I learned about Oregon author Don Carpenter (1931 – 1995, Portland)  from reading about his friendship with Oregon author Richard Brautigan (1935 – 1984, Eugene).

Don Carpenter’s primary vocation was writing fiction. In 1973, he wrote and co-produced Payday, starring Rip Torn.

From Powells Books Blog

Carpenter wrote his Hollywood novels from 1975 to 1981, which is to say the years from the peak of the renaissance in American movies that began in the early ’70s to the year after the debacle that was Heaven’s Gate heralded the death of the personal studio movie. To read these books now is to enter a lost world, the brief period of New Hollywood glamour in which old-fashioned deal-making could result in new kinds of movies that were nonetheless able to find large audiences. The movies were often open-ended, not rounded off in the way that years of classical Hollywood filmmaking had trained viewers to expect. That openness could be attributed to the new movie audience’s hunger for less pat conclusions, or it could be an easy reflection of the aimlessness people felt after the assassinations, after Vietnam, after Watergate.

From an interview with Carpenter on www.doncarpenterpage.com:

The fact is I like to spend an enormous amount of time alone. I have since I was a little tiny kid. And writing is one of the things you can do when you’re alone. It had been made clear to me as a child that I would never be able to get along in any kind of social situation as a functional member of any kind of team. I knew that if I was going to make any kind of living, it was going to have to be on my own hook, where other people’s presence and demands and needs and interests would not affect it. and, of course, the arts immediately pop into mind, because that’s exactly what they are. They are the way that private individuals can relate to and belong to society without too much pressure.

It’s hard to call Payday a forgotten gem, because nobody saw it in the first place. But it stands with works like Fat City and Two-Lane Blacktop in depicting a seamy underbelly of America that most of us wouldn’t care to know about or see. It’s one of the most effective, searing dramas of the 1970s. Paul Mavis

I have not seen the infamously dark Payday, a film Kim Morgan calls “brilliantly brave”.

If you are ready to despise Rip Torn, and the human race in general, this is the film to see. Elizabeth Spiridakis, a big fan, gives you some reasons why you should.

I hereby claim it as an Oregon film based on the contributions of novelist Don Carpenter who, besides being a Wilson High School and PSU graduate, was the screenwriter-producer of Payday.

How could it be, you ask, that Oregon contributed literary hippie heavyweights Ken Kesey and Richard Brautigan to American counterculture, and yet we had no musicians present at Woodstock?

The answer is that didn’t happen. Of course there was an Oregonian on that stage. Just because Tim Hardin’s performance did not make it into Michael Wadleigh’s 1970 documentary Woodstock , doesn’t mean he wasn’t there.

See for yourself in Woodstock: The Lost Performances.

Tim Hardin (1941 – 1980) was born and raised in Eugene. He was most famous for writing “If I Were A Carpenter”, the song he performed on August 15, 1969, on the fields of Max Yasgur’s upstate New York farm, to an audience of  ”half a million strong”.

I hereby claim Woodstock: The Lost Performances as an Oregon film on the basis of singer-songwriter Tim Hardin’s performance, documented in that film.

“Perhaps it is the climate, and then again, perhaps it is the illustrious example of the late Homer Davenport, but climate or whatever, the soil of Oregon seems to be prolific of cartoonists.”

The Oregonian, in 1914.

1. Homer Calvin Davenport (1867 – 1912) was the son of a well educated, politically progressive Oregon Trail pioneer. Brought up on a farm in Silverton, Homer became, after a series of vocational false starts, the most highly paid newspaper cartoonist in the world. His political cartoons, drawn for Hearst newspapers, were so influential legislation was introduced in New York State to outlaw them. As one of the country’s first media superstars, Homer Davenport was wealthy, powerful, well connected, and homesick. He dreamed of leaving New Jersey to return to Oregon, but his wife would not hear of it. Born in the Waldo Hills. Self taught.

