Alternative cinema’s right-wing champion
By Diane Dietz
The Register-Guard


Published: December 30, 2007 06:01AM



He was a spy, a helicopter pilot, a patriot and a right-wing conservative who spent his career screening art films for Eugene’s liberal elite.

Michael Lamont, owner of the Bijou Art Cinemas, was a private man who didn’t exactly hide his views but didn’t exactly trumpet them either, longtime friends and employees say.

“He was someone very far to the right to show left-leaning films. There’s some ambiguity there that I never penetrated,” said Lois Wadsworth, a retired film critic and arts editor.

Lamont died Dec. 22 of Lou Gehrig’s disease, which over a half-dozen years slowly robbed him of his ability to walk, eat, breathe, speak and finally live. He was 62.

Gone is a man of enormous talents and contradictions, say many who knew him.

As a young man growing up in El Paso, Texas, he was a “genius” with a perfect grade record, according to his sister, Michaele Rychetsky, of Redmond.

At age 18, he joined the Air Force, which sent him to Yale to learn Chinese. After that, he was based in Taiwan, where his job was to translate Chinese radio transmissions, Rychetsky said.

After his hitch in the Air Force, he joined the Army because that branch would allow him to do what he really wanted: Fly. He became a helicopter pilot and served for an additional five years.

At age 32, he came to Eugene to study computer science, but got derailed when he took up a hobby of showing Super 8mm films in the “wine loft” of a campus restaurant called Aunt Lucy Devine’s.

It was a short step from there to opening the Bijou in 1980 in the venerable mission-style building at 492 E. 13th Ave. in Eugene, which had served previously as a church and a funeral home.

“Everything was sort of accidental,” he once told a reporter. “Things don’t always go as planned.”

Within a month of opening the Bijou — at age 35 — Lamont abruptly changed his name. From birth until that point, he was Robert McNeely. After, he was Michael Lamont.

Rychetsky said he chose the name “Michael” to honor his mother. That’s what she’d wanted to name him, but somehow he got pinned with his paternal grandfather’s moniker. Apparently, he just liked the sound of Lamont, she said.

“All my kids were used to calling him Uncle Bob,” she said. “It was kind of strange.”

Lamont was an artist who left boxes brimming with notebooks and microcassettes with records of dreams, song lyrics and melodies and ideas for stories and products and projects.

He could instantly play any instrument. He learned accordion as a small child, played baritone horn in high school and piano, guitar and drums as an adult.

He believed “The Grumbles” was the perfect name for a rock band, but he wouldn’t tell anybody lest they steal it, said Jamie Hosler, who worked for Lamont for seven years, lived with him for a year and was his friend until his death.

In 1989, Lamont felt compelled to enlarge images from the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, which he exhibited at a campus coffee shop, Hosler said.

It was hard to tell if he was moved by the bravery of the Chinese, Hosler said. “We had a conversation about it at the time, that basically all art was to pick up girls with.”

Lamont’s Bijou became an essential part of Eugene’s cultural life, especially when the city’s 11 commercial cinemas winnowed to just a few.

“It was an exclusive entree to the kind of film you’d never see in a traditional, commercial movie theater,” said Lloyd Paseman, retired editor and movie critic. “And that was important and it’s still important.”

The Bijou is revered by Eugene’s counterculture for its yeasty, organic popcorn and for showing small, offbeat, classic and foreign films the multiplex theaters often pass by.

Little in the ambience betrayed the owner’s point of view.

Lamont was an early fan of Rush Limbaugh and a latter-day participant on the conservative Lars Larson radio show, according to family and friends.

When protesters thronged in the streets to protest the first Gulf War, Lamont was a counterdemonstrator, sticking up for the first President Bush on the other side of the street.

When President Bill Clinton visited Springfield in 1998, Lamont stood in the streets to protest. Lamont contributed to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group that challenged presidential candidate John Kerry’s war record four years ago.

“He had this particular feeling of right and wrong in politics,” Rychetsky said.

Lamont strongly felt that a flag was the right replacement for the cross on Skinner’s Butte and wrote a moving letter to the editor with his rationale: “We look up at those stars and stripes — Old Glory, a symbol of our revolution, our history, our sacrifices, our mistakes, our triumphs, our future course. How lucky, how very lucky, we are to see it fly.”

Despite his strongly held views, Lamont succeeded for more than quarter century in a left wing business in a liberal town.

“He was a conundrum because he loved art films, and he was this other guy. He tried not to associate his goofy rantings with the Bijou, but he was very politically active,” said Louise Thomas, who knew Lamont for two decades and continues to manage the Bijou.

He’d argue with the Bijou’s fix-it man, Sparks, who had opposing views on many issues, Hosler said, but the repartee was without acrimony.

“Sitting with the two of them at lunch was like sitting with an old married couple. They’d argue back and forth — just arguing for the sake of arguing,” he said.

Ex-employees said Lamont was hard to work for. He could be harsh, and the atmosphere was sometimes tense. And he would engage in arguments with employees.

But he’d also send them e-mails on topics that interested them, saying “you mentioned this the other day,” Holser said. “Even if he was arguing with you it seemed like he was paying attention to what you were talking about,” he said.

Thomas worked for him for years, quit in anger and then went back to work for him again in 2002 after he got sick.

“He was difficult to get along with, but a lot of us never left him. We would get mad and leave and be drawn back,” she said. “He was so unlike anyone else in the world. He was difficult, but also glorious.”

Lamont was a vigorous man who ran, hiked, snowboarded, paraglided and climbed towering rocks. Although he had no children, he was devoted to his nieces and nephews.

Once, while visiting his sister when her children were 3 and 5 years old, he disappeared into the bathroom. He emerged with a pile of suds on his head and on the backs of his hands, which he clapped, and the bubbles flew. “They thought it was the most comical thing,” she said.

Diagnosed at 56 with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a fatal neuromuscular disease, Lamont kept disability at arm’s length as long as he could, Thomas said, accepting a feeding tube and a ventilator to aid his breathing only when absolutely necessary. He lived on a ventilator for five years, Thomas said.

“He just wouldn’t stop,” she said. “His body was so done. It was so tired, but it was his will. He concentrated on not dying for the longest time.”