Making the Picture Show : Ojai: Filmmakers who live and work in this bucolic town say it’s close enough to L.A. to be accessible, but far enough away to discourage commuters.

Ever since the Krotona Institute of Theosophy moved from Hollywood to Ojai in 1924, the town has been a magnet to those seeking beauty, truth and the country life. Not that a school studying the nature of humanity could do it alone.

Ojai is its own richly endowed high plateau, walled in by breathtaking mountains and sleepy in what seems a constant column of sunshine. Its draw was powerful, and a culture formed here that would attract Hollywood players over and over again. Loretta Young. W.C. Fields. Margaret O’Brien. They all lived here, in seclusion and peace, yet within reach of the Hollywood madness they fled.

“Lost Horizon” author James Hilton helped out. When his book was made into a movie, in 1937, it was shot here.

In the Fifties, when Hollywood buckled under Communist scares, some would think of Ojai again: as refuge. Michael Wilson, blacklisted and uncredited at the time for writing “Bridge Over the River Kwai” and “Lawrence of Arabia,” would, upon returning from Europe in 1964, choose to move here with his wife, architect Zelma Wilson.

Other Ventura County cities are beyond the frenetic Los Angeles orbit and yet a manageable drive to the entertainment mecca. But it is only Ojai--site of spectacular topography and accrued cultural cache and myth--that continues to boast Ventura County’s concentrated but varied community of artists.

The potter Beatrice Wood. Actors June Allison, Mary Steenburgen and Peter Strauss.

And filmmakers. In Ventura County, filmmaking means Ojai. Resident producers and directors have included Robert Young, Ron Shelton, Robert Zemeckis, Jerry and David Zucker and Tim Burton.

They, too, have been drawn here for the familiar reasons: beauty, refuge and a creative climate free of studio pressure.

Three filmmakers now stand out in Ojai. Of these three, two not only live in Ojai but conduct their work there. The third drives a few scant miles from his Ojai home down Route 33, into Ventura, where he unobtrusively keeps an ambitious post-production facility, returning to Ojai each night.

The members of this trio couldn’t be more different--in their outlook, in their work. What they do have in common, however, is their sense of artistic purpose and their sense of place.

Somehow, in Ojai, as it has been for decades, the two get happily mixed together.

A Nice Place to Live

The view from the Nava-Thomas hilltop property is something out of a dream, a dream about California awash in orange groves and paradisiacal rural vistas. The large house is an architectural hybrid, with Doric columns and a stately, frontal Greek facade to the driveway.

A vintage Olds sits in the driveway, and a jungle gym in the yard is put to good use by the couple’s two children, ages 7 and 9.

Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas moved to Ojai five years ago. What Thomas likes about life here is that it is just beyond the industry’s reach. “It really is ideal,” Thomas says, “because it’s far enough away from L.A. that it can’t be a bedroom community.”

“Our schedule varies a lot,” says Nava. “Sometimes we go in two or three times a week, and sometimes we don’t go in for two months. Sometimes, we just stay here and work on screenplays.”

But always, no matter what the schedule, the peace of Ojai establishes the work climate. “You can’t do good writing if you’re looking over your shoulder all the time, to see what someone else is thinking about, looking at the trades,” explained Thomas. “We get away from all that.

“With writing, you can balance the rest of your life in a sane and reasonable way. You can do your work, stop and be with your kids at home,” she says. Production, which is done in L.A. or on location, “devours your life. It’s a black hole. Nothing else exists for months. It’s very disruptive.”

Nava and Thomas met 25 years ago in the UCLA film school. Through collaboration on projects and two independent films, their relationship developed. Thomas, along the way, also developed a career as a writer of cookbooks, most noted among them “The Vegetarian Epicure,” in two volumes.

The pair’s biggest film splash came in 1984, with “El Norte,” on which they collaborated on the script, with Nava directing and Thomas producing. The bilingual film tells a poignant tale of two young Guatemalans who flee their oppressive homeland and wend their way through nightmarish struggles getting into the United States. Needless to say, the premise is not the stuff that Hollywood clamors for. How did they get it to the screen?

Said Nava, “We got it made by pigheadedness and total perseverance.”

Thomas added: “We had to hear ‘no’ 200 times. It took years to get it off the ground, and even then we had very little money to make it with.”

