Paranorman, the second stop motion feature from Laika, will open on August 17, 2012.

I hereby claim Paranorman in advance as an Oregon film, based on the fact that it was made in Oregon, and produced by Travis Knight, the Oregon filmmaker who also serves as one of its lead animators.

Elizabeth Peterson’s students made Lost And Found to document their work cataloging University of Oregon’s 16mm film collection.

I hereby claim Lost And Found as an Oregon film.

The plot of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol contains all the action they cut out of Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy. I am hoping someday someone will restore these two separated spy movies to their previous unity.

Wikipedia explains that the original Mission Impossible team led by Peter Graves on television was “…. mostly part-time operatives, who kept regular day jobs, and many of them were independently wealthy, in large part so that they could not be bribed.” I cannot imagine Ethan Hunt accepting a bribe. His attention span is too short.

But nice to know that independently wealthy people are the conscience of the spy world! If you have any working knowledge of screwball comedy you know they play a similar role that comic universe.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Just so you don’t spend any time being confused, here’s a handy guide to the difference between the IMF and the IMF.

I hereby claim Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol as an Oregon film on the basis of Oregonian Brad Bird’s contribution as director.

From MOMA:

The Great Northwest
2012. USA. Directed by Matt McCormick. This experimental documentary centers around a re-creation of a 3,200-mile road trip made in 1958 by four Seattle women who documented their journey in an elaborate scrapbook of photos, postcards, and brochures. Fifty years later, Portland artist and filmmaker Matt McCormick found that scrapbook, and set out to follow their route as precisely as possible. Simultaneously observational and voyeuristic, The Great Northwest is a lyrical time capsule that explores how the landscape and roadside culture of the Pacific Northwest has changed over the past half century. 70 min.

I hereby claim The Great Northwest as an Oregon film, based on the Portland citizenship of director Matt McCormick.

Oregon has a film at the Oscars this year.

Documentarian Marshall Curry followed Daniel McGowan from Brooklyn, where he was a graduate student, to Eugene, where he was an environmental activist,  to Illinois, where he is serving time in the Communication Management Unit, aka a highly restrictive federal prison. McGowan is serving a 7 year sentence for two counts of arson and conspiracy, one in Glendale and one in Clatskanie.

If A Tree Falls: A Story Of The Earth Liberation Front first aired on the PBS documentary series P.O.V. It has been nominated for an Academy Award in the category of Best Documentary.

From The Gothamist’s interview with Curry.

There’s some footage that you included in If a Tree Falls from the Warner Creek blockade in the mid-90’s, where activists were attempting to stop logging in a national forest in Oregon. Their encampment looks exactly like Zuccotti Park—the tents, the signs, everything. And it’s destroyed by the police, just like the Zuccotti encampment was. In what ways are eco-terrorism and “economic inequality terrorism,” as the authorities might call it, similar, and in what ways are they different?

I think there are a lot of thematic similarities between what happened in the 90s, in the environmental movement, and what we see now with the Occupy movement. There there are things that I was seeing on television as the Occupy movement was being covered that seem to be almost lifted from the movie. Whether it’s scenes like the one you describe where folks were being evicted from an encampment where they were trying to keep logging trucks from getting into the forest, or whether it was the use of pepper spray by police to go after non-violent protestors.

We saw it in Zuccotti and it’s similar to the WTO protests and a number of other places in the 90s in the film. And what’s been interesting is when the film came out in the theaters this summer, it was a couple of months before the Occupy movement had started, and a lot of people kind of saw protest movements in the United States as a quaint historical event. There was no discussion of a current protest movement about to happen. And as soon as it happened it really seemed to follow the playbook, and I feel like the film could be a cautionary tale both for activists to consider the types of tactics that they’re engaging in, and also for law enforcement to think about how they’re reacting to activists because I think there are some responses to activism that radicalize people and other responses that bring people into the democratic argument.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is Curry’s second Academy Award nomination. His first was in 2005 for Street Fight, a profile of a mayoral race in Newark, NJ.

Curry was a Comparative Religion major at Swarthmore. Just to show you what it takes to become an Oscar nominated filmmaker.

If A Tree Falls is distributed by Oscilloscope Pictures, which also distributes Meek’s Cutoff, Wendy and Lucy and Howl.

I hereby claim If A Tree Falls: A Story Of The Earth Liberation Front as an Oregon film, on the basis of location shooting, and on the basis of the inspiration provided by Oregon forests, which impelled McGowan to take the journey Curry documented.

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If A Tree Falls is an Oregon film by virtue of subject matter and location.

For Oscar nominated films which have Oregon directors and/or are based on work by Oregon authors: See this Handy Guide

For Oscar nominated animation by Oregon artists, including three Oscar winning Oregonians: See this Handy Guide

Barbershop Punk introduces us to Robb Topolski, the Hillsboro barbershop quartet enthusiast who proved, in 2007, that his ISP, Comcast, was using DPI to block peer-to-peer uploads, a discovery which resulted in an FCC order to end the practice.

The New York Times wrote about Barbershop Punk:

The film follows Mr. Topolski’s case to Washington, offering familiar but vivid glimpses into Beltway mores. (Ostensible civil servants, manipulated by lobbyists, often have greater loyalties to big-pocketed conglomerates than to the average citizen? Shocking.) But it’s noteworthy when nemeses like the Christian Coalition and the group Naral Pro-Choice America are on the same side of the Net-neutrality fence. The “punk” in the title refers to defiance and freethinkers like Janeane Garofalo and Henry Rollins, who provide eloquent digressions about the electronic dissemination and stifling of information and historical efforts to control such delivery systems.

