Michel Gondry arrives in Portland to introduce his new documentary The Thorn in the Heart (Hollywood Theater, May 28 & 29), and to answer the question  ”Are Oregonians Secretly French?”

Richard Beer, director of Film Action which runs the Hollywood Theater, reminds Gondry fans:

Tickets are still available for our special Michel Gondry appearance this Saturday night.

Gondry, the director of such cult hits as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Science of Sleepand Be Kind, Rewind will be in Portland to do a q&a after the 7:30pm screening of his new film THE THORN IN THE HEART.

Tickets are also available for the 9:45pm show which Gondry will introduce only. He will be also signing merchandise between shows.

About the question he will address: I began suspecting  Oregon artists Marne Lucas and Bruce Conkle of being secretly French when they invented Eco Baroque.

Here’s more reasons to entertain a theory that Oregon has a 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?

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. The 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.

That’s how French Oregon is. The first ever Palme d’Or in the history of the world  (as adjudged in 2003) would have gone to a film based on work by an Oregon author.

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.

Michel, your move.

Walt Curtis, in a scene from Penny Allen’s Paydirt (1981). Cinematography by Eric Edwards.

Portland’s unofficial street poet laureate, Walt Curtis, did not confine himself to the printed page. Here’s a quick guide to his film career.

Number of times Walt appears as himself in a film: 3

Number of times Walt plays a character named “Walt” in a film:  2

Number of Oscar nominated filmmakers who have put Walt in their films: 2

===============================================

Walt appears as himself in Bill Bowling’s American Ferris Wheel (1970)

Walt appears as a character based on himself in Penny Allen’s Property (1979)

Walt appears as the character based on himself  in Penny Allen’s Paydirt (1981)

Walt appears as George in Gus Van Sant’s Mala Noche (1985)

Tim Streeter appears as Walt in Gus Van Sant’s Mala Noche (1985)

Walt Curtis appears as himself in Bill Plympton’s Peckerneck Poet (1997)

Walt Curtis appears as himself in Sabrina Guitart’s Salmon Poet (2009)

Here’s information on how to contribute to the efforts to help Walt recover from losses sustained in the fire which destroyed Great Northwest Bookstore.

Penny Allen’s award winning film closely documents her encounter with an American soldier on his way home from Iraq. Sitting next to her on a plane, he struck up a revealing, anguished conversation that she turned into The Soldier’s Tale.

Allen is a seminal figure in Portland film history – her first film, Property, gave two recent art school graduates named Gus Van Sant and Eric Edwards their first professional exposure to low budget, entirely independent filmmaking.

Allen worked again with Edwards on The Soldier’s Tale. Catch it on the big screen if you go to Paris this spring. Or buy the DVD straight from Allen.

……

Until Penny Allen.

Working with a micro budget, Penny Allen used CETA (Concentrated Employment Training Assistance, a federal job program) funding to employ first time cinematographer Eric Edwards and first time sound man Gus Van Sant on her first feature, Property. Allen was not Portland’s first independent filmmaker, but she is the first to have launched Hollywood careers for two of her crew.

Allen continued her collaboration with Eric Edwards on Paydirt.

Here’s a description from the NW Film Center’s website:

PAYDIRT
US 1981

Portland filmmaker Penny Allen’s second feature, like PROPERTY, her first, is a time capsule of the Northwest. Set in the lush hills of Newberg, PAYDIRT tells the story of Nancy (Lola Desmond), the great-granddaughter of an Oregon pioneer, who reclaims the family land to start a vineyard and winery. The dirty little secret is that her back-to-the-land fantasy is only possible if she grows a crop that actually generates cash: marijuana. When local thugs show up to steal the sinsemilla, Nancy and her friends turn to their fellow vintners for help (Eyrie winemaker David Lett has a cameo), but in the end only old-fashioned self-reliance will protect the fruits of their labor. Allen’s modern urban-vs.-rural “Western,” strikingly shot by cinematographer Eric Edwards, is “a down-to-earth morality tale…full of looming ironies, crisp wit and poignant humor.”—United States Film Festival (the precursor to Sundance). (90 min)

Penny Allen came to film via theater. All three of her films (Property, Paydirt and The Soldier’s Tale) are personal expressions of social and political engagement.

