Lost, but now found!

Rockaday Richie was written and produced by Don Gronquist and directed by George Hood, son of Frank Hood, the founder of the all important Teknifilm Lab.

It is screening on Feb. 6, 7:00 PM at the Whitsell Auditorium, as part of the Essential Northwest series. Admission is pay what you wish.

Both filmmakers will be present.

The 1970’s saw the re-emergence of wholly independent feature filmmaking in the Rose City. Here’s the timeline:

Tom Moyers, Jr. and Will Vinton make The Circle in 1972

Don Gronquist and George Hood make Rockaday Richie and the Queen of the Hop in 1974 (For film scholars: I recommend Tim Smith’s thematically related The Case Of The Kitchen Killer , made in Portland the same year, for a great double feature)

Don Zavin makes Fast Break in 1977

Penny Allen makes Property in 1978, and Paydirt in 1981

Gus Van Sant makes Mala Noche in 1985

And then we were off and running.

Here’s more information, from NW Film Center:

VISITING ARTIST—Made at the same time as Terrence Malick’s BADLANDS, ROCKADAY (nationally released in 1975 as B-titled STARK RAVING MAD) is based on the infamous Starkweather-Fugate murder spree in 1958. Portland actors Russ Fast and Marcie Severson star as the pair who left a disastrous trail of carnage from Nebraska throughout the Midwest as they desperately tried to cover up one killing with another. Written and co-produced (with Tiger Warren) by Don Gronquist and shot by John Mincey, a large cross-section of the Portland film community worked on the film, which was also George Hood’s first feature. “A compelling, if modest, work … neither high-brow nor exploitation. Fast has a brooding presence and is genuinely chilling. … Severson has natural screen charm.”—Variety (88 mins.)

Brian Lindstrom comments “An underrated film! Truly worth seeing. Will make any independent filmmaker proud.”

Although I excuse myself from seeing Rockaday Richie and the Queen of the Hop because of my wimpy dislike of serial murdering, I do claim it as an Oregon film, based on the location shooting and the Oregon citizenship of the artists.

When John Wayne came to Oregon in 1975 to make Rooster Cogburn, it was a return trip.

Wayne was working as a props man on Rough Romance, a logging film shot in Oregon in 1930, when he was tapped to play an uncredited bit part in front of the camera. Later that same year, Raoul Walsh gave him the lead in The Big Trail, and his career in the props department was over.

I always wondered where Rough Romance was shot. Today an Oregon Movies, A to Z reader gave me a clue.

She writes:

I was told that John Wayne (when he was still known as Marion Morrison), was in a logging film done in Coos County, Oregon. I cannot find any mention of it on-line.There are no known copies of the film; yet stills used to hang in the Taylor Maid Donut shop located in Bunker Hill (Coos County).Can you confirm this? Or shed any light as to its history?

I wish I could help with more information.

Here’s what I know, beyond the ”blink or you’ll miss him” role Wayne had in Rough Romance.

1. The star of Rough Romance, George O’Brien, returned to Oregon to make  Park Avenue Logger (1937), now lost. I would love to see it!

2. The logging film genre and the lost film genre seem to enjoy significant overlap. Sometimes A Great Notion, the culmination of the logging film genre, was for a long time a lost film.

Thank you, Cherie, for sending in this question!  I may never see Rough Romance, but I now know it was shot  in the same county where I first fell in love with movies.

Here’s a photo, recently offered on eBay, of George O’Brien in Rough Romance.

I agree! He looks like a chucklehead. But looks are deceiving – he was a big star. Rough Romance is set in Canada, so maybe this is how Canadian lumberjacks dressed in 1930.

Read about the intersection of John Wayne’s career with Oregon film history  here.

I hereby claim Rough Romance as an Oregon film, based on location shooting in Coos County.

Mute testimony to Portland’s silent film industry, this lost film was shot in Beaverton and Portland.

Here’s the best available synopsis, from TCM:

“… hero swears to avenge murder of his ‘pal.’ The trail takes him to the Mexican border. He wrongly suspects father of girl he has fallen in love with, but the real murderer turns up at the head of gang of cattle rustlers, and hero captures him.” ( Motion Picture News Booking Guide, 4:71, Apr 1923.)

IMDB adds the fascinating information that one of the leads, the hero or  the murderer, take your pick, was played by Edward Everett Horton.

I predict some day in the future we will know much more about the silent films produced by Oregonians in Oregon. For right now, we know very little.

I hereby claim Vow of Vengeance as an Oregon film, on the basis of the location shooting.

The same year Stanley Kubrick cast Timberline Lodge in his screen adaptation of The Shining, French No Wave filmmaker Eric Mitchell cast Portland performance artist and free lance semiotician Duncan Smith as “The Shrink” in his East Village no budget feature, Underground USA.

Mitchell says he is trying to get a DVD release of Underground USA, which is otherwise out of print. I hope he suceeds. Smith has a small but mighty role as the turtlenecked psychiatrist who won’t let his patient ( Patti Astor ) get a word in edgewise.

