John Korty Filmography

Ms. Scrooge

Crew: Director

Actors: Cicely Tyson, Katherine Helmond, Michael Beach, John Bourgeois, Rae'Ven Larrymore-Kelly

Synopsis: In 1974, Cicely Tyson and director John Korty (The Ewok Adventure) worked together on the acclaimed The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (winner of nine Emmys), and they reteamed for this updating of Charles Dickens' 1843 classic, A Christmas Carol. When miserly banker Ebenita Scrooge (Tyson) is Read More

Redwood Curtain

Crew: Director

Actors: Lea Salonga

Synopsis: An adopted girl's search for the truth is the subject of this Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation. Lea Salonga stars as Geri Riordan, a half-Vietnamese girl who feels an emptiness in her life because she doesn't know her ancestral roots. After the death of her adopted father, she starts to Read More

Getting Out

Crew: Director

Synopsis: This taut, gritty made-for-TV drama is based on an off-Broadway play by Marsha Norman and follows the struggle of a female ex-con to reform despite the destructive influence of her terrible mother. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide Read More

They

Crew: Director

Actors: Vanessa Redgrave

Synopsis: Made for cable TV, They is based on a story by Rudyard Kipling. Patrick Bergen stars as a paper-pusher who cares more about his business than his family. He is brought up short when his young daughter dies. Deeply regretful that he never got to know the girl, Bergen relies upon blind psychic Read More

Deadly Matrimony

Crew: Director

Actors: Brian Dennehy, Lisa Eilbacher, Treat Williams, Embeth Davidtz, John M. Jackson

Synopsis: Brian Dennehy makes one of his many TV-movie appearances as Chicago homicide cop John Reed in the two-part Deadly Matrimony. Reed's quarry this time is mob lawyer Treat Williams, who murders his wife and then effectively covers his tracks. The closer Reed comes to the truth, the more he's in Read More

Long Road Home

Crew: Director

Actors: Mark Harmon

Synopsis: The Long Road Home evokes memories of The Grapes of Wrath, though it doesn't quite reach the same heights as the earlier film. Mark Harmon heads up a family of migrant workers, toiling in California's San Joaquin Valley in 1937. Harmon's brood is obliged to face down not only the Depression but Read More

Line of Fire: The Morris Dees Story

Crew: Director

Actors: Corbin Bernsen

Synopsis: Corbin Bernsen, fresh out of LA Law, plays a real-life attorney in Line of Fire: The Morris Dees Story. As Dees, Bernsen goes head to head with the Ku Klux Klan in the Alabama of the 1980s. Despite having his name included on the "hit list" of every wacko white supremacist in the Nation, Dees Read More

Keeping Secrets

Crew: Director

Actors: Ken Kercheval, Suzanne Somers

Synopsis: A gentle remonstration to those who avoid any TV movie with the name Suzanne Somers attached to it: Do not pass up Ms. Somers' Keeping Secrets. The actress plays herself in this painful retelling of her formative years as a member of a dysfunctional family. Ms. Somers' father, played by Ken Kercheval Read More

Eye on the Sparrow

Crew: Director

Actors: Mare Winningham, Keith Carradine, Conchata Ferrell, Bianca Rose, Sandy McPeak

Synopsis: Curiously listed as a 1991 theatrical production in some sources, Eye on the Sparrow was actually a made-for-TV movie, which first aired December 7, 1987. Mare Winningham plays a blind Missouri woman who marries sightless teacher David Carradine. He is resigned to a world of darkness, but she is Read More

A Son's Promise

Crew: Director

Actors: Rick Schroder, Donald Moffat, Veronica Cartwright, Stephen Dorff, Andrew Lowery

Synopsis: The promise made by 15-year-old Georgia boy Ricky Schroder is to his dying mother (Veronica Cartwright). Schroder vows that he'll keep his parentless family--all seven brothers--together, no matter what. He keeps his word, through starvation, deprivation and natural disaster. It says in the ads Read More

Cast the First Stone

Crew: Director

Actors: Jill Eikenberry, Joe Spano, Richard Masur

Synopsis: Returning from a Catholic retreat, public school teacher Jill Eikenberry picks up a hitchhiker--who repays her hospitality by brutally raping her. Plunged into shame and self-hatred by the incident, she does not report the attack to the police. Only when she becomes pregnant does she tell the Read More

