Arnold on the left, Jacob on the right. Second generation Portland artists, the Pander brothers went straight from reading comic books to making them, and from comic books to movies. Arnold and Jacob together wrote Selfless (2009). Jacob directed. This photo, which also features Oregon filmmaker Bill Plympton (second from left), is from the 2009 Sedona Film Festival.

Jacob Pander’s award winning first feature opens at Cinema 21 on Nov. 6.  D. K. Holmes reviews Selfless.

Without having seen Selfless, but having seen the trailer, I have to point out an artistic legacy to which the Pander Brothers appear to conform. Both Ernest Haycox’ Canyon Passage ( 1946), set in Oregon’s frontier past, and  Ursula LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1979), set in Oregon’s near future, had plots which centered around theft – as does the Panders’ new film, which is set in present day. I leave it to the readers of Oregon Movies, A to Z to offer their own reasons why Portland artists obsessively tell and re-tell this story.

I certify Selfless as an Oregon film.

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.