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.

Miranda July (born Miranda Jennifer Grossinger) arrived in Portland in 1996. A film school drop out attracted by the Pacific Northwest’s Riot Grrrl scene, she proceeded to create, from the ground up, both her own career and a national support network for other female filmmakers.

I saw Miranda perform Love Diamond, a “live movie” commissioned by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, at Lincoln Center in 1999. The room had maybe twenty people in it. Three years later, I watched her lecture on Nest of Tens to a packed auditorium at the Museum of Modern Art. In 2005, everyone who wasn’t talking about Gus Van Sant’s Last Days was raving about You Me and Everyone We Know, Miranda’s first feature film. Both hit Manhattan at the same time.

It was around this time I began to think that Portlanders underestimated how much Oregon there is in New York.

A classic lillypadder, Miranda July now lives in LA. She has kept her Portland years close to her heart, as you see in the following video, in which she tries to pass on to a group of young Angelenos her love of DIY, postering, and open source everything.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Miranda July directed this Sleater-Kinney music video, starring Carrie Brownstein, Corin Tucker and Janet Weiss, during the earliest chapter of her career. Twelve years later, July’s second feature film, The Future,  is about to premiere at Sundance, while Brownstein is all over the New York Times as the writer-producer-star, with Fred Armisen,  of IFC’s new comedy series, Portlandia.

Good going, Riot Grrrls!

I hereby claim Get Up as an Oregon film, on the basis of location shooting and the Portland citizenship of every single one of the creative principals.

Oregon Movies, A to Z invented the classification “lillypadder” to describe the artists who came to Oregon in pursuit of greatness and left for the same reason. July is a classic lillypadder, a label she shares with actor Eric Bogosian, screenwriter Callie Khouri, and author John Varley, among others.

New Yorker Jim McBride began as an experimental underground filmmaker in the 60’s, and was still experimenting when he came to Oregon to make Glen and Randa in 1971.  In 1983, he  made movie history by talking Richard Gere in appearing into a remake of Breathless (the above photo captures the exact moment he persuades Gere this idea isn’t totally nuts) while in 1987, he made fans of Ellen Barkin very, very happy by starring her opposite Dennis Quaid in The Big Easy.

Q: How does this system work? Why is a New Yorker an Oregon filmmaker?

A: McBride is an Oregon filmmaker because he made an Oregon film, that is, one shot within Oregon’s state lines. He is not an Oregon director  -  that label is reserved for directors who are from Oregon.

I know its hard to keep all this straight.

Shelley Plimpton, born and raised in Roseburg, appeared in Glen and Randa, giving it a second qualification as an Oregon film.

Careful examination of McBride’s filmography reveals that he is a lillypadder. Lillypadders come to Oregon to work on their careers, and leave after they have accomplished that goal. Glen and Randa was McBride’s first feature length film.

Courtney looks a little impatient in this picture, as if she knows she is just a few months away from her New York film debut in Sid and Nancy. Taken in 1986, Courtney Michelle Harrison was three years away from starting Hole, five years away from marrying Kurt Coban, and ten years away from playing Mrs. Larry Flynt  in Milos Forman’s The People Of The United States Vs Larry Flynt.

When Courtney said “I surrounded myself with women when I was growing up because I had this horrible psycho father”, maybe she was thinking of these women, in this booth, on that night.

From Willamette Week’s wonderful obituary of Satyricon, the nightclub in which that booth was located:

GEORGE TOUHOULIOTIS: I had an interest in the culture of the music. Not in the music, per se, but what the bands represented. That was the beauty of the punks: They were real, I thought. In the late ’70s and early ’80s, it was a fantastic movement. The times were very fresh. I think there’s nothing more beautiful than freshness. I think God loves freshness; he hates repetition.

Q: Who’s George Touhouliotis?

A: The  proprietor, the brains and heart behind Satyricon.

This period portrait of George, hard at work, was taken by Sean Fong.

Here’s Satyricon on Halloween, another portrait by Sean Fong.

I wonder if George ever thinks about the impact he, and his club, had on one young, ambitious girl’s evolving artistic sensibility:

GEORGE TOUHOULIOTIS: This idea evolved about the place that if we go there, we have to break something or do something nasty, because that’s the nature of the place. As much as I really wanted to get rid of that aspect, it seemed like it was always there: the fights and the drugs. But it’s rock ’n’ roll; it’s rebellious. You have to allow a certain amount of emotion to come out. So, to a certain extent I understood it. You can’t have a castrated audience to watch a rock-’n’-roll show—the blood is boiling, and I saw the value of that. That’s fine. That’s human.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Portland gave Courtney Love stripping, reform school and Satyricon. A classic lillypadder, she made the most of all three.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s part of the aching horror and lucidity of Jost’s vision that he can’t regard himself and the U.S. as wholly separate entities. Jonathan Rosenbaum

Born in Chicago in 1943, Jon Jost was raised all over the world- a military brat. He made his first feature length film, Speaking Directly, in Cottage Grove, Oregon in 1973.

In 1991, he was honored with the first IFP/West John Cassavetes Lifetime Achievment Award. In 1993, he  returned to Oregon to make The Bed You Sleep In in Toledo.