2. Carl Barks (1901 – 2000) was the creator of Uncle Scrooge McDuck, and the writer-artist auteur behind Disney’s Duckburg comic books. Revered for his story sense and superior draftsmanship, he has been claimed as an inspiration by figures as diverse as R. Crumb and Steven Spielberg. Barks was chosen as one of three figures to inaugurate the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall Of Fame in 1987.  Born and raised on an isolated ranch in Merrill. Self taught.

3. Basil Wolverton (1909 – 1978) was the first Pacific Northwest cartoonist to conduct his entire career by mail, without leaving the Portland area. Enormously influential, his innovative “spaghetti and meatballs” style challenged the boundaries of good taste and changed the face of American comics. Robert Crumb’s recently published Book Of Genesis is a tribute to Wolverton, while Jerry De Fuccio of Mad Magazine thought the comics industry version of the Oscar should be called “The Basil”.  Born in Central Point. Self taught.

4. Born in Oregon City in 1946, Bill Plympton worked as an illustrator and syndicated cartoonist in New York for 15 years before switching to animation. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Variety, Rolling Stone, Glamour and National Lampoon. Bill Plympton is the only filmmaker alive who hand draws feature length films. He has drawn six of them, and is a two time Oscar nominee. Matt Groening, for one, believes “Bill Plympton is God”.

5. Born in Portland in 1951, John Callahan began cartooning in the late 70‘s, after a car accident confined him to a wheelchair. He brought a portfolio of cartoons to a PSU class taught by Bill Plympton, and the rest is history. His syndicated cartoons appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Daily News, The London Observer, the Los Angles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Harpers, the Utne Reader, Willamette Week and 50 other publications. Two animated television series, Quads and Pelswick, were based on his work. He died in 2010, of complications related to his quadriplegia.

6. Born in Portland in 1954, Matt Groening is the creative force behind  the longest running scripted show in television history. The Simpsons has won 27 Emmy Awards, 30 Annie Awards and a Peabody Award. He is the third Oregonian to have a star on Hollywood Boulevard, after Jane Powell and Mel Blanc. Throughout all this, Groening has remained active as a cartoonist, publishing his syndicated strip, Life In Hell, every week since 1977. He cheerfully admits “Cartooning is for people who can’t quite draw and can’t quite write. You combine the two half-talents and come up with a career.”

7. Born in Portland in 1959, David Chelsea was selling cartoons before he was in high school. His work appears in hundreds of publications including the New York Times (where he illustrated the Modern Love column), The Wall Street Journal, The New York Press, Seattle Weekly, Chicago Tribune, Reader’s Digest, Boston Phoenix and Portland Monthly. For years, the New York Observer carried David’s celebrity caricatures on the front page.

8. Born in 1960 in St. Paul, Minnesota, Jack Ohman moved to Portland in 1983 to begin working as a cartoonist for The Oregonian. His cartoons appear in hundreds of newspapers including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The Seattle Times, and The Baltimore Sun. He is the author of ten books, and winner of numerous awards, including the 2009 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, the 2010 Society of Professional Journalists Award and the 2012 Scripps Howard Journalism Award.

9. Born in Malta in 1960, Joe Sacco moved with his family to Beaverton in time to attend Sunset High School. Graduating with a journalism degree from University of Oregon, he found his true calling when he began using the comic strip format to cover the war in Palestine. Internationally renowned, he is the winner of the 1996 American Book Award, 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2001 Eisner Award.

10. Two emerging Oregon cartoonists share the #10 spot.

Shannon Wheeler moved to Portland in 2010. You’ve seen his cartoons in the New Yorker.

Matt Bors received the 2012 Herblock Prize, the first alternative editorial cartoonist to win that honor.

Learn more about Homer Davenport, the first in this illustrious string of Oregon cartooning geniuses, in this month’s issue of the magazine 1859. Or attend your choice of three Homer Davenport events taking place in Portland this month:

Saturday, April 21, 2:35 – 3:45 PM
“Occupy Davenport: Cartoons for the 99%”, panel at Bus Project’s Rebooting Democracy @ Backspace Cafe

Tuesday, April 24,  7:30 PM @ Jack London Bar
“Stumptown Stories: Homer Davenport Covers Dempsey vs Fitzsimmons Prizefight” Speakers: Gus Frederick & Gordon Munro

Saturday, April 28, 11:00 – 11:45 AM
Homer Davenport Presentation & Panel Discussion @ Stumptown Comics Fest

All three events are the brainchildren of Gus Frederick, lead organizer of the Davenport Project. Frederick was inspired by last summer’s Mel Blanc Project, a series of public history/arts education events presented by  Oregon Cartoon Institute.

