In 1959, composer George Bruns, from Sandy, received his first Oscar nomination, for Sleeping Beauty.

In 1959, writer-director-producer  James Ivory, from Klamath Falls, made The Sword and the Flute, a documentary about Indian miniature paintings.

In 1959, future film scholar Sheldon Renan, from Oregon City, was studying at Yale.

AND

In 1959, Gordon Scott, from Portland,  was swinging from the vines and letting out bloodcurdling yells as King of the Jungle.

Scott (born Gordon Werschkul) was discovered while working as a lifeguard in a Las Vegas hotel. From 1955 to 1960, he was the big screen Tarzan. After a second career in Italian sword and sandal pictures, he retired in 1968. Born in 1926, he died in 2007.

Gray H. Whaley’s brand new guide to the first five decades of European American presence in Oregon uses the Chinook concept of “Illahee” (homeland) as a counterbalance to the American concept of “Oregon”, the idea of an empty, fertile wilderness bequeathed directly to settlers by God. The title of the book,  Oregon and the Collapse of Illahee: U.S. Empire and the Transformation of an Indigenous World, 1792-1859, uses words which imply the erasure of Native American culture: “collapse” and “transformation”.

However, in real life, in the Oregon I live in, erasure is not the right word for what happened to the First Oregonians.

Testimony to that could be seen on stage and screen last month.

Matt McCormick originally imagined Carrie Brownstein in the role he eventually gave Renee Roman Nose in Some Days Are Better Than Others. Roman Nose plays a woman who in the course of her work sorting donations to Goodwill discovers a funeral urn filled with the remains of a human being. McCormick didn’t write his screenplay with the goal of balancing his tiny cast racially, it just happened in the casting.

Umatilla musician and music historian Thomas Morning Owl, Jr co-wrote the stage musical The Ghosts Of Celilo with Marv Ross over a period of ten years. The Ghosts of Celilio is based on true events which occurred when The Dalles dam inundated a ten thousand year old fishing village in 1957. Morning Owl Jr has appeared in both Portland productions of The Ghosts Of Celilo, playing the heavy.

The ghosts of Celilo also haunt Chief Bromden, the character played by Tim Sampson in Portland Center Stage’s production of Dale Wasserman’s adaptation of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Sampson is the son of Will Sampson, the actor who made his debut playing the same role in Milos Forman’s 1975 film. Wasserman’s stage treatment preserves the centrality Ken Kesey’s novel assigned to Bromden, a bi-racial, self elected mute whose stream of consciousness narrates the action.

In Meek’s Cutoff, Rod Rondeaux plays the Cayuse Indian who crosses paths with a hopelessly lost, and perilously thirsty, wagon train. Screenwriter Jon Raymond based his script on an actual event, recorded in an 1845 pioneer diary.

All four stories – Meek’s Cutoff, Some Days Are Better Than Others, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, and The Ghosts Of Celilo – seamlessly incorporate  European American and Native American characters. Meek’s Cutoff and The Ghosts Of Celilo were based on historic events; Some Days and Cuckoo’s Nest based on imagined ones.

Whether the events were real or imagined, all five Oregon writers – Jon Raymond, Matt McCormick, Ken Kesey, Thomas Morning Owl, Jr. and Marv Ross –  tell stories set in biracial worlds because that choice most faithfully reflects the world in which they live.

When did Oregon writers start exploring the bi-culturality of our state ?

1873: Joaquin Miller writes Life Amongst The Modocs: An Unwritten History

1883: Sarah Winnemucca writes Life Among The Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims

1890: Frederick Homer Balch writes The Bridge of the Gods: A Romance of Indian Oregon

1902: Eva Emery Dye writes The Conquest: The True Story of Lewis and Clark, with Sacajawea at the center of her narrative

1940: Yellow Wolf dictates Yellow Wolf: His Own Story to Lucullus Virgil McWhorter

1960: Don Berry writes Trask

1962: Ken Kesey writes One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

1983: Ron Finne makes Tamanawis Illahee: Rituals and Acts In A Landscape

1987: William Kittredge writes Owning It All

1993: Elizabeth Woody writes Seven Hands, Seven Hearts

1995: Craig Lesley writes Winterkill

1998: Chris Eyre makes Smoke Signals

2000 Marv Ross and Thomas Morning Owl, Jr begin writing & composing The Ghosts Of Celilo

2010: Matt McCormick makes Some Days Are Better Than Others

2010: Jon Raymond writes Meek’s Cutoff

In Meek’s Cutoff, the wagon train has to decide whether they want to kill the one human being they have found in the desert or entrust their lives to him. Oregon literature has been grappling with the repercussions of that decision ever since.

Two of these four stories deal with the damming of Celilo Falls, an event which is evoked on the front of Whaley’s new book.  So maybe we add Whaley as the fifth story teller.

