Funding Sought To Restore Classic 1967 LGBT Film Portrait Of Jason

Gay filmmaking before the mid-70s was a tough job, but a few filmmakers managed to bring LGBT stories to the screen. Sadly though, many of the relatively underground, independent efforts have suffered over the years due to the fact the original elements have degraded and preservation has been difficult, partly because few people have wanted to put up the money to restore these slices of gay history.

One movie that’s suffered badly since its release is Shirley Clarke’s 1967 movie Portrait Of Jason, a documentary in which Jason Holliday, aka Aaron Payne, is interviewed about his life as a black, gay hustler in 1960s America. It garnered a lot of interest on its release, as it was one of the first film to look at the life of a real gay person, but it’s virtually disappeared in the last couple of decades due to problems with the surviving prints and degraded elements.

However, now US independent distribution company Milestone Films has stepped up to try and ensure this movie is restored and preserved for posterity, as well as to hopefully give it a re-release so everyone can see this important part of LGBT history. They’ve already spent two years tracking down the necessary elements, but restoration doesn’t come cheap. It will cost around $100,000 for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Film Archive in LA to fully restore the movie, half of which needs to come from Milestone. To help the company (which is essentially just two people) afford this, they’ve launched a Kickstarter campaign to come up with $25,000 toward the preservation efforts.

The hope is that with that cash, the restoration can be completed and the newly refreshed Portrait Of Jason can screen at the 2013 Berlin Film Festival next February, before reaching a wider audience later that year. If you’d like to find out more, watch the video above and head over the film’s Kickstarter page. As always with these crowdsourcing efforts, there are rewards available depending on how much you give.