Northwest
CELEBRATING LIFE AFTER 50
www.NorthwestPrimeTime.com
EE FR
Prime Time
May/Ju 2022 ne
Trailblazing Seattle Filmmaker Gets Her Due …by Robert Horton / Crosscut.com
I
f Jean Walkinshaw were making a documentary about herself, how might she begin the film? Perhaps she would start off with an introductory statement: Jean Walkinshaw is a pioneering, prolific, yet overlooked figure from Northwest filmmaking history, the producer of dozens of nonfiction films from the early 1960s to the present.
"Women weren't supposed to be interesting in those days..." Jean Walkinshaw, producer/editor/writer. All photos courtesy commons.wikimedia.org
Or might she begin with a grabby detail, a hook to keep you watching? Something, for instance, like the moment in 2013 when Walkinshaw got a phone call from someone at KCTS, Seattle’s public broadcasting station [and Crosscut’s sister organization], informing her that a Channel 9 employee had noticed some of her original tapes and films
stacked in a hallway. Thinking they were in danger of being thrown out, that employee had taken the tapes and hidden them in an electrical closet at the station until some sort of rescue mission could be made. As alarming as the phone call was, it led directly to Walkinshaw recovering a huge amount of her
material and, years later, to her work being celebrated and catalogued online by the prestigious American Archive of Public Broadcasting. The robust Jean Walkinshaw Collection was released online in 2021. The narrator of this imagined film profile might pause here to note that continued on page 16