(Ed note: Whaley says the engraving on the cover of his book is of Willamette Falls, in Oregon City).

The above book list is not comprehensive! I am not covering all related works of art, nor all artists. Please feel free to add names/titles I have omitted.

For people who would like to know more about the books on the list — several are on Walt Curtis Recommends: Top Nine For Oregon Bookworms. Another great list can be found on the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission website.

Director Eric Mitchell thanks Oregon actor Duncan Smith in his opening remarks at the 2009 Museum of Modern Art screening of his 1980 film, Underground, USA.

Duncan Smith was a writer (Age of Oil, Private Elvis), conceptual artist, and performance artist from Portland who emigrated to the East Village in the mid 1970’s. In Mitchell’s Underground USA, he played a self absorbed psychiatrist; in Tim Smith and Matt Groening’s Drugs: Killers and Dillers (1972), he plays the ecstatic wandering beatnik who flies off the Vista Bridge.

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.

Shot in Oregon by Jim McBride (David Holtzman’s Diary, The Big Easy), Glen and Randa is about two young lovers who go searching for a rumored City after the Age of Oil has run out of gas.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Glen and Randa stars Steven Curry and Shelley Plimpton. Born and raised in Roseburg, Oregon, Shelley Plimpton’s acting career began in New York in 1967, when she debuted as “Crissy” in the musical Hair. She is the mother of Martha Plimpton and distant cousin to Bill Plympton.

Q: Never heard of this film. How did you learn about it?

A: I had to resolve the “what the heck is she talking about?” cognitive discomfort I felt upon hearing New York native Martha Plimpton refer to Southern Oregon as her family’s ancestral home. After poking around on IMDB, I learned about her mother Shelley’s career.

Faithful readers of Oregon Movies, A to Z know that Martha Plimpton came back here to make her own Oregon film, years later. Another Oregon film history connection: Martha served as producer on Bill Plympton’s Hair High.

Now you know as much as I do about Glen and Randa, the only Oregon film with a trailer that includes salmon being clubbed right on camera.

Somebody see this film! Send me a report.

I am confident to claim Glen and Randa as an Oregon film, based on the location shooting on the Oregon coast and the Oregon origins of the leading lady.

Johnnie Ray was one of the first to make me really open my ears. That was like 2 or 3 years before Elvis. -Rolling Stone Bill Wyman

Johnnie Ray was born in Dallas, Oregon in 1927.  He wrote The Little White Cloud That Cried, his first hit, while a teenager in Oregon. In December 1951, after serving an apprenticeship in a Detroit night club, he recorded that song for Okeh Records in New York. It went to the top of the charts.

Click here to view the embedded video.

From fansite  www.johnnieray.com: The executives at Capitol Records heard a Johnnie Ray demo record and thought the vocals were by a black female blues artist. Johnnie was thought at first by the radio listening audience to be a black blues singer, but soon it was revealed that he was a tall, thin, very fair complected, handsome boyish looking man of 24. Johnnie’s first Okeh release was a quick Detroit recording of “Whiskey & Gin”, a stomping R&B number, and ”Tell The Lady I said Goodbye”, a torchy ballad, both recorded May 29th, 1951, possibly in a radio station, with Maurice King and the Wolverines.

Ray skyrocketed to the top despite multiple challenges. A childhood accident left him deaf in one ear. He came out in public as a deaf person by wearing his hearing aid on stage but was unable, due to the times in which he lived, to come out as a gay man. He battled alcoholism.

Polite and soft spoken in person, on stage Ray was a physically uninhibited performer who prowled the stage, manhandled the microphone, threw himself on the floor, and attacked the piano as Jimi Hendrix would later attack his guitar.

A more sedate version of Ray’s stage persona is seen in There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954). His singing provides the only honest moments in that enormous, greedy, gaudy turkey.

Portland has never been as remote – geographically, socially and spiritually – from the rest of the country, as it would like to believe.

In 1923, a young Ernest Haycox was living in Greenwich Village, writing his first western.

In 1923, a young George Olsen was appearing on Broadway in Kid Boots, with Eddie Cantor.

In 1923, a young Mayo Methot was appearing The Song & Dance Man on Broadway, opposite George M. Cohan.

In 1923, a young Lee Morse was startling audiences with her deep bluesy voice in the Artists & Models, a musical review on Broadway.

In 1923, a young Mark Rothko moved to the Upper West Side to study painting, after being upstaged in a Portland acting class by the future King of Hollywood.

I have no idea if Mark Rothko liked jazz.

If he did, whenever he felt homesick he could have taken a quick stroll down Broadway to see his fellow Portlanders George Olsen, Lee Morse, and Meyo Methot performing onstage.