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This post brought to you by Oregon Cartoon Institute, a colloquium of individuals and organizations interested in raising awareness of Oregon’s rich animation and cartooning history.

An Introduction to the American Underground Film: A Unique, Fully Illustrated Handbook To The Art Of Underground Film And Their Makers covers the work of Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger in Los Angeles; James Broughton, Bruce Conner in San Francisco; Harry Smith, Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol and the Kuchar Brothers in New York, among others.

Its author? Oregonian Sheldon Renan.

Sheldon told me that when he was in high school, there were only three hip people in all Oregon City. He was one, and Walt Curtis was the other. I am dying to know who the third was. Sheldon went off to Yale, Walt to PSU. Both men made foundational contributions to independent filmmaking in Oregon.

Walt did this by writing Mala Noche, the novella which inspired Gus Van Sant’s first feature.

Sheldon did this by writing the first National Endowment for the Arts proposal for a network of regional film centers, launching the process which led to the formation of the Northwest Film Center.

Subtract Gus Van Sant and the NWFC from Portland’s current film scene, and you can see how large the contributions of these two Oregon City beatniks were.

Sheldon Renan’s guide to American underground film was published in 1967. Was it the first such guide? I believe it was.

Sheldon has returned to Oregon and continues to be hopelessly hip. The simplicity of his insight, “Devices can be small on the outside, but large on the inside”, provides the clinching argument for cyber anthropologist Amber Case’s description of Liquid Modernity.

Derroll Adams (born Derroll Lewis Thompson) is Pacific Northwest College of Art’s least well known alumnus.  Born in Portland, Oregon on November 25, 1925, he attended PNCA when it was still known as the Museum Art School.

Before entering art school, Derroll Adams survived life as a logger and as a Navy combat diver. Here’s how/why he changed his name to “Adams”.

In 1930, Elizabeth and her son moved into an apartment house in Portland. One of the tenants there, George Irwin Adams, came to assume the role of Derroll’s missing father. He was a good and generous man – “a true old westerngentleman”, as Derroll often repeated – and whose name he later assumed. His grandfather, “Grandpa Adams”, had fought the Indians and had known Wild Bill Hickock personally. One day, young Derroll asked him if he too had a six gun. Grandpa Adams’s only answer was to half-open the tails of the greatcoat he always wore, allowing Derroll a glimpse of the sawed-off shotgun that was strapped to his leg. Derroll’s Aunt Netty, a former saloon dancer, used to live with one of Kit Carson’s companions and saw the man get shot dead in a duel right in the middle of the street. Derroll could spend literally hours telling such stories.

This timeline locates Adams’ first meeting with Pete Seeger as taking place at Reed in 1946.

Twice married and twice divorced by the age of 26, he left Portland, banjo in hand, for Los Angeles. There he teamed up with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and joined the growing folk song army.

He crossed the Atlantic in 1957, entering film history in 1967 when he was recognized at a party by a longtime fan named Bob Dylan, whose British tour was being documented by D. A. Pennebaker. He never returned to the US, except on musical tour. He died in Belgium in 2000.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In 1967, Oregon musician Derroll Adams attended a party where the guest of honor was a singer from Hibbing, Minnesota. Little did he know he would be making an appearance in the grand daddy of all back stage rock documentaries, Don’t Look Back.

The party was in London and the guest of honor was Bob Dylan.

In the excerpt below, Dylan recognizes Adams (at 3:00 ), and tells him he remembers seeing him perform with his singing partner, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, in New York.

Then Adams introduces Dylan to his British counterpart, the singer-songwriter Donovan, who can be seen behind Dylan, below.

