 and invites Robert Altman to discuss his work in November 1990.

After the EZTV Video Theatre (1982) and the EZTV Video Gallery (1983-1985), EZTV moves to a new location to become the EZTV Video Center in April 1985. In January 1986, EZTV starts selling VHS cassettes of their major features films.

EZTV Center (1985-1988)

In order to appease his « creative guilt », Dorr became the co-director, with Lewis MacAdams, of the Lannan Literary Series, a series of documentaries on contemporary writers and poets, commissioned by the Lannan Foundation in 1988. Twenty-six episodes, summarily directed and mainly consisting of talking head interviews and documentary footage of performed readings, were produced until 1991, among which Czesław Miłosz, Allen Ginsberg, Octavio Paz or Carlos Fuentes.

In the late 1980s, Dorr attempted to make a fifth feature-length video, based on a screenplay titled The Three Cassandras. The script, touching on the subject of time, was written by Dorr for three actresses, including Strawn Bovee and Irene Roseen. Production was stopped because of the EZTV workload, and of one of the actresses' refusal to participate.

Later projects and death

In the Spring of 1991, Dorr was diagnosed as HIV-positive. He wrote poems about his condition, performed in EZTV events to support AIDS patients in April 1991.

In the Spring of 1992, Dorr's four narrative tapes were featured in the June issue of French film periodical Trafic, in a piece by critic/director Jean-Claude Biette. Biette mentioned his work again in Cahiers du cinéma's Summer issue, which paid hommage to film critic Serge Daney, recounting how Daney was amused by The Case of the Missing Consciousness scientifical experiment storyline, just days before he died from AIDS. At Biette's invitation, Dorr himself published a compilation of personal recollections about his career, his illness, and commentary on the Los Angeles riots in the November issue of Trafic. During the Summer, Dorr started work on a behind-the-scenes documentary on Robert Altman's Short Cuts alongside Mike Kaplan, titled Luck, Trust and Ketchup. Dorr accumulated material, spending two months on the shoot in Los Angeles, conducting interviews with the main cast and taping later material in New York, where Altman was editing the feature. At the end of the year, Dorr produced another Season Greetings video, in which he recapped his work on Altman's film and joked about his late French appraisal.

John Dorr was admitted at Century City Hospital, where he died on January 1st, 1993, from AIDS complications.

Filmography

As script supervisor

• The Second Coming / Messiah of Evil (1973) (directed by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz)
• Hell Up in Harlem (1973) (directed by Larry Cohen) (uncredited)
• It's Alive (1974) (directed by Larry Cohen) (uncredited)
• Mama's Dirty Girls (1974) (directed by John Hayes)
• Black Starlet (1974) (directed by Chris Munger)
• Best Friends (1975) (directed by Noel Nosseck)

As director

• Sudzall Does It All! (1979)
• The Case of the Missing Consciousness (1980)
• Dorothy and Alan at Norma Place (1982)
• Approaching Omega (1983)
• The Lannan Literary Series (1989-1991) (documentary series, co-directed with Lewis MacAdams)

1. Louise Glück
2. Galway Kinnell
3. W. S. Merwin
4. Lucille Clifton
5. Philip Levine
6. Czeslaw Milosz
7. Octavio Paz
8. Gary Snyder
9. Allen Ginsberg
10. Yehuda Amichai
11. Joy Harjo
12. Victor Hernandez Cruz
13. Kay Boyle
14. Alice Walker
15. Ishmael Reed
16. Richard Wilbur
17. Carlos Fuentes
18. Carolyn Forche
19. Robert Creeley
20. Larry Heinemann
21. Sonia Sanchez
22. Andrei Voznesensky
23. Ernesto Cardenal
24. Anne Waldman
25. Sharon Olds
26. Amiri Baraka

• Luck, Trust and Ketchup (1992) (documentary, co-directed with Mike Kaplan)

As producer

• Death Blonde (1984) (directed by James Dillinger)
• Polly Perverse Strikes Again! (1986) (directed by Dan Sallitt)