Allen is also the author of Geography of Saints: A Memoir and editor of Metaphors for Change: Partnerships, Tools and Civic Action for Sustainability.

In the above photo, Allen examines her exhibit War Is Hell, at the Mark Woolley Gallery in Portland. Allen currently lives and works in Paris.

Here’s an excerpt from Property, her first film.

Click here to view the embedded video.

]]> http://www.talltalestruetales.com/2009/03/penny-allenoregon-filmmaker/feed/ 1 http://www.talltalestruetales.com/2009/03/corky-hubbert/ http://www.talltalestruetales.com/2009/03/corky-hubbert/#comments Fri, 13 Mar 2009 06:35:48 +0000 Anne Richardson http://mufilmfest.episodecreative.com/?p=942

Penny Allen, directing Lola Desmond and Cork Hubbert (born Carl Hubbert, in Pendleton) in Property.

Penny Allen wrote the following appreciation of Cork Hubbert after his death, in  2003.

Corky Hubbert
born Carl Hubbert
later known in L.A. as Cork Hubbert

Part One: Mirage

The show called Mirage was a biting musical, created and performed mostly at the Euphoria tavern during Corky’s early period, in 1974, when he was still living in Portland and was still known as Corky. I found Corky doing his own show, The Lola Desmond Story and recruited both him and Lola Desmond (a totally made-up name) for a new show. Mirage, amazingly enough, was a raucous singing satire of the Middle-East morass, with Egypt, Syria, Israel and Palestine duking it out. Inspired primarily by the Yom Kippur war beginning in October, 1973, Mirage put the leaders of numerous countries on trial and on stage with huge nametags on their fronts so the audience would know who they were.

The fact that very little has changed in Middle-Eastern politics since we wrote that show 30 years ago is not a promising thought–except that now, the terrorism on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides is more frequent and more efficient, but in Mirage, we already had the terrorism central and at least comically efficient, so we must have seen the future coming even then. The one thing that happened in our show that hasn’t happened in reality, or at least not yet, as I write this on October 6, 2003, was that in Mirage, a belly-dancing Israeli woman spy assassinated Arafat in his tent. Plot-wise, in Mirage, this seemed like the way to make the whole situation blow, which it did.

The fact that we succeeded in writing a truly funny show about such a subject was because of Corky Hubbert’s comic brilliance, exquisite sense of improvisation, capacity to imitate the famous, and unsurpassed adrenaline. We would identify a leader’s weakness, or tics, or the absurdity of his or her (Golda Meir) political stance, and Corky would fly with it. He had an ability to seize upon raw material and then synthesize seemingly everything he ever knew into a memorable comic insight. Corky’s most unforgettable piece in Mirage was when he played a threatening Colonel Muammar Khaddafi, the Libyan president transformed by Corky into a perfect imitation of Bob Dylan, circa Highway 61 Revisited, singing words he wrote himself: “Sleep With One Eye Open, Moshe Dayan,” the song went, and it was a show stopper. In case you’ve forgotten, Moshe Dayan only had one eye. The other was covered with a patch.

I never heard of anyone doing another show like Mirage until 1999, when some satirical group did a show in Cairo. I read about it in an article in the International Herald Tribune, which I sent to Corky. The article made the Cairo show sound like Mirage redux, only this time it was Arabs doing the satirizing, so the focus was no doubt different. As a show though, it was apparently maniacally comic and organized around one very funny, very short comic, just like Mirage. I couldn’t help thinking that some student from Egypt had been in Portland at Portland State University’s Middle-East Studies Center in 1974, and had seen our show. Then he went home and years later did something similar himself.

Bravo, Corky, for being so memorable.

Part Two: The Sisters Hotel

In 1985, Corky came up to Central Oregon for a visit to the ranch outside of Sisters where I was living. He came with Joe and Charlotte Uris, their daughters Rachel and Elisa, and David Horowitz. We went into town for lunch to the Sisters Hotel, which was an authentically old two-story wooden Old Western building with a boardwalk, high ceilings, and many little rooms upstairs along a hallway. Certain people in town enjoyed saying the Hotel used to be a whorehouse, but then people always enjoy saying that about some building in their town. Anyway, Sisters at the time was largely an undeveloped, straight, fundamentalist Christian, sincere, even innocent place.

