I am “not qualified”, in the words of Mr. Stevens, to pass judgement on Remains Of The Day, because, as a WASP, I feel personally responsible for all the emotional and sexual repression which transpires in it. This is my tribe. We came to America for a second chance.

Judge for yourselves whether we deserved one.

Remains Of the Day follows on Merchant Ivory’s successful pairing of  Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson in Howard’s End. Many regard this story of a butler who comes to question the way he has spent his life as the pinnacle of the Merchant Ivory collaborations. I am too deeply sorrowed, and ashamed, by the actions of everyone in it, downstairs and upstairs, to have an opinion one way or the other.

This character study of an English butler was written by Kazuo Ishiguro, from Japan, adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, from Germany, produced by Ismail Merchant, from India, and directed by James Ivory, from Klamath Falls.

It received eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor in a Leading Role, and Best Actress in a Leading Role.

I hereby claim Remains Of The Day as an Oregon film, on the basis of James Ivory’s contribution as director.

Leonard Stone, Oregon’s most successful character actor, was born in Salem in 1923. IMDB clocks him at over 120 television series appearances and 35 feature films. His most famous film role is in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, where he plays Mr. Beauregard, Violet’s father.

Stone’s road to Hollywood, like that of James Ivory, his near contemporary, involved graduate studies interrupted by WWII, and then a long professional apprenticeship in a foreign land.  Stone was a student at the Royal Academy for the Dramatic Arts in London when the war broke out. The Navy cast him as the captain of a minesweeper. After the war, he spent eight years performing ( possibly the role of sailor? ) in an Australian touring company of South Pacific. Then came the Tony nomination in New York. Then came the Hollywood career.

Stone appeared in Dr. Kildare, McHale’s Navy, Rawhide, Perry Mason, Lost In Space, Dragnet, The Partridge Family, Mod Squad, Mannix, Gunsmoke, Sanford and Son and MASH. He appeared in The Bob Newhart Show, Barney Miller, and Quincey. He appeared in Hill Street Blues and LA Law. On and on.

Bottom line: if you’ve ever watched TV, you’ve seen Leonard Stone. If you missed him on TV, and in Willy Wonka, maybe you saw in Soylent Green, or heard in him in American Pop, where he continued Oregon’s long, fine tradition of providing voice artists to the world.

I remember when everyone gave me a hard time about liking Brian DePalma’s films. There’s a similar unanimity to the disgusted reaction I get when I describe James Ivory as Oregon’s most distinguished filmmaker. Everyone knows that Ivory is a featherweight who makes high brow bodice rippers. Everybody knows this because they haven’t seen his films.

People came around about DePalma, and eventually people will get around to seeing all five decades worth of James Ivory films, and then they will come around about him too. In the meantime, its hard out there for an Oregon film historian who is the only person alive to have seen every single frame James Ivory committed to celluloid, and who came out a believer.

Turner Classic Movies is making it easier for the lazy bones Ivory haters to actually check to see if the films Ivory made match up with the low opinion they know they are supposed to have about him.

Broadcast on September 8, 2011 are:

Savages 1973 Made from a screenplay inspired by Luis Bunuel, written by Saturday Night Live writer Michael O’Donoghue, and starring Seventies It Girl Susie Blakeley. Ivory’s weirdest film starts with a croquet ball entering the Stone Age.

Roseland (1977) A film about dying – disguised as a film about dancing. Watch it to see Christopher Walken before he became enshrouded in mannerisms. He plays a gigolo torn between (rich) Joan Copeland and (poor) Geraldine Chaplin. I didn’t like the other two thirds of this tripartitated (I just made that word up)  film, but Walken makes up for it.

The Europeans (1979)  Lee Remick plays a sexual predator outwitted by Puritans. Ivory’s first period film, and he laid down the law “… actresses were required to be tightly laced up into corsets with stays, and were not allowed to surreptitiously put on lipstick or eye shadow”

Quartet (1981) Alan Bates and Maggie Smith squash Isabelle Adjani like a bug. Like a BUG. Not for the faint of heart. Takes place in Jazz Age Paris, although not the one Woody Allen visited via Owen Wilson!

The Bostonians (1984) Vanessa Redgrave places herself between Madeleine Potter and Christopher Reeve.

See these films. While you’re thinking them over, see the rest of the Ivory ouevre – TCM is showing everything – on the following two Thursdays in September.

Gus Van Sant returns to Festival de Cannes, on the evening of Thursday, May 12, to open the “Un Certain Regard” competition with his latest film, Restless.

Shot in Portland, Restless stars Mia Wasikowska and Henry Hopper.

Here’s Gus Van Sant’s history at Cannes:

Gus Van Sant received the Palme d’or in 2003 for Elephant and the 60th anniversary award for Paranoid Park (2007). His first nomination at the Festival de Cannes was in 1995 for To Die For.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I submit the track record Gus Van Sant (Portland), James Ivory (Klamath Falls) and Bill Plympton (Oregon City) have at Cannes as solid proof all Oregonians are secretly French.

Director Jody Mack conceived her 28 minute color xerox animated musical while on a visit to Oregon. It just won the Jury’s Choice First Prize at the Black Maria Film Festival in Jersey City.

I am not going to claim Yard Work Is Hard Work as an Oregon film, although students of Oregon film history will see the influence of Jim Blashfield.

TRUE FILM GEEK ALERT: Devoted scholars of Oregon film history will recall that James Ivory’s dad, inventor Edward Ivory, worked for Thomas Edison, the proprietor of the first Black Maria, the rooftop film studio after which the Black Maria Film Festival was named.

But because Yard Work Is Hard Work was conceptualized in Oregon, I do hereby claim Jody Mack as a lillypadder.

