James M. Martin

March 23, 1943 - December 13, 2015

James M. "Jim " Martin died at age 72 on December 13, 2015, in his native Corpus Christi, Texas, after a short illness.

From 1961-65, Mr. Martin attended Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas, where he obtained a degree in English, journalism and theater when the drama department there was headed by former Max Reinhardt assistant director Walther R. Volbach.

While there, Mr. Martin became "The Campus Critic" for the university's newspaper, The Skiff, becoming one of the most well-respected students on campus during his matriculation.

He also became chairman of the celebrated TCU Films Committee, at the time a jewel in the crown of North Texas culture, a group that screened art films, foreign films and experimental films, unavailable elsewhere in the days prior to videotape and DVDs.

Mr. Martin selected motion pictures of wide-ranging topics and wrote a "film program" to accompany each showing.

The TCU Films Committee was organized a semester before Mr. Martin's arrival by his lifelong friend John W. Gaston, now living in Sequim. Along with his theater studies, Mr. Martin produced and directed his first film, "The Rehearsal," a satire on stage auditions.

Upon graduation, Mr. Martin attended the University of California, Los Angeles, graduate school of screenwriting from 1965-67 while at the same time working in the script department at Paramount Studios.

Mr. Martin studied with such film greats as Josef von Sternberg and Jean-Luc Godard in his graduate courses.

While at UCLA, he organized the first retrospective of the British filmmaker of horror films Tod Slaughter, whose "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" became the basis of the Broadway musical.

The successful Tod Slaughter retrospective was called "A Festering in Royce Hall," reflecting the venue on campus in which the screening occurred.

In his last year of graduate school, Mr. Martin produced and directed his second film, a short feature, "The Long Shot," a comedy about modern, married life.

In the late 1960s and early '70s, Mr. Martin became the editor of Coast FM & Fine Arts magazine in Los Angeles, where he interviewed and wrote profiles of such luminaries as the international film star Marcello Mastroianni, the poet Charles Bukowski, the dancer Rudolf Nureyev and scores of others in the Hollywood community.

During his years in Los Angeles, Mr. Martin wrote four books and contributed film reviews and articles too numerous to count for many national journals, including Film Quarterly.

In 1974, he wrote the screenplay for the Warner Brothers feature film "Black Eye," directed by his friend Jack Arnold, who also directed "Creature from the Black Lagoon."

In the late '70s, Mr. Martin relocated to New England to become a freelance writer before returning to his native Texas, where he obtained a law degree at St. Mary's University and returned to Corpus Christi to practice law.

He continued to participate in the performing arts, starring in 1986 as Prospero in the Harbor Playhouse's production of Shakespeare's "The Tempest," a performance praised by drama critics.

Throughout his life, Mr. Martin continued to edit and write, completing in 2015 a three-act play, "Cactus Idyll," about the novelist Katherine Anne Porter and the poet Hart Crane when the two celebrated writers lived near each other in Mexico City.

At the time of his death, he was finishing a screenplay about the filming during the early 1930s of Sergei Eisenstein's "¡Que viva México!" All his life, Mr. Martin traveled widely in Mexico researching locales and acquiring the "local color" he used in his writing about the Latino culture in his many articles.

James Michael Martin was born March 23, 1943, and died 18 days before his announced retirement.

Mr. Martin was one of the bright lights in the generation of film writers who grew up with Italian neorealism, championed the French "New Wave," formulated the auteur-theory of filmmaking and helped elevate the taste of a new generation of filmgoers.

He was both talented and erudite, a true aesthete, author and critic in the same mold as the late-19th-century writers George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde.

He made a deep impact on those who knew him and on those who read his learned articles.

Mr. Martin was a social maverick with a delightful sense of humor and adventure. He led one of the most interesting lives in his generation.