Enter the charmingly cluttered Potrero Hill home of Judy Stone and you might bump into an ornamental Inuit canoe paddle, or a cobalt blue Italian glass sculpture, or maybe a scowling Balinese marionette. She’s been collecting pieces throughout the 40 years she’s lived in the house.
No surprise that her art comes from far-flung places. For more than 30 years Stone has been the Bay Area’s premiere reporter on international cinema, writing about important filmmakers from Asia, the Middle East, Europe, South America and — occasionally — even the United States.
This year she took time to compile some of her best work in a new book, “Not Quite a Memoir,” which includes reprinted articles from the San Francisco Chronicle, Examiner and others, spanning several decades. Among them are interviews with Alfred Hitchcock, Doris Lessing, Salma Hayek, Isabel Allende, Jean Genet, Maya Angelou and India’s Satyajit Ray.
Those are some of the familiar names. The majority of personalities in her 500-page tome are likely unknown to most Americans. But everyone receives the same respectful Stone treatment. “I like to talk to people,” she says, “and draw them out.”
A native of Philadelphia, Stone grew up in a vigorously intellectual, progressive Jewish home. Her older brother was the late left-wing journalist I.F. Stone. “It was not a religious household,” she says. “But I don’t think Jewish has to do with going to synagogues and listening to rabbis. It has to do with a sense of ethics.’
Stone chose a somewhat different route from her famous brother. She wrote her first film review back in junior high school, and after a stint as a factory worker during World War II, she launched her own career in journalism, writing for Bay Area newspapers as well as Ramparts Magazine and the New York Times.
She barely tops 5 feet, but Stone is plenty feisty and doesn’t suffer fools — or foolishness — gladly. Ask about her favorite film or director, and she’ll shoot you down. “I hate when people ask me that,” she says. “But I know which director I liked least.”
That honor falls to Claude Lanzmann, the French director of the 7-hour epic documentary “Shoah,” a film she greatly admired.
“He was so arrogant,” she recalls. “I thought he was dreadful. I don’t mind people who are proud of their work, but I hate when I go into an interview and the guy immediately wants to know what I thought of the movie.”
Lanzmann became an international celebrity, but many of the artists she respects most rarely get a foothold in the United States. One such artist is Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk.
“He wanted to engage in a literary discussion,” she recalls. “I said I just do interviews. Then he said, ‘Who’d you last interview?’ I told him [Spanish novelist] Juan Goytisolo. He said, ‘He’s more obscure than I am.'”
Having traveled the world for her work, Stone has developed an internationalist view of life and politics. Despite the radical inclinations of her family (I.F. Stone was decidedly left of center), she says touring Eastern Europe during the Cold War era left an impression.
“I learned to discredit certain left-wing simplicities,” she says, but adds, “We’re not living in a totalitarian situation. But I lived in the McCarthy period, and [today] is worse than that. I don’t believe in such a thing as Republican Jews. They’re very dangerous.”
World capitals were not the only places she visited. Stone says one of her favorite places on Earth is the Inuit land near the Arctic Circle. She has friends up there, including Inuit filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk from the village of Igloolik.
She is one of probably very few Jews who ever ventured to that part of the world (she toured the Frobisher Bay region). But with her embracing attitude toward art, life and humanity, Stone has no problem being one of the frozen chosen.
Says Stone with a laugh, “I’m very big in Igloolik.”
“Not Quite a Memoir” by Judy Stone (486 pages, Silman-James Press, $29.95).
Judy Stone will appear at 7 p.m. Wednesday, July 19 at Reader’s Books, 130 E. Napa St., Sonoma. Info: (707) 939-1779; and at 7 p.m. Tuesday, July 25 at a Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, 601 Van Ness Ave., S.F. Info: (415) 441-6670.