While funding for “El Norte” was finally procured from independent sources such as American Playhouse, Thomas says her cookbook royalties kept them afloat while making the film.

In 1988, the couple had their first major studio encounter when they made “A Time of Destiny,” starring William Hurt and Timothy Hutton, for Columbia Pictures. Radically different from “El Norte,” it is a World War II-era saga with melodrama on the sleeve. It was met with mixed reviews.

For the most part, the pair have reputations as filmmakers with social consciousness. “We went to school in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s,” Thomas said. “That was a time when everybody we knew or came in contact with was intensely aware of social issues and very committed to making a difference. People saw working in film as a way of doing something meaningful.”

Nava said: “The medium has tremendous potential to reach people. With something like ‘El Norte,’ for example, you read statistics and newspapers about immigration coming up from Latin America into the United States. But a film can make you know somebody from that world. It can touch your heart and bring the humanity into it.

“We’ve always been interested in using that power to tell these stories. As a result, we haven’t gotten as many films onto the screen as other filmmakers.”

Of late, the pair have worked on various script projects, one of them about a gay man from San Francisco going home to the Midwest to confront his straight roots.

More personal for them is a film Thomas describes as “a multi-generational saga of a Mexican-American family in East L.A.” They would like to produce and direct it.

“It spans the 20th Century in one family,” he continued. “In the course of this, the L.A. riots and all the stuff that has happened has made it more topical, maybe, than it was when we were actually writing it. It really is a story of L.A. as a divided city.”

Ojai, of course, is anything but divided, and its small-town quality sets it apart from the bustle of L.A. Thomas says it makes it easier to appreciate people.

“When you’re in New York or L.A., where the rest of the human race is in your face all the time, you don’t want to see them. Here, you’re in a quieter place where you don’t feel the crowd encroaching on you all the time, so it’s easier to be friendly with people.”

“I go to Meiners Oaks to take the kids to school, and I think, ‘I wonder if we could shoot a film here,”’ Nava said.

Thomas added, “We’re thinking about re-creating the barrio back in the 1920s in East L.A., to see if we can shoot a movie out here.”

“You know what, though?” Nava asserted. “There are great locations up here in Ventura County. But as filmmakers, I don’t want to come here to make movies. We’ve come here to live. I don’t want to bring the hurly-burly of film production up here to this part of the world.”

Field, World, Hometown

At age 66, Tom Horton Sr. is a substantial figure in the world of adventure-oriented documentaries. Far from being a man single-minded in his pursuit of filmmaking, however, Horton’s resume shows a dizzying, circuitous route.

He’s a man full of stories, and as he sat down for an interview, the energetic CEO talked about past glories--like the two Emmys he has won--and about the facts and figures of projects under way in his office.

Horton was a Marine in World War II, an Army Reserve officer in the Korean War, a two-time Olympic athlete (in canoeing), a former employee of IBM and Westinghouse, and a specialist in marketing “military electronics.” That last job involved helping in the effort to search for Russian submarines.

It was through this work that he met Jacques Cousteau, who then hired him to work with his California-based son, Phillipe Cousteau. Horton was with the Cousteaus for eight years during the ‘70s as executive in charge of production for “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.”

“One time, I asked Phillipe Cousteau, ‘What the hell is my job?’ ” he recalled. “He described me to me (as) ‘the minister in gray. You stand quietly behind the throne and whisper in the emperor’s ear.’ That sized up my job for me.”

Horton was 53 by the time he made his first film, “The Gossamer Albatross,” in 1978. With typical good karma, Horton had fallen backward into the story of Paul McCrady, the designer of a man-powered flying machine McCrady hoped would cross the English Channel and thus win a 100,000-pound prize.

Horton first raised funds to build the mylar-based flying machine. Then he coaxed DuPont Corp. into funding a film of the project. The resulting documentary was screened on CBS and won an Emmy for Horton as producer.

Shaking his head at the memory, Horton said: “I thought, ‘Jeez, this is a great business. Make a film, win an Emmy.’ ” Then, laughing: “It’s been downhill ever since.”

Horton earned a second Emmy in 1983 as the producer of the two-hour special “America Remembers John F. Kennedy.”