How did filmmakers Georgia Sugimura Archer and Kristin Armfield fund Barbershop Punk? Kickstarter, naturally. Bet you didn’t know that you can use Kickstarter even if your executive producer is Anthony Dominici.

Ed. Note: the filmmakers politely corrected me. They used Kickstarter to underwrite a screening of the finished film, not to pay for production.

I hereby claim Barbershop Punk as an Oregon film on the basis of the Oregonian who inspired it.

Letters from the Big Man belongs to the rarest category of Oregon film – those inspired by a direct contact with the landscape.

From today’s New York Times:

“Letters,” which opens at the IFC Center in Manhattan this Friday, grew out of Mr. Munch’s desire to make a movie in the Klamath-Siskiyou eco-region of southwestern Oregon.

They have to specify this, or  you might be led to believe that Mr. Munch’s desire was to make a movie starring the children of movie stars. Letters features a leading performance from the daughter of Jill Clayburgh, Lilly Rabe, with a supporting performance from the daughter of Brad Dourif, Fiona Dourif.

There is a club in Hollywood of young actresses with pedigrees in the business who cut their teeth at the beginning of their careers by appearing in Oregon films. Angelina Jolie Voigt appeared in two, Without Evidence (1995) and Foxfire (1996). Zoe Kazan appeared in Meek’s Cutoff (2010). Lilly and Fiona, no dopes, are following suit.

I remember seeing Jill Clayburgh once in New York, and reporting the sighting to a friend. “Guess who I saw on Fifth Ave today! Jill Clayburgh, wearing a fur coat!” “Oh,” my friend said, “Jill always wears fur coats. She was wearing them when I met her at Sarah Lawrence 20 years ago, before she was famous.”

The second time I saw Jill Clayburgh she wasn’t wearing a fur coat.  She was appearing with Frank Langella and Raul Julia in Private Lives. Frank and Raul went up on their lines and burst out laughing. Everyone laughed along with them except Jill, who was visibly furious. She was in an evening gown, and you could see her anger, even though her back was to us.

That’s the end of my Jill Clayburgh stories. Back to Letters.

Christopher Munch believes in Sasquatch, but not his acting ability. He tapped Isaac C. Singleton, Jr. to play the Big Guy.

Karen Black also appears, in this her fourth Oregon film. Good call, Christopher!

I have no idea what else Letters from the Big Man contains, but I’m happy to claim it as an Oregon film, based on the location shooting, and the inspiration provided by the legendarily shy Oregon Sasquatch.

James Westby spent 20 days shooting Rid Of Me.

Then, into the cutting room.

Two years later he and his leading lady Katie O’Grady took the Tribecca Film Festival by storm with their comedy of a milquetoast who finally unleashes the power of her sexuality. Rid Of Me stars O’Grady, with support from (wonderful) Orianna Herrman, Storm Large, Art Alexakis, and Teresa Russell.

How do you fund an entirely independent romantic comedy? Here’s one of the ways James Westby did it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

James Westby tapped a wealth of producing talent for Rid Of Me — congratulations to all five of them – Kristin Coleman, Katie O’Grady, Robin Schiff-Coste, Raija Talus, and Westby himself – for creating a film which at least one Hollywood insider sees marked for multiple Oscar nominations.

Rid Of Me opens in theaters November 18, 2011.

I hereby claim Rid Of Me as an Oregon film, based on every qualification you can think of.

Yes, that’s Sallie “Force Of Nature” Ford on the soundtrack!

Don’t know anything about Bucksville, except that it is a live action feature directed by Chel White, and it has been accepted into the 2011 Hampshire Film Festival.

I think toy trains are involved.

I hereby claim Bucksville, sight unseen, as a self described genre bending Oregon drama/thriller, on the basis of the location shooting and the Oregon director, Chel White.

The late Bobby Fischer was a World Chess Champion. Later, he was totally out of his mind.

Widely considered a “chess legend”, at age 13 Fischer won a “brilliancy” that became known as The Game of the Century. Starting at age 14, he played in eight United States Championships, winning each by at least a point. At 15½, he became both the youngest grandmaster and the youngest candidate for the World Championship up until that time. He won the 1963–64 U.S. Championship 11–0, the only perfect score in the history of the tournament. In the early 1970s he became the most dominant player in modern history—winning the 1970 Interzonal by a record 3½-point margin and winning 20 consecutive games, including two unprecedented 6–0 sweeps in the Candidates Matches. According to research by Jeff Sonas, in 1971 Fischer had separated himself from the rest of the world by a larger margin of playing skill than any player since the 1870s.^[3] He became the first official World Chess Federation (Fédération Internationale des Échecs) (FIDE) number one rated chess player in July 1971, and his 54 total months at number one is the .third longest of all time.

As in many entries in Oregon Movies, A to Z, there turns out to be more than one Oregon connection. The primary connection: Bobby Fischer Against The World was the last editing project of Portland born and raised Karen Schmeer.

The second Oregon connection is not to the film so much as to the life of Bobby Fischer. In the mid-1960’s, he joined the Worldwide Church of God, a radio ministry which began in Eugene, Oregon as the brainchild of Garner Ted Armstrong.  (Strange but true: Basil Wolverton was also a member of Worldwide Church Of God.) Fischer left the Worldwide Church Of God in 1972 after Armstrong was accused of sexual misbehavior.

This HBO documentary explores the way things started to really fall apart for Fischer after that.

I hereby claim Bobby Fischer Against The World as a Oregon film, on the basis of the editing contribution made by the late Karen Schmeer.