A short list  of the many films which reference/spoof/directly quote Don’t Look Back would include:

This Is Spinal Tap (1984)

Bob Roberts (1992)

Almost Famous (2000) Readers of Oregon Movies, A to Z recognize this as an Oregon film.

The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2005)

I’m Not There (2007) Made by a newly minted Oregonian, Todd Haynes.

Patti Smith: Dream of Life (2008)

Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)

Derroll Adams’ appearance in Don’t Look Back is limited to his one scene at the party, but that is no reason not to see all of D. A. Pennebaker’s wonderful portrait of young Dylan as he makes the transition from acoustic to electric, from folkie to rock star.

I hereby claim Don’t Look Back as an Oregon film on the basis of proto hipster Oregon musician Derroll Adams’ appearance in it.

In the early 1970’s, everyone wanted to live in Eugene. People came from all over the country to wear tie dye, eat granola, and live in wood stove heated homes. Consequently, there was no place to live. Housing is always tight in university towns, but Eugene during this period was like post WWII Moscow.

Why the stampede?

Blame two founding fathers of American counter culture. For people who read Ken Kesey and/or Richard Brautigan, and wanted more, more, more, there was only one thing to do. Move to the place which produced them.

Ken Kesey was born in 1935, moved with his family to Springfield in 1946, and graduated from Springfield High School in 1953. His exact contemporary, Richard Brautigan, was born in 1935, moved with his family to Eugene in 1945,  and graduated from  Eugene High School in 1953.

Kesey was a star athlete who went straight to the University of Oregon after high school.

Brautigan was a misfit loner who could not afford college, instead taking a job in a cannery.

Kesey went to graduate school at Stanford.

Brautigan moved to San Francisco’s North Beach, and joined the Dharma Committee of artists and writers.

Kesey got into print with One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest in 1962.

Brautigan got into print (as a novelist, he had been in print as a poet since 1957) with A Confederate General From Big Sur in 1964.

A documentary about Brautigan is in the works. Periodically, people discuss making films of Brautigan’s novels, as well. Playing himself, he appears in just one film.

Unless you count this one…..

Click here to view the embedded video.

I had no idea that Richard Brautigan was from Eugene! And I am from the generation which was hugely into him, plus I like to think I know a bit about Oregon literary history. I lived in Eugene during the height of his fame, so I am astonished that somehow I never got this particular memo.

If you want to help rectify the situation and bring Brautigan back into the fold of recognized Oregon writers, here’s everything you would like to know about the tall, shy, prolific poet who also wrote novels.

Thanks, and a tip of the hat to Laura Berg, who told me about her own Montana adventures trout fishing with one of Oregon’s most renowned authors.

The only known film footage of Oregon author Richard Brautigan is in this fishing documentary which also features his buddies Thomas McGuane and Jim Harrison.

One missed opportunity to see Brautigan on film happened when fellow beat poet James Broughton shot scenes with him in San Francisco for The Bed (1968), but didn’t use them.

I hereby claim Tarpon as an Oregon film on the basis of the presence within it of Oregon author Richard Brautigan.

Come to an awards ceremony that doesn’t require black tie.

The Teeny Tiny Film Festival in Estacada limits the competition to films under ten minutes. Awards given include Best Comedy, Best Drama, Best Actor, Best Experimental Film, Best Junior Film, People’s Choice, and more.

The winner of Judge’s Choice award takes home the Teeny statue (pictured above).

From the festival website:

The Teeny Tiny Film Festival was founded in 2005 by the Performing Arts Group of Estacada, a group that provides opportunities for all to participate in the performing arts, develop positive life skills and enrich the cultural experience of our community. The TTFF is open to all filmmakers, regardless of experience, age, or background.

I learned from The Oregonian today that Estacada is home to Oscar nominated Lawrence Bennett. Bennett was nominated for his art direction on the all silent, all black and white,  The Artist.

His wife, Nina Bradford, is also a film artist. She is one of the Teeny Tiny Film Festival judges.

Admission is free, and there will be popcorn.