Emboldened by his auspicious beginning, Horton started his company, Thomas Horton Associates, and a series called “Search for Adventure.” He’s since become a heavy hitter in the field of independent, adventure documentaries, with titles such as “Operation Shark Attack” and “Jungle Trek.”

“We just finished our 14th year in August,” he said. “We now have the largest series of adventure programs in the world. Maybe, with the exception of National Geographic, the BBC and Cousteau, we are likely the fourth-largest documentary series of that type in the world.”

Horton has shifted his base of operations several times over the years, responding to the fluctuations of activity and the acquisition of equipment. For the last three years, the company has occupied an elaborate, fully equipped post-production facility situated on Ventura Avenue in downtown Ventura.

Horton moved his family to Ojai from Los Angeles in the late 1970s. Three of his five children now work in the business with him.

He attributes much of his company’s recent success to the cable television boom: “If it weren’t for the Discovery Channel and the Arts & Entertainment network, I don’t think we’d have many independent filmmakers in the United States. They’ve sure made the difference for us.

“We produce family-oriented pictures that have no bad language, that have a bit of a moral involved. They certainly are educational--from all over the world. They travel well.”

The output has reached a peak these past three years, a period in which Horton estimates that he has been making an hourlong film every six or seven weeks.

Fieldwork this year includes a fact- and footage-gathering trip to Easter Island in the South Pacific and South Africa. On the South Africa trip, the company will explore hammerhead sharks and a gold mine that descends for nearly 2 1/2 miles.

Horton is philosophical about his work. “The game is to live long enough to enjoy a brilliant future,” he said. “We’re still waiting for that future, but we’re hanging in there.”

Home Work

Carol McCartney came to her tidy Ojai tract home from Los Angeles six years ago.

The documentary producer/director does it all right here, in the house. A recent tour revealed scaled-down editing equipment and a mothership computer occupying a spare bedroom. The integration of computer programs for titling and editing have enabled image-makers like McCartney greater flexibility-to operate even in small home studios.

Pointing to the set-up, McCartney said, admiringly: “It’s a real breakthrough for those of us who are considered desktop video publishers. In order to turn things out, it’s important to learn how to do it all, and writing helps tremendously. It’s the old French film school idea--author/director. That really is the way it works.”

While McCartney spent much of the 1970s as a screen and television writer, she drifted toward video production 10 years ago, encouraged by technological advances. It all began with the PC.

“It revolutionized the way one could write and revise scripts,” she said. “That same technology has now revolutionized the way people can produce videos. Now one person can do it all.”

McCartney’s subject matter ranges widely. She made her first film, “Elena,” in 1970, while studying at San Diego State University. She had been a Head Start teacher and “was very aware of the problems of kids coming into school speaking English as a second language and being labeled as retarded.”

Funded by the San Diego PBS station, the film went on to win honors, although McCartney didn’t get back into making films until the 1980s.

When not working on her own documentaries, McCartney has come forward with effective advocacies for public access television. As coordinator of Ventura County Broadcast Network, she was instrumental in getting Ventura County Cablevision to open a video-editing bay in an office in Ojai, and as a result she teaches the craft there.

McCartney officially became a self-reliant video producer in 1985.

Among her projects have been educational films, a documentary on the proposed Weldon Canyon landfill, and video profiles of Ojai artists Beatrice Wood and George Stuart. Her works-in-progress include a portrait of Ojai’s eminent potter couple Otto and Vivika Heino and a documentary about animators. Along with Alice Staton, a French instructor at Ventura Community College, she is creating an interactive laser disc video on French language and culture titled “Fantastique.”

“I continually go back and forth between the issues that concern me--as, for example, with the documentary on Weldon Canyon--and also what are considered real treasures, like my piece on George Stuart.”

Ojai resident Stuart is a historian and sculptor who creates small, life-like historical figures. He gives lectures and monologues at the Ventura Museum of History and Art, based on the stories behind the figures.

McCartney’s film, “George Stuart: Sculptor, Entertainer, Historian,” was made in 1991 and distributed by the Cinema Guild in New York. In the film, she deftly captures the fine craftsmanship of this fastidious miniaturist.

“It takes time to get to know a person, to figure out how best to portray them, to try to go in without too many pre-formed ideas,” she said. “Every person is different in terms of the story they have to tell, and I see myself as a portrait artist doing a video painting. That’s the new form for video artists.”