Our gang sat down at a big table in the middle of the first floor restaurant, and we weren’t being particularly loud or unusual or raucous at all. The teen-age waitress came over to take our order, glanced around at us all open-faced, and then she fixed wide-eyed on Corky.

“Are you guys from the circus?”

The thing is, the waitress had asked her question in all innocence, no wit or irony intended, but Corky in particular was outside her scope, so she’d blurted out her thought. Without excluding the girl, Corky seized upon this choice raw material and riffed uproariously about innocence and the circus and correct behavior and being an outsider, getting funnier and funnier on everybody’s energy pouring in his direction. He had a subject going that he knew a lot about, and he wouldn’t let it go.

Corky grew up in a small Oregon beach town, so he was small-town himself, under the manic urban facade. And a relative, his grandfather I believe, had been a Pentecostal preacher, whose style of delivery Corky would later excel at. These past experiences were rich sources for Corky, who knew how better than anyone to take the small guy’s point of view and, when he was hot, transform it into Everyman’s.

Bravo, Corky, for being so smart.

Part Three: Ciao, Cork

I never saw Corky perform stand-up comedy in L.A. under the name of Cork. He changed his name to Cork when he went to L.A., because there was already another guy in Hollywood named Corky. Anyway, I never saw him doing stand-up comedy at The Comedy Store or other clubs, where he performed in the big-time L.A. comedy scene. People say he was brilliant, with his own great material, a rapid-fire socio-politically astute mind in a manically comic body, just as I will always remember him.

Too bad Corky and I–or Corky and somebody else–too bad we didn’t make that movie together, the one that would make him a star: Corky as a newsstand guy with a secret life, a life full of sexual passion, good works, and a tragedy that, try as he might, he doesn’t succeed in preventing. We threw ideas back and forth about this movie from time to time during the ’90s, when we saw each other in Portland, but we did not even come close to doing it.

So many people felt intense love for that man Corky. Nothing will ever fill up the holes in so many hearts. Nothing. Not even laughing like him. Or maybe laughing like Corky will help for a minute. He could laugh in so many different ways, all of them vaudevillian, most of them pretty villain:

Hehhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Ho, ho, ho, from the stomach.

Heh, heh, heh, heh.

Nicker, nicker, in the bottom of the throat.

Haaaaaaaaaaaaaa, with head thrown back.

Others?

Everybody who knew him, you can remember how he laughed, you can still hear it… pull it up out of your memory… find it… think about it… hear it… and on the count of three, everybody laugh like Corky. One, two, three.

That’s better. Lots. Thanks. Since I got the news of Corky’s death, I’ve been walking around, laughing like him, unconsciously shouting his name out loud. CORKY! CORKY! And I’ve been pumping adrenaline like mad. CORKY, we’re all working together again!

Bravo, Corky, for teaching us so much.

David Horowitz, Eric Edwards, Margorie Sharp, and Lola Desmond on the set of Penny Allen’s Property

Eric Edwards’ career as a cinematographer began with Penny Allen’s first feature here in Portland. Since that time, Edwards has worked with Gus Van Sant (the sound man on Property), David O. Russell, James Mangold, Judd Apatow and many others.

When theater director Penny Allen asked her neighbor, Eric Edwards, to shoot her first feature film, he brought along a friend named Gus Van Sant to do sound.

Poet Walt Curtis (pictured above) was in the cast. Van Sant first read Curtis’ unpublished novella, Mala Noche, as a result of this shoot.

Property is about a group of Portland friends who attempt to pool their financial resources to buy a house together. It gave a start to writer-director Penny Allen, cinematographer Eric Edwards, director Gus Van Sant and actor Cork Hubbert. It built on the careers of writer Walt Curtis (who appears as himself) and painter Henk Pander, who did set design.

I hereby claim Property as an Oregon film.