Lost, but now found!

Rockaday Richie was written and produced by Don Gronquist and directed by George Hood, son of Frank Hood, the founder of the all important Teknifilm Lab.

It is screening on Feb. 6, 7:00 PM at the Whitsell Auditorium, as part of the Essential Northwest series. Admission is pay what you wish.

Both filmmakers will be present.

The 1970’s saw the re-emergence of wholly independent feature filmmaking in the Rose City. Here’s the timeline:

Tom Moyers, Jr. and Will Vinton make The Circle in 1972

Don Gronquist and George Hood make Rockaday Richie and the Queen of the Hop in 1974 (For film scholars: I recommend Tim Smith’s thematically related The Case Of The Kitchen Killer , made in Portland the same year, for a great double feature)

Don Zavin makes Fast Break in 1977

Penny Allen makes Property in 1978, and Paydirt in 1981

Gus Van Sant makes Mala Noche in 1985

And then we were off and running.

Here’s more information, from NW Film Center:

VISITING ARTIST—Made at the same time as Terrence Malick’s BADLANDS, ROCKADAY (nationally released in 1975 as B-titled STARK RAVING MAD) is based on the infamous Starkweather-Fugate murder spree in 1958. Portland actors Russ Fast and Marcie Severson star as the pair who left a disastrous trail of carnage from Nebraska throughout the Midwest as they desperately tried to cover up one killing with another. Written and co-produced (with Tiger Warren) by Don Gronquist and shot by John Mincey, a large cross-section of the Portland film community worked on the film, which was also George Hood’s first feature. “A compelling, if modest, work … neither high-brow nor exploitation. Fast has a brooding presence and is genuinely chilling. … Severson has natural screen charm.”—Variety (88 mins.)

Brian Lindstrom comments “An underrated film! Truly worth seeing. Will make any independent filmmaker proud.”

Although I excuse myself from seeing Rockaday Richie and the Queen of the Hop because of my wimpy dislike of serial murdering, I do claim it as an Oregon film, based on the location shooting and the Oregon citizenship of the artists.

Pittsburgh has George Romero, Baltimore has John Waters, and Boulder has the memory of Stan Brakhage.

Portland has Gus Van Sant, Bill Plympton, Matt Groening, Mike Richardson, Jon Raymond, Aaron Katz, Chel White, Jacob & Arnold Pander, James Westby, Jim Blashfield, Joan Gratz, Joanna Priestley, Matt McCormick, Rose Bond, Vanessa Renwick and Will Vinton.

Ever wonder why?

For cities wishing to replicate Portland’s densely populated cinematic scene, here’s a handy “how to” guide.

1.  Start early.

As soon as people were making films in New York and Fort Lee, they were making them in Portland. Portland’s first film studio, American Lifeograph, opened in 1910. That’s the same year movies came to Hollywood.

2. Have a show business friendly mayor.

During the 16 year tenure of theater-owner-turned-mayor George Baker, downtown Portland was wall to wall theaters. John Gilbert, Clark Gable, William Powell, Edward Everett Horton and Eugene Pallette are some of the actors who jumpstarted their acting careers on the Portland stage, some of them in Baker’s own stock company. It was Baker who renamed Seventh Avenue “Broadway”.

3. Support innovation.

Oregon’s oldest source of print media, The Oregonian, responded to the puzzling new medium of radio by setting up a station right in the Oregonian Tower. Radio later served as an Early Warning System to identify the talent of Portlanders Mel Blanc, Suzanne Burce (renamed Jane Powell by MGM) and Johnnie Ray.

4. Grow your own film processing lab.

After WWII, Portland inventor Frank Hood went to work for a brand new electronics firm named Tektronix. He set up his own home lab to process films he made for them, after losing patience with the delays of sending film to LA. Eventually, he went into business as Teknifilm Lab. For decades, independent filmmaking in Portland was supported by Hood’s lax attitude toward payment schedules.

5. Provide a home for an exiled Hollywood film scholar.

Andries Deinum came to Portland during the blacklist. His vision of film as a mode of social discourse laid the groundwork for PSU’s Center For The Moving Image, housed in Lincoln Hall. Jim Blashfield, Bill Plympton, and Matt Groening were among the faithful attendees of the Center’s influential screening series, run by the Portland State Film Committee.

6. Provide a day job for the guy who wants to mentor the guy who wants to revive the archaic art form of stop motion animation.

Homer Groening led a dual life – ad man by day and experimental filmmaker by night. He had a family, a home, and his own business doing what he loved – and he did it all without leaving Portland. Aspiring filmmaker Will Vinton paid attention, and followed suit. His career, like Groening’s, would encompass both television commercials and art house films, but on a much larger scale.

