“Actually, I prefer not to have the cooperation of my subjects.” Nigel Nado

In Alexia Anastasio’s new documentary Adventures in Plymptoons, one remark is heard over and over again from the people being interviewed. They marvel that Bill Plympton consistently chooses, as an artist, to reveal all. Guns On the Clackamas is a great example of Bill’s confidence in process, and his thick skin when it comes to criticism. Bill taught himself how to make feature length narrative films. Guns On The Clackamas was part of that journey. Not every art house animator would choose to subject himself/herself to such trials.

Bill’s mock doc about the making of a fictional Western was made in his ancestral backyard. After years of sitting inside drawing frame after frame of films in which you control everything, I can see that going outside to collaborate with friends on a live action film which spoofs the filmmaking process itself would seem irresistible. If you are doing this in the backyard where you grew up playing cowboys and Indians, so much the better.

I am not sure but that Guns On The Clackamas is the first Western written and directed by an Oregonian which was actually shot in Oregon. This credential would be more impressive if Guns wasn’t a spoof.

Guns On The Clackamas was Bill Plympton’s first live action feature. Here’s his description:

Nigel Nado, the notable documentary filmmaker, is trying to make a behind-the-scenes movie about the making of the western “Guns on the Clackamas”. But everything is going wrong. The lead actress has a severe stutter, but since she’s also the Executive Producer’s mistress, when she’s fired, he pulls the plug on the film’s financing. Then, the cast members start dropping like flies, due to accidents on the set and some really bad catering…….

Guns On The Clackamas is not for Bill Plympton beginners. Its not the most important Plympton film to see. It is one of the most peculiar.

I hereby claim Guns On The Clackamas as an Oregon film on the basis of multiple qualifying criteria.

Stephen Herek made this time capsule so that people in the future would be able to see what a fully funded high school music program of the mid to late 20th century looked like. Richard Dreyfuss was Oscar nominated for his performance as Mr. Holland, an aspiring composer who ends up devoting his creative energies to his students.

In real life, Richard Dreyfuss began working as an actor at age 15. I don’t know if he graduated from high school. He attended Beverly Hills High.

Mr. Holland’s Opus is set in a fictional school in an unspecified city in an unspecified state. It was shot in Grant High School in NE Portland.

I can personally testify that the Mr. Holland of Patrick Sheane Duncan’s screenplay was not based on Grant’s own music teacher. Eugene Kaza was not an aspiring composer, and did not lose himself in his devotion to his students. He was exasperated, distant, responsible, and overworked. I am not the only one of his students who thought of him as the only real teacher, the only one who really saw us, in the entire school.

He sent his own children to Catlin Gable.

Grant at the height of the Baby Boom had over 3,000 students. Mr. Kaza would march the band around the neighborhood so we could practice turning corners. Girls were not allowed to wear pants to school. Wearing skirts meant you had to wear stockings. Wearing stockings meant you had to wear some kind of garter belt or girdle. Katie Davenport rose above all that by going barelegged all year.

Rick LeDoux burned a giant peace symbol into the front lawn as an anti-war protest. The English teacher wore a cape. The Geometry teacher looked lonely. The Latin teacher pointed out all the words in our textbook which did not actually exist in Roman times. In PE, we learned how to hurdle, to swim, and to do the polka.

Inexplicably, they left all this out of Mr. Holland’s Opus.

I hereby claim Mr. Holland’s Opus as an Oregon film on the basis of location shooting.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Luke Perry plays real life rodeo champion Lane Frost. Stephen Baldwin plays his best friend.

I have never seen 8 Seconds, but I hereby claim it as an Oregon film on the basis of location shooting in Pendleton.

Vacations can be scary. If you don’t know this, try going on this river raft trip with Meryl Streep.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Other movies to choose from for an Oregon double feature:

Something Wild

The Wild Party

Where The Wild Things Are

A Wild American Forest

The Practice of the Wild

Strange but true: cast member John C. Reilly is coming to Portland on May 26, 2012 to perform with John C. Reilly and Friends (with Becky Stark and Tom Brosseau).

I hereby claim The River Wild as an Oregon film on the basis of location shooting on the Rogue River.

When Mel Gibson and Jodie Foster sit down to the climatic card game at the end of Richard Donner’s big budget valentine to the Western, they are aboard a St. Louis river boat moving down the Columbia Gorge (!)

Geographic sleight of hand aside, the greater importance of Maverick to American film history lies in the friendship which Jodie Foster and Mel Gibson began during shooting. In all their scenes, you can see them having a whale of a time.

It was on the basis of this friendship that Jodie Foster cast Mel Gibson in her 2011 film The Beaver.

The Beaver is the genre defying Hollywood art film about a depressed man who speaks through a puppet. It is in every way, shape and form the exact inverse of Maverick.

Jodie Foster had come to Oregon earlier in her career to play opposite Michael Douglas in Napoleon and Samantha. She played a runaway. Michael Douglas played the wise, helpful, John Day sheepherder who counsels her to go home. I doubt he enjoyed it – he looks bored out of his mind in the role. What we do know: he kept developing a literary property his dad gave him, and three years later he won an Oscar for his first film as a producer. Made in Oregon.

Meanwhile, Foster herself became a producer and a director. The Beaver was her third feature film.

