June 7, 1928– James Ivory is a great American filmmaker. When asked to name a favorite film, I usually answer with A Room With A View (1985), although that choice changes from moment to moment. That famous film is actully in a 10 way tie with other much loved films, but I name this one, based on the 1908 E. M. Forster novel, because of the time & place that I saw it & because it eventually led me to the trip of a lifetime, a month in Italy in 1991. The Husband (then the BF) & I stayed in the place where the movie was made in Tuscany & we indeed enjoyed a room with a view.
A Room With A View was nominated for 8 Academy Awards, including Best Picture & Best Director & won 3: Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Costumes & Best Production Design. A Room With A View was also voted Best Film of the year by The British Academy of Film & Television Arts, The National Board Of Review, & in Italy, where the film won the Donatello Prize for Best Foreign Language Picture & Best Director for Ivory.
Ivory is known for his work in a long collaboration with Indian-born film producer Ismail Merchant & screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. The trio formed Merchant Ivory Productions in 1961. Their films won 6 Academy Awards. Merchant was also Ivory’s longtime partner in life & love as well as art. Their professional & romantic partnership lasted until Merchant’s death.
Oregon’s own Ivory studied at the University Of Oregon, majoring in Architecture & Fine Arts & University Of Southern California Film School. He wrote, photographed, & produced Venice: Theme & Variations, a 30 minute documentary thesis film for his degree at USC. The film was named by The NY Times as one of the 10 best films of 1957.
Merchant Ivory will always be known for smart literary adaptations, restoring characterization, subtlety & period details to films in an era of explosions, aliens & special effects escapism. At first, their films were dismissed as yawners. Yet, A Room With A View, with a production budget of $7 million, grossed $55 million & left much anticipation for the next offering, the gay-themed Maurice (1987). Maurice is an impassioned love story. The author E.M. Forster was gay guy in a period when homosexuality was a crime in Britain. He had demanded that the book, written in 1914, be published only after he died. Forster left this world in 1970.
Forster’s literary executors tried to interest Merchant Ivory toward the writer’s other works. The team found it hard to find investors for their gay love story. Their collaborator Jhabvala declined to write the screenplay. Ivory co-wrote the script with Kit Hesketh-Harvey, an actor who had graduated from Cambridge where much of Maurice takes place. Just before shooting began that year, Julian Sands, who had co-starred in A Room With A View, opted out of playing the title role claiming personal reasons. Ivory was warned that during the new AIDS plague, a tale of homosexual passion was probably not a good bet for the box-office. The R-rated film shows men courting, kissing & making love. Ivory:
“It would have be wrong to turn our faces from the homosexual community. We wanted the audience to root for a happy ending for the film’s male lovers. People should be saying, ‘I know what’s in their hearts, I can feel for them.’ Although the book was written over 90 years ago, it’s completely relevant to today. The laws may have changed regarding homosexuality, but people’s feelings, the dismay, panic & compromises, they endure remain the same.”
In 1987, Maurice debuted at the Venice Film Festival where it received the Silver Lion Award for Best Film, Best Film Score & Best Actor Awards for co-stars James Wilby & Hugh Grant. The film was received good reviews & made a profit.
Ivory & Merchant are the most impressive, impassioned, inspired & influential gay partnership in film history. The films of Merchant Ivory will always be loved for their visually sumptuous, smartly acted period pieces of literary works produced on tiny budgets. The couple & their work are so closely intertwined that film fans assume that “Merchant Ivory” is the name of one individual. With British literary & cultural traditions, their professional & personal relationship actually managed to bring together diverse elements of American & Indian culture.
Other Merchant Ivory films based on gay literary sources include their adaptations of Forster’s Howards End (1992), Carson McCullers‘s The Ballad Of The Sad Café (1991, directed by gay actor Simon Callow), & Henry James‘s The Golden Bowl (2001).
Ivory had no problem gathering A-list actors willing to work for union scale: all of those darn Redgraves, Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, Sam Waterston, Alan Bates, Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Bernadette Peters, Christopher Reeve, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Anne Baxter, Stanley Tucci, Helena Bonham Carter, Daniel Day-Lewis, Julie Christie, Ralph Fiennes, Nick Nolte, Leslie Caron, & my boo Jeremy Northam.
In 2005, Merchant took his final bow, after a short illness. Ivory’s last film was The City Of Your Final Destination (2010), based on openly gay Peter Cameron’s novel. It is the only film he has made on his own. Ivory:
“Ismail was very much there to plan it, he bought the rights to the book & we went down to Argentina together to scout the location. We then went to China & made The White Countess &, when we returned to London, that was when he died. I had to finish The White Countess without him & how can I put this?… It took me some time to recover.”
Ivory lives in the 3 houses on the 3 continents that inspired his work in art & life with Merchant. The made 35 films as a duo.
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