Winnie

Crew: Director

Actors: Barbara Barrie, David Morse, Meredith Baxter-Birney

Synopsis: Made for television, Winnie is adapted from the fact-based book Winnie: My Life in the Institution by Jamie Paster Bolnick. Meredith Baxter-Birney plays Winnie Sprockett, who at age 6 is adjudged moderately retarded and confined to an Iowa mental institution. After being locked away for 30 years Read More

Baby Girl Scott

Crew: Director

Actors: John Lithgow, Mary Beth Hurt, Linda Kelsey, Robert Desiderio, Ronny Cox

Synopsis: This heartrending TV movie stars John Lithgow and Mary Beth Hurt as the parents of a severely handicapped premature infant. Weighing a scant 20 ounces at birth, the baby girl has no esophagus and very few signs of being able to stay alive without artificial assistance. The desperate couple sign Read More

Deadly Business

Crew: Director

Synopsis: This TV-movie was based on a true story of criminal culpability in the ecological crisis. Alan Arkin stars as an ex-convict hired in 1972 by smooth-talking Armand Assante, who runs a successful garbage disposal business. Even when Arkin finds out that Assante is a functionary of the mob, he Read More

Resting Place

Crew: Director

Actors: John Lithgow

Synopsis: Set in 1972, The Resting Place stars John Lithgow as an Army major who accompanies the body of a young black lieutenant killed in action to the dead man's Georgia home town. Though the local cemetery is for whites only, the town's resident liberal has paid for a plot for the deceased lieutenant. Lithgow Read More

Second Sight: A Love Story

Crew: Director

Actors: Elizabeth Montgomery, Barry Newman, Nicholas Pryor, Richard Romanus, Susan Ruttan

Synopsis: If Elizabeth Montgomery must continue to play put-upon women in her TV movies, it cannot be denied that she possesses the superior talents to pull it off. In Second Sight: A Love Story, Ms. Montgomery portrays a woman who has been blind for 20 years. Worried that people will try to get close to Read More

The Ewok Adventure

Crew: Cinematographer, Director

Actors: Warwick Davis

Synopsis: At this late date, it should hardly be necessary to inform viewers that The Ewok Adventure was inspired by those fuzzy little space muppets seen in the 1983 Star Wars sequel Return of the Jedi. This costly made-for-TV film was executive-produced by George Lucas, with special effects provided by Read More

The Haunting Passion

Crew: Director

Actors: Gerald McRaney, Jane Seymour

Synopsis: Jane Seymour stars in The Haunting Passion as Julia Evans, a woman forced to make a decision between two lovers. The gimmick here is that one of her suitors is an invisible--but very sexy--ghost. The other man in Julia's life is her neglectful husband Dan (Gerald McRaney), a former athlete who is Read More

Twice Upon a Time

Crew: Director, Screen Story, Screenwriter

Actors: Lorenzo Music, Marshall Erwin Efron, James Cranna, Julie Payne

Synopsis: Twice Upon a Time is an animated cartoon feature from the Lucasfilm factory. The story involves a battle royal amongst the employees of Murkworks over possession of a "cosmic clock." Whoever controls Time will control the universe, so you can well imagine that some of the characters consider this Read More

A Christmas Without Snow

Crew: Director, Producer, Screen Story

Actors: Ramon Bieri, Michael Learned, Ruth Nelson, Valerie Curtin, John Houseman

Synopsis: A Christmas Without Snow originally premiered December 9, 1980. The title refers to the film's setting: the snowless San Francisco. The story is told from the point of view of newly divorced Michael Learned, who comes to grips with disillusionment with a little help from her friends in the church Read More

Oliver's Story

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Ryan O'Neal, Candice Bergen, Nicola Pagett, Edward Binns, Benson Fong

Synopsis: Get ready for another dose of love and loss in this sequel to the four-handkerchief classic Love Story (1970). Oliver Barrett (Ryan O'Neal) is emotionally devastated after the death of his wife Jenny, and while he tries to lose himself in his work as a lawyer, the long hours don't ease his pain Read More

Forever

Crew: Director

Synopsis: According to the network press release, the made-for-TV Forever was concerned with the "joys and anguish" of teenage romance. The teenage romancers herein are played by Stephanie Zimbalist and Dean Butler. It is the first serious relationship for both, and so far as they are concerned, it will be Read More

Who Are The DeBolts? (And Where Did They Get 19 Kids?)

