Barbara Stone was Unpublished. This film explores her life as a mother, filmmaker, teacher, distributor and exhibitor.
Barbara Stone was for six decades a quietly dynamic force in promoting progressive cinema, in her varying roles as producer, distributor, exhibitor and indefatigable facilitator.She left school early to work as a model in New York's Garment District, a job which paid for night classes in English literature at Brooklyn College. Meanwhile the fan magazines were discarded in favour of Film Culture, the avant-garde journal established by the legendary Lithuanian exiles Jonas and Adolfas Mekas. Soon Barbara joined them as circulation manager and contributor. In 1957 she met David Stone, whose varied and enthusiastic university studies had given place to a passion for cinema comparable with hers. Their marriage was to be a lifelong and unbreachable personal and professional partnership.In 1961 Barbara visited Gian Carlo Menotti's budding Spoleto arts festival in Italy. She remonstrated at the event's neglect of film, and proposed that she should remedy the deficiency. Guided by the Mekas brothers, the Stones met, befriended, encouraged and unified the young American avant-garde directors, and were ready with a revelatory programme of their films for the 1962 festival.Despite their influence on the New York avant-garde, the Mekas brothers' own efforts at film-making had been abortive. The Stones took them in hand, producing two films by Jonas, Memories of Frankenstein and The Brig, both based on stage productions by The Living Theater: and Adolfas' Hallelujah the Hills. Later productions included Robert Kramer's Ice (1970), Milestones (1975) and Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal (1977) and Jerome Hill's autobiographical Film Portrait (1973), which in 2003 was selected for permanent preservation by the US National Film Registry.Barbara's debut as director came when she was invited by the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC), along with Adolfas and David, to shoot a 140-minute documentary Compañeras y Compañeros (1970). U.S.-Cuban relations were at rock-bottom, and Barbara's Cuban adventure and subsequent visits were not ignored by U.S. intelligence. The family - there were now four children - prudently expatriated to London, where they were to move into exhibition and distribution. In 1974 they opened The Gate Cinema at Notting Hill, established their own distribution company Cinegate, and went on to open two further London cinemas, in Brunswick Square, and Camden Town, along with the mini Mayfair Cinema.Barbara recreated herself as a vivid and popular personality at every major European film festival, in her search for new talents and new films. The imaginative and financially viable programming of the cinemas owed much to these excursions and her impeccable eye.She still had dreams of moving into feature production, and in the 1980s developed projects with filmmakers including István Szabó, Martin Scorsese and Bernardo Bertolucci. Though none of these came to fruition, she was associate producer on Freddie Francis' The Doctor and the Devils (1985) based on a script by Dylan Thomas.In these years the enormous kitchens of the Stones' successive family houses became the essential Saturday night rendezvous for international film artists passing through London, alongside local critics and guests. One of Barbara Stone's more phenomenal feats was to produce a meal just short of cordon bleu for two dozen diners - who might range from Martin Scorsese to Anouk Aimée and Bernardo Bertolucci - while never missing a beat of the conversation.Barbara was briefly Managing Director of the San Francisco International Film Festival, and served on the Board of Directors of the American Conservatory Theatre.
