By Daniel Hartill,Staff Writer
The Maine native was the only director in Hollywood history to win four best director’ Oscars.

PORTLAND – Unlike the pretty people on TV, white-knuckling the legs of their gold statuettes, Dan Ford held his Oscars gingerly.

He placed his hand beneath the base of each and carefully pointed to the spot where the older one – the 1935 Academy Award for Best Director – had broken and was repaired.

“Everybody wants to touch them,” said the tall retiree, whose grandfather, John Ford, earned these two Oscars and four more.

If only everyone wanted to know how the statuettes were earned.

Even here in Maine, where Hollywood’s most honored movie director was born and raised, few folks recall his movies.

That may be changing.

On Friday, the Maine Irish Heritage Center plans to launch a yearly film festival aimed at reminding people of the late Mainer’s role in movie history.

The first John Ford Film Festival will feature talks, screenings and presentations by film historians and Dan Ford, who also wrote a biography of his grandfather.

“He represented the better parts of who we are as people and as a nation,” Dan Ford said. He told stories about honor, struggles and lost causes.

Ford was the man behind such film classics as “Stagecoach,” “The Quiet Man,” “The Searchers,” “The Grapes of Wrath” and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”

Their images are iconic. And he shaped the movies for generations of filmmakers.

Orson Welles studied “Stagecoach” over and over before he made “Citizen Kane,” saying later that he’d studied “the masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford and John Ford.”

Contemporaries Frank Capra and Howard Hawks were friends and admirers.

A generation later, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese both talk of their love of his films, particularly “The Searchers.”

In 1971, Peter Bogdanovich made a documentary about Ford, who died in 1973, a few months after being awarded the American Film Institute’s first Life Achievement Award.

Filmmakers still remember him.

In recent films, “Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones” and “Kill Bill Volume II,” directors George Lucas and Quentin Tarantino each gave nods to Ford.

Filmmakers always will, said Howard Vandersea, a retired instructor from Bowdoin College who lectures about Ford.

People here ought to know the movie director in the same way that they know poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, painter Andrew Wyeth or author Stephen King, Vandersea said.

He was that good.

“He was a Mainer,” Vandersea said. “He brought his Maine values to his films.”

He always had that connection, said Dan Ford.

Born in Cape Elizabeth, John Ford moved to Portland as a boy.

His father ran a bar near Gorham’s Corner.

The Maine Irish Heritage Center is based at the former St. Dominic’s Church in Portland’s West End. Ford was an altar boy there.

When kids or young adults visit, it’s still a tough association to make, said John O’Dea, the center’s executive director.

When a recent tour came through, O’Dea asked a group of a dozen kids if any had seen a movie with John Wayne.

One raised a hand.

“Bruce Willis is an old man to kids today,” O’Dea said.

Former Portland Mayor Jack Dawson, a Ford fan who has helped organize past events, said events like this weekend’s festival won’t change the kids.

It might change the baby boomers, though.

“You’ll never get everybody,” Dawson said. But there needs to be a “build-it-and-they-will-come mentality.”

If they continue, events such as the festival will teach people about cinema and create new fans.

Ford was the best, Dawson said.

“He just knew people,” his grandson said. “He knew what was right and authentic. And he could show it to you.”