Oscar-winning Oregon director James Ivory offers a look beyond the lens in new memoir

In this 2018 file photo, screenwriter James Ivory, winner of the Best Adapted Screenplay award for "Call Me By Your Name," poses in the press room during the 90th Annual Academy Awards. (Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images)

When he was just 5 years old, James Ivory saw his very first movie at the Pelican Theater in downtown Klamath Falls. Although he remembers no details about the main feature from that afternoon, he vividly recalls the mayhem of the newsreel that preceded it.

“I wonder if I acquired my love of disaster movies, with all their disorder, physical destruction, and mass annihilation from this long-ago newsreel,” he writes in his new memoir, “Solid Ivory” ($30; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 399 pages).

The experience marked the start of a lifelong love of movies, though the films the veteran director would go on to make would be anything but disasters. Working with producer and partner Ismail Merchant, as well as screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Ivory directed some of the most-lavish period dramas of the 1980s and ‘90s (“A Room with a View,” “Howards End,” “The Remains of the Day”).

“Solid Ivory” isn’t a traditional autobiography, or even a behind-the-scenes look at the making of those Oscar-winning films (Merchant Ivory Productions hauled in seven Academy Awards over the years, and Ivory was nominated four times himself, finally winning for his screenplay to 2017′s “Call Me by Your Name”).

Instead, it’s a collection of beautifully written essays reflecting on his life beyond the camera. Ivory shares vignettes from his childhood in Southern Oregon and attending the University of Oregon, as well as reflections on past lovers and places he’s visited making films around the world.

Ivory throws in enough dish to satisfy film buffs, including how Indian film director Satyajit Ray helped him get his first film completed, and would become such an influence on his career that Ivory would dub him “Maestro.” We also learn that actress Raquel Welch was prone to throwing fits on sets, which was intolerable behavior given her slight acting chops; that film critic and Ivory nemesis Pauline Kael had a notorious foul mouth; and how legendary director George Cukor, who helped Ivory get into the Directors Guild of America, spent his final years fuming over how Hollywood had changed from its Golden Era, losing all sense of beauty and fun along the way.

In this 2002 photo, Ismail Merchant (left), Ruth and James Ivory celebrate the 40th anniversary of Merchant Ivory Productions in London. (Photo by Dave Benett/Getty Images)

Perhaps the best of these short portraits is the one Ivory paints of actress Vanessa Redgrave, who starred in 1984′s “The Bostonians.” Getting her to agree to be in the film proved to be a difficult – first she was in (with reservations), then she was out (replaced by Glenn Close), then she was back in (after Close opted to make a more high-profile film). When Redgrave finally signed on, controversy followed; she was in a legal dispute with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which had fired her from a narrating gig for championing the Palestine Liberation Organization. Ivory and the film’s producers worried that they might face protests while filming in Boston, and Redgrave was tense and unhappy over the anticipated tension. Those protests never materialized, but there was still tension, as mercurial Redgrave often refused to take direction and could be a bully on set. Some surprise, huh?

One of the sweetest moments in “Solid Ivory” is his postcard recollections of summers spent at Lake of the Woods in Southern Oregon, where his family owned a rustic cabin that he still returns to every year to work on scripts and marvel at the views of nearby Mount Pitt and the surrounding woods.

“For me, now a New Yorker, it’s as straightforward as the Manhattan skyline, and as unforgettable,” he writes, “and like it, as beautiful in all weathers and at all times of the year.”

-- Grant Butler

gbutler@oregonian.com; @grantbutler

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