P Adams Sitney was studying at Yale, I think, when he came. I was running... when I met him first, I was running the Charles Theatre. That was '61 and I think that's when I met him for the first time. He was already publishing Film Wise, very irregular publication, each issue was devoted to a different film-maker. He had already published, I think, one on my... Willard Maas and Maria Meken and then he was preparing one on Maya Deren, that's when I met him.
He was 17, I think, or 18. He was an amazingly bright young person. Actually, when we went in December '64 during the... in Knokke-Le-Zoute in Belgium, we went together, we took some films including Flaming Creatures and Barbara Rubin came with us to the Experimental Film Festival, what it was called, and of course it became a big scandal, they refused to show the film. I resigned from the jury and we tried to do everything to screen the film, but it was P Adams Sitney who made the sort of defending statements on the film and later Jacques Ledoux who was the head of the Cinémathèque royale de Belgique, said, 'Yes, we had many discoveries during these festival, Flaming Creatures and other, but the main discovery was P Adams Sitney'. And he was only like 19, that's all, around that time and they were all amazed. In any case, I invited him immediately to join me to help me on the Film Culture magazine and we have... and he continued, of course, exploring that direct concentrating on the avant-garde film and publishing books on it and he's now at the University of Princeton, teaching film and literature. Amazingly bright person and knowledgeable in cinema and literature and one of my oldest friends.