John Busbee at Waterfront
1/1/2025
John Busbee has been covering, creating, managing, promoting and producing the Iowa art scene for more than five decades. He and I both have columns in CITYVIEW and radio shows on KFMG. I thought it was time to finally break bread together and asked him to lunch.
We met at Waterfront Seafood Market Restaurant’s West Des Moines store. Over fried walleye plates and uni (sea urchin eggs) sashimi, we talked about the arts in Iowa over the last half century.
Busbee has been at the core of Iowa arts in Des Moines for such a long time, I can’t remember if he had a life elsewhere before landing here.
“I grew up an army brat. After my parents’ divorce, Mom packed up her four kids in a pickup truck and moved in with her parents on their Henry County Iowa farm. It was a blessing, a true silver lining to a usually dark cloud, as our three-generation, non-traditional family gave me so much. They just said, sure all of you move in.”
How did the farm kid become the arts guy?
“I went to the University of Iowa and met Kimberly, my wife. We were both into musical theater and the creative arts. After college, one of our very first jobs was at Adventureland. The Krantz family hired us to create and perform an original musical show — “How the West Was Won.” We did 111 straight days with 10 shows a day. Music, choreography, production. We did a USO tour of the Caribbean, too. Then the cast wanted to go back to college.
“After that, we did lots of theater at Ingersoll Dinner Theater and Drama Work Shop, etc. One interlude was ‘Shakespeare on the Loose.’ We produced that in Greenwood Park, in an attempt to preserve an endangered Sylvain Theater there. The place was falling in to disrepair.
“Then there was a stint with Living History Farms. We actually produced Shakespeare’s ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ in the Flynn Barn there. We worked with Ames playwright Thomas Kidd on ‘The Bard on Broadway.’ Then he moved to Hawaii.”
How did Busbee branch out from theater?
“I got myself certified as a festival manager. That was useful. One of the next jobs was as manager of the Heartland Brewfest. I did that from 1995 to 1998. Did the first one in a parking lot next to a brewery in Adel. Then we moved it to Valley Junction the next year and then to the Iowa State Fairgrounds. That was in the Varied Industries Building before they enclosed it. A wicked storm blew in and wreaked havoc. The last year we held it on Court Avenue. Stints with nonprofits followed that.”
A major health event changed his life plan before the new millennium 1990s blew in.
“In 1995 I had a triple by-pass surgery at Mercy Hospital. Those doctors are great because I’m still here. At that time, Kimberly and I had a long talk about what I wanted to do when I grew up. I decided that I needed more variety in my life. I dubbed myself Creative Product Developer and determined to get involved in film production. A little writing but mostly in development work, predominantly fundraising.
“I found a project that needed funding to build a monument in Louisa County, to the Littleton Brothers. Those were six brothers from Toolesboro, in Louisa County. They all enlisted and all perished in the Civil War. Their story was largely forgotten but resurrected when a 1912 scrapbook was found. Now their memorial is next to the Toolesboro Mounds, an ancient Indian construction, on the Mississippi River Road.”
Today Busbee is mostly known for his work promoting film-making in Iowa. How did that develop?
“I got a job as Iowa locations manager for ‘The Crazies.’ That was a big budget movie with Timothy Oliphant. They had to begin shooting in Georgia because of Iowa winter weather. I found a location here in Lenox. The town was fabulous. They were so cooperative that the Iowa schedule, the days shooting in Iowa, went from five to 28 days. They were spending half a million dollars a day here.
“Basically, Lenox agreed to turn their main street into a zombie apocalypse. We needed a jail, so the bank closed for a day, and we turned that into a jail. They needed to film a building being burnt down, so we negotiated with a guy who owned an abandoned house, and he agreed to having it burnt down for $3,000. They called that a Volunteer Fire Department exercise. They needed to film a scene with Timothy Oliphant escaping the zombies on an interstate highway. So, the West Des Moines Police, the County Sheriffs office and the Iowa Highway Patrol all helped — stopping cars for a scene to be shot on Highway 5. Local law enforcement loved these jobs.”
How did the Cloris Awards (for theater arts) get started?
“That began with Zach Mannheimer at the Des Moines Social Club. He wanted to call them something else, but when that fell through, John Domini, Michael Morain and I decided to pursue Cloris Leachman. We contacted her through two others, and when I finally called her at a precise time, she answered the phone and simply said, ‘The answer is yes.’
“We brought her to Des Moines to see the awards, and she was a trooper. In a wheelchair, she went from one event to another, at the Capitol, at Roosevelt High School from which she graduated, to the State Historical Building, to the awards.”
There was a ship in Busbee’s background?
“The Freedom Ship was a 14 feet by 10 feet by 7 feet construction that we took to 14 towns in every corner of the state. That was a project. In Keokuk, we heard from people who said that event was the first time the town ever felt truly connected to the rest of Iowa.” n