7. Work with, not against, a pair of cinema addled students who want to start a regional film center.

When the National Endowment for the Arts decided to seed regional filmmaking, they went looking for the right person to submit a grant for a film center in Portland. They were pointed to Brooke Jacobson and Bob Summers, members of the Portland State Film Committee. Brooke and Bob wrote the grant, Portland Art Museum acted as fiscal sponsor, and the Northwest Film Center went into business. This year marks its 40th anniversary.

8. Work with, not against, a visionary film preservationist who wants to create a moving image archive.

Lew Cook was trained as a newsreel photographer by the first generation of Portland filmmakers. His stop motion film, The Little Baker, made circa 1925, proved prophetic when it came to Portland’s future claim to cinema history. He and Thomas Vaughn conceived Oregon Historical Society’s moving image archive, and Cook personally trained the preservationist, Michele Kribs, who currently presides over it.

To re-cap: by the end of the 1970’s, Portland had a film program at Portland State University, a film archive at Oregon Historical Society, and a regional film festival (now the NWFF) located at Portland Art Museum. That nucleus of film creativity on the park blocks was balanced by a film processing lab, an emerging animation studio, and a warehouse waiting to be filled with  filmmakers’ offices over in northwest Portland. No one entity owned the scene – the infrastructure and the support system served all comers.

The following timeline concentrates on factors which contributed to a culture where independent filmmakers supported each other in Portland. It does not address the important role played by Hollywood productions shooting in Oregon. The symbiotic role of Hollywood and the Indies in Portland is embodied in the career of Gus Van Sant who slips and slides with ease between these two worlds.

A timeline:

American Lifeograph founded 1910

Lewis Moomaw makes The Chechacos 1924

Lew Cook makes The Little Baker c1925

PGE makes It Can Be Done c1936

Tektronix founded 1946

Frank Hood founds Teknifilm Lab, early 1950’s

Andries Deinum arrives 1957

Homer Groening starts his own ad agency 1958

Center For The Moving Image founded 1965

Bob Summers and Brooke Jacobson found Northwest Film Center 197o

Tim Smith and Matt Groening make Drugs: Killers or Dillers 1972

Brooke Jacobson founds Northwest Media Project 1974

Will Vinton and Bob Gardiner make Closed Mondays 1974

Don Zavin makes Fast Break 1977

Penny Allen makes Property 1979

Rose Bond makes Gaia’s Dream 1982

Gus Van Sant makes Mala Noche 1985

Bill Plympton makes Your Face 1987

Matt Groening makes The Simpsons 1987

Jim Blashfield makes Leave Me Alone 1988

Joan Gratz makes Mona Lisa Descending A Staircase 1992

Gus Van Sant makes Good Will Hunting 1997.

Miranda July makes The Amateurist 1998

Chris Eyre makes Smoke Signals 1998

Will Vinton makes The PJ’s 1999

Travis Knight makes Coraline 2009

Jon Raymond writes & Neil Kopp produces Meek’s Cutoff 2010, one of five Oregon films at Sundance in 2011.

This post is dedicated to Portland filmmaker/film writer David Walker, who inspired it by raising the question “how rare is regional filmmaking, anyway?”

Glen Moore says about their music, “We’re intensely interested in sound itself, the colors and shapes of sound…and we never know ourselves how we’re going to get from one piece to another…what could be a quick little element one night could be drawn out, extended and thoroughly explored another.” Ralph Towner explains, “My notion of a song, including the improvisation on that song, is that from the first sound you establish a character, a sense of motion; then you are committed to develop a history, a miniature lifetime that is a faithful development of the original atmosphere.” From the OREGON website.

I first saw OREGON at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in the fall of 1973. They were performing outdoors, in the sculpture garden. I was newly on the East Coast, and a friend had taken me to see them because they were cool, not because their name was the same as that of my home state. In fact, she took pains to tell me, OREGON was a New York band.

I accepted this information. It wasn’t true. Ralph Towner and Glen Moore began playing together in Eugene, in the early 60’s, when both were students at the U of O. It was the sole non-Oregonian in the group, Paul McCandless, who suggested they call their trio OREGON. Together they have been nominated for seven Grammys, and continue to tour the globe.

OREGON entered film history  when it supplied original music for Fast Break, Don Zavin’s 1977 documentary about the Portland Trailblazers’ championship season. The world’s only sports film with a jazz soundtrack plays at the Clinton Street Theater, Oct. 24 – 29.