With cinematography by Tom DiCillo and sound by Jim Jarmusch. I hereby claim Underground USA as an Oregon film, based on Oregonian Duncan Smith’s performance in it.

From IMDB.com user comments for Deafula.

Just as Twilight is about high school student who refuses to give into to his vampire nature, Deafula was about a theology student unaware of his own bloodsucking DNA. Told only that he has a strange blood condition which requires monthly transfusions administered by his father, all hell breaks loose when his father falls ill, and can no longer give the transfusions.

I have never seen Deafula. Shot in Oregon, using Portland and Eastern Oregon locations, it is lost film.

Deafula was written and directed by Peter Wechsberg, who also starred. I hereby claim it as an Oregon film.

Before John Badham came to Astoria to shoot Short Circuit ( 1986), he came to Mt. Angel to shoot this television movie starring Alan Alda and Louise Lasser.

I learned about Isn’t It Shocking? from an Oregon Movies, A to Z reader who was an eyewitness to the production. Strange but true: also in the cast was Ruth Gordon, whose first Oregon film was Abe Lincoln in Illinois, shot in Eugene in 1940.

I hereby claim Isn’t It Shocking? as an Oregon film, based upon the location shooting in Mt. Angel.

The Guru seems now to be a brightly colored fairy tale, a kind of 1960s fable, in which a muddled young urchin prince is deposited, via Air India’s flying carpet, in a land of broad rivers, oriental domes, and harems full of plotting ladies. In this ever-so-puzzling kingdom, ruled over by an insecure despot who can thunder one moment and summon up divine music the next, our urchin prince has many strange adventures. There are witches who cast evil spells, magic amulets, a courtesan who is strangled by her own strings of pearls, cups containing mind-altering brews, and ancient seers who deal out both encouragement and fierce rebuke.

At the end of all his trials, the young prince, now enlightened, boards his magic carpet to return to his own far off land. He is sheltering his treasure in his arms – the simple, good-hearted maiden he has set free from her imprisoning dreams, and who loves him. The Guru, the most unseen and mysterious of our movies, was Merchant Ivory’s version of a sixties trip. To me anyway, it holds up as well – though some might say no better than – any of the others of the genre that have survived.

From commentary by director James Ivory

I have not seen The Guru, starring Michael York and Rita Tushingham. I claim it as an Oregon film, as I will all James Ivory’s films, whether they star Rita Tushingham or not.

Ring of Fire is about a sheriff who tangles with three hoods who get the upper hand, kidnap him, take him to the woods, put him in a sexually compromising position, and then somehow there’s a train crash and a forest fire.

The whole town of Vernonia was cast as the whole town of Vernonia. At one time there was an annual tradition of playing Ring of Fire at the local movie theater, and everyone would go to watch themselves on the big screen. Sometimes, they would run this David Janssen/ Frank Gorshin teen-punks-take-over-a-small-town-forest-fire film for an entire month.

That’s my kind of town! A whole community of film buffs.

Which explains why, of all the small logging towns across the state, Vernonia was selected as the shooting location for some key scenes in Twilight.

Like many of the films I call “lost” , Ring of Fire is available for sale on DVD if you poke around the internet.

I have never seen Ring of Fire. I hereby claim it as an Oregon film.

The enormous box office success of The Defiant Ones (1958), starring Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis, made clear Sidney Poitier was ready for Hollywood. Hollywood, however, was not ready for him. All The Young Men, written for Poitier, was impossible to finance until Alan Ladd stepped in and both produced and co-starred.

All the Young Men (Hall Bartlett; Columbia) expertly blends two traditions rich in cinematic cliche—the war movie and the fearless-denunciation-of-race-bigotry movie. Sidney Poitier, an accomplished actor so discriminated against because of his color that he will probably never be allowed to play a character who is not strong, sensitive and noble, is a Marine sergeant whose unit is chopped to pieces during a Korean war skirmish. The only officer dies, and Poitier takes over, despite a near mutiny by Paul Richards, a race-baiter who calls him “night-fighter.” and Alan Ladd, a surly type who has little use for Negroes, and who is also jealous because he had outranked Poitier until a recent demotion.

From the 1960 Time magazine review of All The Young Men.

Some of this Korean war drama was shot on Mt. Hood. I hereby claim All The Young Men as an Oregon film.

Has anyone seen All The Young Men?

Reasons to feel wistful about the “Lost film” status of Pillars of the Sky:

1. Joseph, Oregon filmed in Technicolor and in Cinemascope.

2. Ward Bond plays an intellectual

3. Lee Marvin, in an early role, test drives an Irish accent

4. Based on a book by a novelist whose day job was writing gags for Tex Avery

What little is available to read about this film describes a Western in which the traditional cowboys vs Indians narrative is contaminated/decayed/made more historically accurate by including Christian Indians and atheistic white people in story line.

Has anyone seen Pillars Of the Sky?