Alumni Spotlight

Jason Whiton '87

Life in Pictures

Most people who want to make movies go directly to film school, but Jason Whiton ’87 took a much more “interesting” route. He was a movie fan as a child and had the good fortune to be introduced to great art films by his father and a favorite high school teacher. It took a long time before filmmaking became his central focus, however, and it’s still not his sole creative endeavor.

A cartoonist and photographer whose work has appeared in such major publications as Rolling Stone, USA Weekend and The Japan Times, Whiton has published a book of interviews with Mort Walker (creator of the comic strip Beetle Bailey). He currently works as a high school art teacher and founded the Brattleboro ( Vermont) Film Series. Coming out of The Putney School, a boarding school with a strong arts program where he now teaches, Whiton could have headed to art school, but he chose Earlham instead.

“I knew I wanted to make art, but I wanted something to make art about,” he recalls. “Earlham gave me that.”

Whiton is a classic example of how Earlham educates outside the classroom as well as in. He was a convener of the Earlham Film Series (EFS), and later, out of a desire to share art and foreign films to the campus community, he founded The Other Film Series (TOFS), an alternative to mainstream fare that dominated EFS at the time. Whiton’s involvement in programming films put him in contact with other students who shared his love for film, and he says these extra curricular activities allowed him to continue his exploration of film, even though Earlham didn’t offer a formal program in film studies.

Earlham also encouraged Whiton to explore his fascination with Japan. He participated in the Studies in Cross Cultural Education (SICE) program and lived in Japan for more than four years after graduation. While in Japan his interest in watching film and his talents in drawing and photography coalesced as he began making experimental films.

When he returned to the United States to begin teaching at The Putney School, he continued to seek out others who share his admiration for art and foreign film, whether among his students or in the larger community.

“I’m still looking for my tribe,” he says, and does so as a teacher, as a film programmer, and for the past several years, by writing screenplays and producing films that have lately been garnering attention and winning awards in the United States and abroad. His film I Was a Dancer premiered at Palm Springs Festival of Short Films last September. His romantic comedy script Romancing the Dead took a top prize at the Moondance Festival while The Bonsai, a screenplay inspired by the Kurosawa classic Ikiru, has won several awards including the Grand Prize at Script P.I.M.P. 2005.

Whiton began writing The Bonsai after visiting an exhibit of ancient bonsai trees in Japan with Steve Nussbaum, former director of Japan Studies at Earlham. “Some of these trees were 500 years old, and I wondered who took care of them over the centuries,” Whiton mused. This thought was the seed for a project he has pursued for several years. He is currently adapting the film script into a novel and shopping the screenplay to producers, studios and agents. (Among those interested in the project is a Japanese producer whose father graduated from Earlham.)

As for the films he makes himself, Whiton takes advantage of relatively inexpensive technology such as digital video and computer software that allows him to edit his footage on his personal computer. Although he wants his ideas to lead to large-budget, feature-length films, he also enjoys the self-sufficiency of smaller film projects that he can take from idea to final cut all by himself.

“The independence excites me,” says Whiton of writing, producing, shooting and editing his own films. “I like not having to wait for a bunch of people to give the green light.”

Not that Whiton doesn’t have a taste for large projects that require their share of deal making and finagling. He is currently working with an entertainment lawyer to get permission from Sony ATV to make a feature length documentary about the continuing international fascination with The Beatles. He has already filmed The Silver Beats, a Japanese tribute band, and hopes to do work related to the film in Liverpool, Tokyo and the United States.

Whatever the particular project, however, Whiton sees a line running through his teaching and creative work that stretches back all the way back to his Earlham days.

“I suppose that choosing Earlham over art school or film school has made my learning curve quite long. It’s taken me a while to figure out how to do certain things, but I feel that now many of my interests have come together. I am very interested in the narrative possibilities of photography and how photography operates as a fiction. That leads directly into film making,” he notes, adding that teaching teenagers has also influenced his own development as an artist.

“Serving as a mentor to younger artists has encouraged me to keep examining my own work critically,” he says. “It’s really my teaching that led me to my ‘eureka moment’ about what my own work ought to be.”