Or is it a jazz film which appropriates the improvisational sport of basketball for visuals? Come see for yourself.

After two restless years in Los Angeles, he decided his home state would be a more fertile place to write and develop his projects.  From an office in Northwest Portland and a beach house in Rockaway, in 1976, he conceived and produced a 13-part instructional series for the North American Soccer League, SOCCER FOR EVERYONE, which was aired by OPB public teleivison and nationally by its affiliates.

A lifelong basketball fan, he decided that same year to parlay his experitise as a sports producer into a new project which would tap into Portland’s affinity for its up and coming NBA basketball team, the Portland Trailblazers.  Assembling a crew of some of Portland’s leading freelancers (including cinematographer Mike McLeod, sound engineer Rick Johnson and producer Reagan Ramsey), he secured the  permission of Harry Glickman’s young club to follow the players and coaches for the entire season, both on the court and off.  Would the team make it to the championships?  Financial backers were willing to gamble with Zavin that it would, and a film known as FAST BREAK was born.

Superstar and counterculture figure Bill Walton quickly emerged as the film’s main character, both for his ethic as a player and excellence at the hoop, providing Zavin, who acted as writer/producer/editor, with a thread around which to wrap the season story.  Hours and hours of footage accumulated as the team stayed in the running and prospect of a World Championship rocketed toward reality.  Committed once again to resisting a narrator-driven approach, Zavin added devices to propel and flesh out the narrative:  the parallel story of local writer Larry Colton’s attempt at writing a book about the team, Walton on a bicycle odyssey along Highway 101 on the Oregon Coast and teaching basketball to kids on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation, and finally, rhythmic original music by the local progressive jazz group, Oregon.

Somewhere between being an observation, meditation and celebration, the two-hour long FAST BREAK premiered at the Fox Theatre in 1978 and to audiences of the 6th Northwest Film & Video Festival later that same year.  The hope that the film would have a major commercial release was subsequently thwarted by Walton’s rupture from the team and the negative public sentiment which ensued.  Attempts at distribution were abandoned.  The film and its hundreds of hours of outtakes are now housed in the Don Zavin Collection of the Oregon Historical Society Moving Image Archives waiting restoration and preservation.

In the 1980’s Zavin went on to found “The Electric Picture,” a Portland-based production company, which created industrial, promotional and training films for such clients as the Bonneville Power Administration, Oregon Associated Industries, various Portland hospitals, and the Lions Sight and Hearing Foundation.  He also worked on several Oregon-produced theatrical feature films including ST. HELENS, starring Art Carney; O’HARA’S WIFE, starring Ed Asner; SHADOWPLAY, directed by Susan Shadburne; Sam Peckinpah’s THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND; and Don Gronquist’s THE DEVIL’S KEEP.  In addition to his filmmaking career, he also taught video production and editing at the Northwest Film Center for nearly twenty years.

Thank you to Ellen Thomas, Oregon Movies A to Z’s first guest blogger, for this biography of her late husband.

In Susan Shadburne’s Shadow Play, a blocked writer seeks sanctuary in an unlikely place – the house where years before she had become a bride and a widow on the same night. Rarely are the creative travails of being a artist depicted so accurately — at one point Dee Wallace Stone is found unconscious on the floor next to her typewriter, covered with blood —  so this is the film to see if you want to be talked out of the sudden impulse you had this morning to write the Great American Novel.

Cloris Leachman appears as the clueless mother-in-law, who just wants to help.

The credits of Shadow Play read like a Who’s Who of Portland film.

Don Zavin……Production manager

George Hood…Assistant editor

Tim Smith….Dialogue editor

Brian Lindstrom…..Production assistant/Assistant editor

Jacob Pander…..Assistant editor

Sue Arbuthnot……..Apprentice editor

Kelley Baker.……Sound effects editor

Marilyn Zornado…..Titles

Gus Van Sant……Slate

Also in the credits:

Walter Murch, who had recently worked with Will Vinton Studios to make Return To Oz, is listed as Special Creative Consultant.

This documentary of the Portland Trailblazers’ championship year will screen at the Clinton Street Theater Oct. 24-29. Matt Love writes about Fast Break , made by late Portland filmmaker Don Zavin, in his On Oregon blog at www.powells.com.

Fast Break belongs to the “lost to popular consumption” sub category of lost films. This screening testifies that at least one print of Fast Break survives.

I hereby claim Fast Break as an Oregon film, qualifying under the old definition (shot in Oregon) and the new (Don Zavin, Oregon director).