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Photograph by George Sakkestad
Former Saratoga resident John McDonald is having the world premiere screening of his documentary at Cinequest. The documentary, 'The Ghost Mountain Experiment,' is about a family that lived by itself on a mountain.
McDonald returns home for preview of film
By Michele Tjin
John McDonald, formerly of Saratoga, is hoping his homecoming turns out to be a good one. He has come back to the Bay Area for the Cinequest world premiere screening of his documentary about an eccentric family, whom McDonald calls "the original hippie family."
For more than two years, McDonald has worked on his labor of love, a 76-minute movie about Marshal and Tanya South and their children, a family who in 1930 eschewed civilization and lived atop a mountain in the desert in California. For 17 years, the Souths sought to be self-sufficient and lived off the land. McDonald chronicled their story in the documentary, The Ghost Mountain Experiment: a film about the original hippie family.
"I think I have the film that I want, but you're never totally satisfied," McDonald said. "I'm really looking forward to how it will play to the audience in San Jose, and I may make some more changes."
McDonald, 58, grew up in Saratoga and lived in town until he was 13. He attended Foothill Elementary School and Saratoga Oak Street School. He recalled his childhood in Saratoga as an "idyllic existence.
"We lived by a walnut grove on Thelma Avenue, and we were surrounded by the orchard as far as you can go," McDonald said. "I remember coming home one day, and there were bulldozers. They were starting the housing tract."
He hopes to see Saratoga again while he is at Cinequest. The last time he was back, he visited his old home, which is off Highway 9 and still standing. Saratoga has changed with the times, he said. Drugstores are now bathed in fluorescent lighting, and milkshakes and soda fountains at corner stores are as extinct as poodle skirts.
McDonald and his family later moved to Southern California, and while in college, he gained an appreciation of movies. He studied cinema at USC but found in the 1970s that there wasn't much money to be made in documentaries, his first passion. To support his family, he made some commercials for Mattel, selling Barbies, and many in-house movies for corporations.
"My bread and butter is still doing industrial films," said McDonald, who now lives in South Pasadena. For example, he makes movies that tout new cars and are later sent to salespeople so they know how to sell them.
Now that his daughters are grown, he figured the time was ripe to work on documentaries again. In 2004, when he and his family were hiking in Anza-Borrego State Park in San Diego County, he discovered the original homestead belonging to the South family and found their story compelling.
"I thought we should do a film and show how people could live here for 17 years," McDonald said.
What struck him about their lives was their pioneering spirit, he said.
"The saga of a strong, resourceful and resilient family surviving alone on an isolated mountaintop fascinates and inspires us but also challenges us to evaluate our own lives and perceptions," he said.
McDonald shopped his documentary to various film festivals, including the Sundance Film Festival, the Berlin International Film Festival and the Atlanta Film Festival. After a series of rejections, the documentary found a home at San Jose's Cinequest. McDonald hopes to find a distributor to pick his film up, and he said he would love to be featured on a show like PBS' American Experience. But finding backing from a studio is not his end goal.
"You don't work on documentaries to make money," he said. "There has to be something more."
The road to the top of Ghost Mountain has been an enjoyable and difficult one for McDonald.
"I feel satisfied, but I feel broke," he said.
He has pumped $80,000 of his own money to bring the South family story to life. The $300,000 production was financed by grants, while his crew worked for nothing. He said he is thankful his wife, Lydia, head of the German department at Pasadena City College, has a full-time job with benefits.
"She'd want me to stop," he said.
McDonald is coming to San Jose to see a number of films. His other project is another documentary, called Children of the Sun, and is about the dying art of Chinese opera. Again, he is looking for funding and is hoping to find supporters in the Chinese-American community who'd be interested in preserving an old culture. Despite the uncertainties that come with making documentaries, McDonald remains persistent.
"It's 10 times harder than you think, and it takes three times longer than you predicted," he said. "But that's what you do. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it. It's really important to work on things you care about and not think about how they are going to be commercial."
Cinequest runs until March 11, but the screenings for 'The Ghost Mountain Experiment' wrap up this week. The final showing is on March 8 at 2 p.m. at Camera 12, 201 S. Second St. in San Jose. For more information on the movie, visit www.ghostmoutainmovie.com.
