John Prusak leaves legacy of mentoring generations of Michigan filmmakers

John Prusak’s former students are doing some amazing things in the movie industry. Earlier this month, one of them, Doug Blush, was onstage at the Oscars after the film that he executive-produced, “The Elephant Whisperers,” won for best short documentary.

A busy producer and editor who has been involved with several Academy Award winners (including the 2013 documentary “20 Feet from Stardom”), Blush says Prusak played a big role in his decision to pursue filmmaking.

“He gave me the belief that I could do it, that it wasn’t just a pipe dream, because most kids in Detroit don’t grow up to be filmmakers,” says Blush. “It just set me on the course that got me to where I am now.”

People in and around Detroit and across the nation are pausing to remember Prusak, the 75-year-old cinematographer and educator who died March 15 from severe respiratory distress from COVID-19 and pneumonia after a long fight with Parkinson's disease.

“The Michigan film community lost a giant last night,” posted friend and media producer Kevin Walsh on Facebook after his passing.

Prusak’s credits span dozens of film and video productions, including his role as a cinematographer for Michael Moore's 1989 documentary “Roger & Me.” But his legacy is the generations of student filmmakers who knew him as their teacher and advocate.

If you talk to someone who learned how to use a 16mm camera or do animation through one of his workshops or classes, his impact is clear.

“John treated all his students the same. From his adult students to high school students, we were all treated like future filmmakers. I know my early films were juvenile and silly, but John treated them like they were ‘Citizen Kane,’ ” says Pixar veteran Dan Scanlon via email. The Clawson native directed 2013’s “Monsters University” and 2020’s Oscar-nominated “Onward.”

“He encouraged and championed everyone’s ideas and dreams. That’s what made him a great teacher, collaborator and friend. And he delivered all this positive support with his trademark knowing, optimistic mustached smile.”

Doug Chiang, whose lengthy history with Lucasfilm includes being a production designer for 2016's “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” and for “The Mandalorian” and “Obi-Wan Kenobi” series on Disney+, has credited Prusak with being his early film mentor.

In a 2022 interview that covered growing up in Westland, Michigan, and becoming fascinated in 1977 with the original "Star Wars:" movie, Chiang told Marin magazine, "John showed me proper filmmaking techniques, gave me access to professional equipment, and most importantly, encouraged me to pursue my passion.”

Born in 1947 in Detroit, Prusak grew up looking at the world the way that filmmakers do. After losing his father to an auto accident in 1954, he began helping his mother, who was blind, by describing what was happening around her. As his friend and filmmaking colleague Kathy Vander wrote in an appreciation done for Prusak’s family: “It forced him to be more analytical, descriptive and to present what he saw in a way that was not just his point of view but looking for those things that would interest others.”

Prusak graduated from Henry Ford High School and Northern Michigan University and also earned a master's degree at the University of Michigan. He became a teacher first in Wisconsin and then, starting in the early 1970s, at Wayne-Westland Community Schools, where he went from teaching art at the now-closed Lincoln Elementary to focusing on film at the William D. Ford Career-Technical Center.

“You could always tell when you were in conversation with him, when he was trying to explain a project or something, he was picturing everything he was talking about, he was visualizing as he spoke. … He had an imagination that was just out of sight,” said Greg Baracy, retired superintendent of Wayne-Westland Community Schools who worked with Prusak for years as an assistant principal and then principal of the Ford Career-Tech Center.

According to Baracy, Prusak’s program there drew students from other cities and states. In Scanlon’s case, his mother drove him during his high school years from Clawson to twice-a-week evening workshops at the Ford Career-Tech Center. She would wait around patiently while Scanlon spent three or four hours studying animation.

When Prusak wasn’t teaching, he worked on a variety of documentaries, often about artists, and other film projects. One of them was 1983’s “Hefty’s,” a short narrative film he co-directed and co-wrote about a young man who’s trying to win a coney dog-eating contest. The cast featured future "Spider-Man” director Sam Raimi as Cook No. 2.

Most significantly, Prusak devoted about 50 years to Digital Arts, Film & Television. It's a nonprofit educational group that promotes the creative use of film and electronic media through workshops, conferences and the annual Michigan Student Film Festival, which will hold its 55th edition in June at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

At DAFT, Prusak was a board member and a key force for collaboration in education. “It’s basically in John’s whole spirit that we help each other,” says Walsh, a former high school teacher who is co-director of the student film festival. “There’s only one video teacher every three or four districts, so we all kind of worked in silos trying to develop our own curriculum. John’s whole idea (was) not anything about turf. It’s all about sharing. As a filmmaker, he was excellent. ... But I think his greatest legacy is just the number of educational programs in the state that he directly influenced.”

Prusak always was eager to talk about the the early successes of former students and film festival participants like John Cohen, the producer of animated hits like “The Angry Birds Movie” and “Despicable Me.” In a 2016 Free Press profile of Cohen, who grew up in West Bloomfield, Prusak recalled a film that Cohen made when he was around 10 about a baseball game between nuts and bolts.

"He had a moral to the story, which was if you practice real hard, then you can become perfect," said Prusak. "What struck me about John was that he had ideas that were all very well thought-out and had a beginning and an end, and that’s not always the case with kids that age.”

Earlier this week, Cohen told the Free Press through email that he has “great memories” of Prusak. “Growing up in Michigan, it was rare to encounter someone who worked professionally in film, and I’m very grateful that Mr. Prusak not only took an interest in helping me, but dedicated his career to providing the resources and guidance to several generations of future directors, producers and artists who are working in the entertainment industry today.”

Walsh says Prusak never missed a student film festival until he faced health issues. As tributes have poured in, Walsh says that he’s learning even now how many admirers Prusak had. “I knew his impact as a teacher, but also I couldn’t believe how many people I knew that knew John that I didn’t even realize.”

Prusak is survived by his wife of 37 years, Barbara, and their blended families that include his two sons, her son and daughter and three grandchildren. A celebration of life gathering is expected to take place sometime in the future.

Efforts are underway on the DAFT website (where Prusak is described as a “founding father") to raise money for a scholarship in his memory. It will join the existing John L. Prusak Visionary Award, a $500 prize that goes to the student film festival’s best documentary.

And who’ll be eligible for the new John L. Prusak Memorial Scholarship? Fittingly, a young Detroiter who is pursuing filmmaking.

Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at jhinds@freepress.com.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: John Prusak mentored Michigan moviemakers, Oscar winners