In Maverick, Foster plays a gambler. In The Beaver she is the real deal, staking her reputation as a Hollywood insider on an exceptionally risky project. If someone (say, Richard Donner) sat down and spelled out to Foster exactly what kind of film would be most likely to damage her career, he very well could have come up with a description of The Beaver. Choose a screenplay which tackles mental illness. Accept the screenwriter’s goal without modifying his work to be more mainstream. Cast an actor everyone in Hollywood has come to dislike, and do it because you see him as a) great for the role and b) in need of some therapeutic employment. Once the film is made, and everyone is stupefied by it, go on tour with it and maintain an open, non defensive attitude about the choices you made.

High stakes gambling, indeed!

Gibson would understand this, because he himself also produces and directs.

I hereby claim Maverick as an Oregon film on the basis of the location shooting in the magnificent Columbia Gorge.

Based on Sheila Ballantyne’s novel, which was in turn based on her own life, Imaginary Crimes is a coming of age story where the heroine’s job is to protect her little sister from the downside of having a father who is a crook and a mother who is dead.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Because it is based on real life, the compassionate teacher (Vince D’Onofrio) is not a love interest for the young beauty (Fairuza Balk) already overwhelmed with grown up family responsibilities. Harvey Keitel is the father who wants to give his daughters what he can’t afford.

In a comedy, dad’s ineptitude would be the source of the joke. Imaginary Crimes is not a comedy.

Is there a “two sisters must survive” film genre? If so both Imaginary Crimes and Bill Forsythe’s Housekeeping belong to it.

I hereby claim Imaginary Crimes as an Oregon film on the basis of location shooting in Portland.

In the same year Vanessa Renwick made a perfect short film, The Yodeling Lesson (1998), Miranda July made her own perfect short film The Amateurist (1998), with Vanessa as her DP.

In the new issue of Plazm, Vanessa tells Nora Robertson that Miranda improvised all her lines as the mysterious Professional who constantly evaluates the equally mysterious caged Amateur.

I have such respect for this work!

From Australian Centre for the Moving Image:

The Amateurist features two figures, both portrayed by the artist, caught in an off-kilter relationship based on a system whose rules, boundaries and ultimate aim remain fascinatingly opaque.

The ‘Watcher’ views the ‘Amateur’ via a video surveillance system, suggesting numbers to her and interpreting the Amateur’s vague gestures and responses with a mixture of pride, concern and condescension. The Watcher considers herself the ultimate professional – telling us she has been engaged in this activity for four and half years – and yet the emotional intensity she has invested in this eerily empty activity is immediately evident.>

What is going on?

Here’s Miranda’s own description of The Amateurist.

I hereby claim The Amateurist as an Oregon film, on the basis of the location shooting, the Portland DP, and the at-the-time Portland filmmaker, Miranda July.

Proof positive that Brad Pitt had to put on his pants one leg at a time, just like any other star-in-the-making.

In The Favor, he plays an artist dumped by a Pearl District gallery owner (Elizabeth McGovern). He is not the star.  He’s not even the man the two leading ladies, Harley Jane Kozak and McGovern, go nuts for.

The theory goes like this: when women start writing, producing and directing in the same proportion as men, we will finally see the way the world looks to them. Freud could be raised from the grave, and taken to the movies to find out “what women want”.

In The Favor, what Kathy (Kozak) wants is for Emily (McGovern), to sleep with Joe (a Neanderthal, not played by Brad Pitt). This is clearly a female fantasy, albeit an anxious, self defeating one. Every once in a while there’s an occasional flash of mordant survivor humor, instantly recognizable to anyone who has been married more than six months.

Not that you should sit through The Favor waiting for that flash.

This is Brad’s second Oregon film, after A River Runs Through It. Fight Club came later. First Oregon film for Bill Pullman. The Zero Effect came later.

I hereby claim The Favor as an Oregon film, based on location shooting.

After Cork Hubbert made his big screen debut in Penny Allen’s Property (1979), he moved to Los Angeles to begin a Hollywood career.

In 1991, he appeared opposite Vanessa Redgrave (looking ALOT like David Bowie in this haircut ) in Simon Callow’s adaptation of Carson McCuller’s Ballad Of The Sad Cafe.

I successfully avoided reading Ballad in high school, and will try my best to avoid seeing Simon Callow’s film, based on what I see in this one clip.

For people who like to keep track of these things: 1991 was a big year for the alumni of Property. Besides Cork Hubbert playing leading man to Vanessa Redgrave, Gus Van Sant (Allen’s sound man) directed Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho using fellow Property alumnus Eric Edwards (Allen’s cinematographer) as his DP.

(Edwards shared the job of cinematography on My Own Private Idaho with another Portland cinematographer, John Campbell.)

Ten years – three careers transformed. Wonderful testimony to Penny Allen’s eye for talent!

Rising above my lack of interest in the Ballad Of The Sad Cafe, I do hereby claim it as an Oregon film, on the basis of the leading performance by Oregonian Cork Hubbert.

Tom Berenger, who appears in Bucksville, stars in this Alan Rudolph film shot in Bend and Portland.

Never heard of it!

Elizabeth Perkins, Anne Archer, Ruby Dee, Ann Magnuson, Kate Capshaw, Annette O’Toole and Neil Young ( Neil Young?) round out the cast.

I hereby claim Love At Large as an Oregon film on the basis of location shooting.