May-June 1995

By Ven. Robina Courtin

Last summer Vajrapani member John Schwartz spent four months in Los Angeles helping his friend Michael Wayne restore one of the unreleased movies of John Wayne, Michael’s father.

“The negative was at least forty years old,” says John, who worked as a producer in Hollywood in the sixties and early seventies. “We had to completely restore it, the soundtrack, everything.”

The new computer technology they used to do this amazed John, and inspired him. Immediately he could see the potential it had for transforming the videos of the teachings of Lama Yeshe, some of such appalling quality that it’s virtually impossible to understand the words.

Movies have been his business for a long time. John, now 67, grew up in Los Angeles. First he had a public relations company that handles various producers, then he switched to producing. “I didn’t do anything very memorable,” he shrugs. He produced, among others, Rock Hudson, Kirk Douglas, as well as John Wayne.

Bus mostly he preferred the creative side and, in fact, his successes were as a writer. He won a Writers’ Guild award and an Emmy for his script, for television, called Tribes, which he also produced. The story of a hippie drafted into the Marine Corps and the changes he effected around him, it was produced as a Movie of the Week, John remembers, and was the first television movie released theatrically around the country.

In ’73 John dropped out and went to India and Nepal, “for the drugs and the meditation.” He heard in Kathmandu about Kopan, “But I was doing too many drugs to want to go up that hill!”

He came back to America and decided he wanted “to help people.” While he was waiting for a response from UNICEF about going to the Sudan he saw an ad in the LA Times for a course organized by American nun Thubten Wongmo, like him a product of Hollywood.

“I met the lamas and they blew my head off. What to say?”

“The new technology that we used on John Wayne’s old movie is a mind blower,” says John. “It allows you to remove and retain exactly what you want on the soundtrack.”

He explains. All the sounds on the recording are reproduced digitally by a computer and each is represented on the screen as a vertical line. By programming the computer to identify each line – this is voice, this is noise – it is possible to completely remove all unwanted noises, leaving a pristine soundtrack. “Hundreds of thousands of cracks, pops and ticks make up these lines,” says John enthusiastically. “The computer goes after each tiny line and finds and antidotes.”

He couldn’t wait to tell his friend, Doren Harper, Los Angeles businessman and fellow student of the lamas. Doren had started making videos of Lama Yeshe’s teachings in 1980. “I was inspired after seeing a little super 8 movie that Carol Witz and Michael Wilder made of Lama. What the heck,” he thought, “I can do it too.”

He borrowed a camera, bulky in those days, and with Lama’s permission began taping the teachings Lama gave at Grizzly Lodge. At the time John was Lama’s attendant. “After the first day we showed Lama Yeshe the result. ‘Well,’ he laughed. ‘This is something! I’ll be able to see myself in my next lifetime!’”

Over the years he and others around the world have taped hundreds of hours of Lama Yeshe’s teachings, and the teachings of Lama Zopa, His Holiness the Dalai Lama and many other great lamas.

Doren was enthusiastic about transforming these videos into top quality recordings. He and John contacted Nick Ribush at Wisdom in Boston and before long the three had a plan for restoring, producing and distributing pristine video recordings of Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s teachings.

Their first project is complete. Hundreds of hours have gone into cleaning up and color enhancing two series of Lama Yeshe’s teachings: Introduction to Tantra, taught by Lama at Grizzly Lodge, Doren’s first attempt, and the last teachings given by Lama at Vajrapani Institute in California, a commentary on lama’s own poetic text, a tsog offering to Vajrasattva.

The technical work is handled by John, the funding comes from Doren and Wisdom, and Nick Ribush organizes the distribution at Wisdom in Boston. Already available is the set of three videos of Vajrasattva Tsog, five hours in all. The two-tape set, Introduction to Tantra, will be available by the summer.

To complete all the teachings of Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa, Doren estimates they need $500,000. But that is their plan. “The quality is exquisite,” says Doren. “It is so worthwhile.”

John keeps in touch with his friends in Hollywood, especially Michael Wayne, “my best friend,” he says, “and a real bodhisattva.” A devout Catholic, Michael gives generously to John’s Buddhist projects and is, in fact, one of Vajrapani Institutes major benefactors.

In 1982 Michael asked John to get him a Buddha statue on one of his visits to the East. “Lama Yeshe chose it for him,” says John. “This absolutely beautiful statue, about nine inches high, adorned with turquoises. And there is sits in Michael’s crystal cabinet with his other special things.”

Perhaps one day the reincarnation of John Wayne will see the statue of Buddha in his previous son’s house, and then through that connection he will meet Lama Yeshe’s reincarnation and together they will watch Lama Yeshe’s videos and John Wayne movies, both transformed by the same computer technology … But that’s another story.