Internationally acclaimed directors are Oregon’s leading cinematic export. Our talent pool in that department – James Ivory, Gus Van Sant, Bill Plympton and Brad Bird – is unparalleled. But the hand painted contact lenses Natalie Portman wears in Black Swan also came from Oregon. Lee Williams has the story.

Parents, next time your children ask you for film school tuition, tell them “Get a job in radio”. Mike Rich’s first screenplay, Finding Forrester, was written while he was working as the director of morning news at KINK in Portland

Here’s Mike at work, before Gus Van Sant decided to gamble on that first screenplay.

Rich first learned to write and to do radio in Enterprise, pop. 1,900, where he grew up. In this interview, he observes “The overall goal of screenwriting is the same as news writing. It’s just done in a different and polar opposite way.” In making this transfer of skills from the newsroom to Hollywood, Rich was entering a tradition pioneered by Ben Hecht.

Here’s the ex-radio journalist, ten years later,  helping to celebrate the career of fellow Oregonian James Ivory at the Oregon Sesquicentennial Film Festival in 2009. This photo, snapped by Shawn Levy using his cell phone, includes (clockwise ) James Ivory, Mike Rich, Bill Plympton, and Gus Van Sant.

Q: What do these four Oregon artists share in common?

A: All four produce their own work. All four choose to hold the reins of their economic destiny in their own hands. Mike Rich began executive producing his own work with his fourth script, The Nativity Story (2006) and continued with Secretariat (2010).

]]> http://www.talltalestruetales.com/2010/10/mike-rich/feed/ 0 http://www.talltalestruetales.com/2010/09/handy-guide-to-oregon-logging-films/ http://www.talltalestruetales.com/2010/09/handy-guide-to-oregon-logging-films/#comments Mon, 13 Sep 2010 23:45:34 +0000 Anne Richardson http://www.talltalestruetales.com/?p=8983

The only known musical version of Livy’s Rape of the Sabine Women was made at MGM in 1954. Seven Brides For Seven Brothers was set in an Oregon logging camp, with Oregonian Jane Powell cast as a lead, but not one inch of it was shot here.

It was only after seeing a number of logging films, and reading about even more than I could see, that I was able to figure out that there is a movie genre dedicated to the lives of lumberjacks. Hollywood’s most famous example is Come and Get It (1936), which has nothing to do with Oregon. But Oregon, with its mighty forests, does have a steady track record with this genre.

The Valley Of The Giants (1919)/Lost film

Rough Romance (1930)/Lost film

Park Avenue Logger (1937)/Lost film

The Forest Rangers (1942)/Lost film

Lumberjack Rabbit (1954) In 3D!

Seven Brides For Seven Brothers (1954)

Sometimes A Great Notion (1971)

The Bed You Sleep In (1993)

Clearcut: The Story of Philomath, Oregon (2006)

If A Tree Falls: A Story Of The Earth Liberation Front (2011)

Oregon’s logging industry produced one best selling journalist, Stewart Holbrook, one recording artist, Buzz Martin, and one literary fraud, Opal Whitely.

In 2009, Oregon Public Broadcasting produced The Logger’s Daughter, based on the real life experiences of Gwen Trice, whose father traveled from the South to work in race segregated Oregon logging camps.

Perhaps the most important contribution Oregon’s logging industry made to the arts is James Ivory, whose father arrived in Klamath Falls from upstate New York (by way of Berkeley, California) to start his own company, Ivory Pine. Ivory recalls accompanying his father on trips to LA where his father negotiated with the movie studios to supply the lumber they used for back lot set construction.

I began suspecting  Oregon artists Marne Lucas and Bruce Conkle of being secretly French when they invented Eco Baroque. But here’s a few reasons to entertain the theory that all Oregon shares their hidden dual identity:

1. Wine

2. Food

3. Movies

4. Mass transit

5. Public spaces (beaches, parks, Pioneer Square)

6. Focus on quality of life (see above)

How French is Oregon?

The first ever Palme d’Or (as adjudged in 2003) went to a film based on work by an Oregon author.

In 1939, a brand new film festival on the French Riviera at Cannes was cancelled due to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. In 2003, Cannes went back and revisited the list of films that would have competed that year. That jury awarded the Palme d’Or to Union Pacific (above), directed by Cecil B. DeMille and based on a novel by Portland author Ernest Haycox.

Currently, four Oregon directors are much beloved in France.

#1: James Ivory (Klamath Falls), 6 nominations for the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Winner of Cannes 45th Anniversary Special Award for Howard’s End(1992).

#2: Gus Van Sant (Portland), 3 nominations for the Palme D’Or at Cannes. Winner forElephant(2003). Winner of the Cannes 60th Anniversary Special Award for Paranoid Park(2007).

#3: Bill Plympton (Oregon City), 2 nominations for the Palme d’Or at Cannes. His latest feature, Idiots and Angels (2009), received theatrical release in France, and was seen all across that country.

#4: Penny Allen (Portland), whose latest film,The Soldier’s Tale (2007), has been seen by more filmgoers in France than America. It was a recent hit at the Nyon Festival Visions du Reel.

Oregon is so French, Bill Plympton says that everyone in France accepts without question the immediate assumption that Pink Martini is a French band.

In 1962, novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a German born British citizen married to a New Dehli architect, hangs out with her three children and American documentary filmmaker, James Ivory.

In 2007, three time Oscar nominee James Ivory escorts two time Oscar winner Ruth Prawer Jhabvala to the Alliance Francaise in New York City. Later that evening, the Alliance presents Ivory with the Trophee des Arts.

Their citation: For more than 40 years, Mr. Ivory at the head of Merchant-Ivory Productions, has created an unparalleled collection of independent films esteemed world wide for their beauty and quality.