Oregon Movies, A to Z

Christopher Walken, in interview about his days attending the Professional Children’s School in New York.

“It was a great place. It was like 95 percent girls…beautiful girls. They were all models and stuff. And the other boys were usually strange — what you might call ’scientific types.’ They played the violin and the cello…and I was silly and frivolous. Those were good days. What do you call them? Halcyon days? Salad days? It was like that movie where the guy gets stranded on a planet of women.”

In Roseland, Christopher Walken puts his early dance training to work, playing a gigolo stranded in a ballroom of women. Roseland is a film about dying – disguised as a film about dancing. James Ivory directed a screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who herself had only recently become a (part time) New Yorker.

Watch this film to see Christopher Walken before he became enshrouded in mannerisms. He won an Oscar the following year for The Deer Hunter.

Yes, that’s Geraldine Chaplin “dancing with the stars”, above.

Strange but true: Bill Foster tells me that Roseland was made with financial backing from Portland, Oregon investors.

I hereby claim Roseland, shot entirely on location in New York City, as an Oregon film, on the basis of the status of the director as an Oregonian.