From his own website:

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, presented a complete retrospective of Jost’s work in January 1991. This show subsequently traveled to the J.F.Kennedy Center, Washington DC, the Harvard Film Archive, the UCLA Film Archive, The Film Arts Foundation of San Francisco, as well as to the Bergamo Film Meeting 1993, the Viennale festival 1993, the Bologna and Torino Film Archives in Italy (1995). Most recently his films were accorded full retrospectives at the Cinemateca Portuguese (1996) and the Filmoteca Español (1997).

His films have been purchased for television broadcast and/or for cinema distribution in the US, UK, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Norway, Hungry, Russia, and Japan .

Prints of his films are held in the archives of The Museum of Modern Art, NY; the British Film Institute, the Freunde der deutschen Kinemathek, The Royal Film Archive of Belgium, the Cinemateca Portuguese, the Filmoteca Español, the Bologna Archive, the National Film Library of Australia (Canberra), the Yamagata Festival of Japan, and the Istituto Luce, Rome.

Jon Jost never swerved from his art film roots, never carried his experimental filmmaking as far as experimenting with Hollywood. A great example of an Oregon lillypadder, he currently teaches at Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea.

Roughly stated, there are two ways for an artist to earn the coveted Oregon filmmaker appellation. One is to come to Oregon to make a film. The other is to leave Oregon to do the same thing. Marc Davis chose the second route.

Marc Davis (1913 – 1978) was not born in Klamath Falls, nor did he grow up there. He did arrive in time to attend Klamath Union High School, the same institution which produced William Kittredge,  James Ivory and Chris Eyre.

Kittredge, Ivory and Eyre – all three shared with me their memories of the teachers who introduced them to their future vocations. For Kittredge, it was an English teacher. For Ivory, drama. For Eyre, photography. All of these cultural riches from one high school in a small town in a rural county in Southern Oregon.

I never had the opportunity to ask Marc Davis about  his high school experiences in Klamath Falls. What I do know: he himself was a dedicated and generous teacher  to young animators throughout his career. The Marc Fraser Davis Scholarship Fund was established in his honor at California Institute of the Arts in 2000.

After graduating from Klamath Union High, Marc Davis went to art school in Kansas City, then in San Francisco and then in Los Angeles. He  finally stopped studying art and began drawing for a living in Hollywood where, among other things,  he created one of Disney’s most terrifying villainesses, Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty.

Walt Disney hired Marc Davis in 1935. Some of his credits:

One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) (directing animator)

Sleeping Beauty (1959) (directing animator)

Peter Pan (1953) (directing animator)

Alice in Wonderland (1951) (directing animator)

Cinderella (1950) (directing animator)

Song of the South (1946) (directing animator)

• This post brought to you by Oregon Cartoon Institute.

Stephen Cannell, whose long list of credits includes 21 Jump Street, The A Team, and Rockford Files, is one of the most successful producers in the history of television.  A native Angeleno, Cannell attributes much of his sucess to the encouragement he received as a student at the University of Oregon. Ralph Salisbury, his writing professor, turned a blind eye to the dyslexia which had crippled Cannell’s academic performance in other classes, and told him he had a gift.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hard to imagine American movies without Johnny Depp — who got his start in 21 Jump Street. Ditto imagining pop culture without Mr. T – in fact  a movie version of The A Team, with an updated cast, is coming out later this year, not to mention a new version of the television series which started it all for Cannell, The Rockford Files.

In the meantime, you can read what Ralph Salisbury’s been up to:

Light from a Bullet Hole: Poems New and Selected, Silverfish Review Press, 2009

The Indian Who Bombed Berlin, stories, Michigan State University Press, 2009

Blind Pumper at the Well, poems, Salt Publishing, Cambridge (UK), 2008

Thank you, Ralph! And thank you, Ingrid Wendt, for tipping me off to this Oregon story. Stephen Cannell has moved from writing and producing for television to writing fiction – still honing the gift Ralph Salisbury encouraged him to use.

I am gratified to add Stephen Cannell to Oregon Movies A to Z’s list of lillypadders who leapt to success in Hollywood after a limited stay in Oregon.

Callie Khouri is one of Oregon’s most impressive lillypadders – an artist who used time in Portland to leap forward in her career.

[responding to being called a 'toxic feminist' for writing "Thelma & Louise"] Kiss my ass, kiss my ass. There’s a whole genre of films known as ‘exploitation’ based on the degradation of women, and until there’s a subgenre of women doing the same thing to men in numbers too numerous to count, as is the case with exploitation film, then just shut the fuck up.

The genius of Ridley Scott’s direction and Callie Khouri’s groundbreaking screenplay is that they allow the film to flirt with standard archetypal conventions, all the while upending conventional notions of women — particularly women in the sort of situation Thelma and Louise find themselves in. Jason McKiernan

Callie Khouri came to Portland to finish her Oscar winning screenplay for Thelma and Louise, taking a break from her secretarial job in the music video business to do so. It was her first script.

Other screenplays written in the rain: Todd Haynes came here  to write Far From Heaven (2002), leaving behind the fleshpots of Brooklyn. Miranda July’s Me, You And Everyone We Know ( 2005) was written in Portland. I am guessing that Gus Van Sant wrote Mala Noche (1985), Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and My Own Private Idaho (1991) in Portland.

I hereby claim Thelma and Louise as an Oregon film on the basis of Callie Kouri’s decision to use Portland as a writer’s colony.