Crew: Director, Producer

Synopsis: This Academy Award-winning documentary focuses upon Robert and Dorothy DeBolt, a California couple with six children of their own-and 13 adoptees and/or legal wards. The DeBolt's extended family includes black, Korean, and Vietnamese children, many of whom are physically challenged. In cinema Read More

Alex and the Gypsy

Crew: Director

Actors: Jack Lemmon, Geneviève Bujold, James Woods, Gino Ardito, Robert Emhardt

Synopsis: Alexander Main (Jack Lemmon) is a tired, middle-aged bail bondsman who hears from his former girlfriend Maritza (Genevieve Bujold) for the first time in quite a while. The news isn't good: Maritza is accused of the attempted murder of her abusive lover, and she hopes that Alex can get her out of Read More

Farewell to Manzanar

Crew: Director, Producer, Screenwriter

Synopsis: Farewell to Manzanar recounts a dark chapter in American history from the point of view of those most closely affected by it. This made-for-TV movie concentrates on the Wakatsukis, a Japanese-American family living in Santa Monica, California in the early 1940s. After the attack on Pearl Harbor Read More

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

Crew: Director

Actors: Cicely Tyson, Barbara Chaney, Richard Dysart, Katherine Helmond, Michael Murphy

Synopsis: Cicely Tyson ages from 19 to 110 in the role of Jane Pittman, a fictional African-American woman whose life began in slavery and ended at the inception of the Civil Rights Movement. Northern journalist Quentin Lerner (Michael Murphy) travels to the racially polarized south of 1962 to interview Ms. Read More

The Music School

Crew: Director

Synopsis: This drama is based on a John Updike story and is narrated by the author. It is the tale of an angst-filled hero attending music school. The precise mathematics inherent in the musical compositions he studies is used as a metaphor for the unattainable perfection humans strive for. ~ Sandra Read More

Class of '63

Crew: Director

Synopsis: The made-for-TV The Class of 63 is set at a ten-year college reunion. Joan Hackett and Cliff Gorman play a married couple who eagerly anticipate meeting old friends at the event. But Gorman's festive spirit dissipates when Hackett's old boy friend James Brolin makes an appearance. In fact, Gorman Read More

Silence

Crew: Director

Actors: Raleigh Geer, Tad Geer, Sam Robustelli

Synopsis: In this film, also released under the title Crazy Jack and the Boy, a young autistic boy, Eric (Ian Geer Flanders), loses himself in the woods while on a visit to the California wilderness. As his parents organize a search party for him, he is discovered by a hermit known as Crazy Jack, who Read More

Go Ask Alice

Crew: Director

Synopsis: "Alice" was the pseudonymous name of the teenaged author who wrote the book upon which this above-average TV movie was based. Jamie Smith-Jackson portrays a shy, slightly overweight high schooler who is so anxious for acceptance that she falls in with the drug crowd. In a methodical, almost casual Read More

The Candidate

Crew: Cinematographer

Actors: Robert Redford, Peter Boyle, Don Porter, Allen Garfield, Karen Carlson

Synopsis: "What do we do now?" Director Michael Ritchie and executive producer/star Robert Redford satirically explore the machinations and manipulations of media-age political campaigns in this cynical political drama. Rumpled left-wing California lawyer Bill McKay (Redford), the son of a former governor (Melvyn Douglas Read More

The People

Crew: Director

Synopsis: Writer Zenna Henderson's science-fiction stories were the basis for this made-for-TV movie. A young teacher goes to a remote area to work with secluded and backwards inhabitants. She accidentally discovers, though, that the residents are actually aliens with psychic-powers who escaped their own Read More

Riverrun

Crew: Cinematographer, Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Louise Ober, Mark Jenkins

Synopsis: A young unmarried couple leave the politically turbulent Berkeley behind for a life in the country. Finding a place in sheep country, the couple awaits the birth of their first child as they revel in bucolic splendor. The tensions of city life are left behind as things progress towards the Read More

Funnyman

Crew: Animator, Cinematographer, Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Peter Bonerz, Carol Androsky, Larry Hankin

Synopsis: In this comedy, a San Francisco comedian decides to get away from it all for a while. En route he encounters a Japanese family, and a model, with whom he has his first real relationship. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide Read More

The Crazy Quilt

Crew: Cinematographer, Director, Editor, Producer, Screenwriter

Actors: Tom Rosqui, Ina Mela, Ellen Frye

Synopsis: Narrated by Burgess Meredith, this drama chronicles the confusion of a young woman who has difficulty deciding whether she wants to stay married or have her freedom. The trouble begins soon after the optimistic woman marries her true love. She gets pregnant, but miscarries. The devastated couple Read More

Breaking the Habit

Crew: Director, Producer