James Ivory listens to screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala in New Dehli (above)/James Blue listens to director Roberto Rossellini in Houston (below)

On Oct. 10 at 7:00 PM, three time Oscar nominee James Ivory comes to Portland to introduce MAURICE (1987), starring James Wilby, Hugh Grant and Rupert Graves. Handpicked by Ivory for the Hollywood event, MAURICE is on the short list of films for which he served as both screenwriter (with Kit Hesketh-Harvey) and director.

James Ivory grew up in Klamath Falls and graduated from the University of Oregon in 1951.  Famously well traveled, he lives in New York and London, and does not often visit Portland. He’s coming this time to see an extremely rare film, and to help celebrate the life and career of its director, James Blue, who was Oregon’s first Oscar nominated director, and Ivory’s UO classmate.

On Oct. 11 at 1:00 PM, Richard Blue, the brother of James Blue, will introduce James Blue’s THE OLIVE TREES OF JUSTICE, winner of the Critics Prize at Cannes in 1962.

James Blue grew up in Portland and graduated from the University of Oregon in 1953. James Ivory remembers working with him building sets for a college drama production. Did they have any idea they would become Oregon’s first Oscar nominated directors?

And that they both would launch careers from outside this country?

I learned about James Blue directly from James Ivory in 2009. Since that time, it has become easier for Oregonians to learn about this forgotten Oregon artist. Thanks to the James and Richard Blue Foundation, James Blue’s papers have joined James Ivory’s as part of the University of Oregon’s Special Collections in the Knight Library.

But who was James Blue?

On Oct. 11 at 2:30 PM, following the screening of THE OLIVE TREES OF JUSTICE, there will be a panel discussion titled James Blue, a life in conversation.

Using archival photos from the Blue Collection to structure the narrative, three panelists will retrace his life from Tulsa to Portland to Eugene to Paris, then on to his professional breakthrough in Algiers, where he made THE OLIVE TREES OF JUSTICE, his subsequent embrace of documentary, and his dual identity as filmmaker and educator.

The panelists are:

Richard Blue, the brother of James Blue

James Dormeyer, Blue’s classmate at L’Institut des hautes études cinématographiques in Paris and a close friend

Gill Dennis, the screenwriter of Blue’s 1969 Oscar nominated doc, A FEW NOTES ON OUR FOOD PROBLEM, and a close friend.

Earlier on Oct. 11, at 11:00 AM at the Hollywood, we will screen James Ivory’s AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PRINCESS (1977), starring Madhur Jaffrey and James Mason. Ivory chose AUTOBIOGRAPHY specifically to complement THE OLIVE TREES OF JUSTICE, which shares its theme of post colonial identity crisis.

Tickets can be purchased online at hollywoodtheatre.org.

The Mid Century Oregon Genius screening of THE OLIVE TREES OF JUSTICE is co-sponsored by The James and Richard Blue Foundation.

Here’s more information about the Mid Century Oregon Genius screening series.

Fiscally sponsored by the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission, the Mid Century Oregon Genius screening series is funded by grants from Kinsman Foundation and Miller Foundation.

More information about the parallel career tracks of these two Oscar nominated directors can be found here.

When I began exploring Oregon film history, I knew I would run across surprises. I never expected to run across a filmmaker as accomplished, and as forgotten, as James Blue.

James Blue (1930-1980) grew up in Portland. He studied speech and theater at University of Oregon, graduating in 1953. After some years of military service, he entered film school in Paris where he was influenced by Jean Rouch. Although he first distinguished himself by winning the Critics Prize at Cannes for The Olive Trees Of Justice, a feature length narrative film, he spent the rest of his life making socially engaged documentaries.

Blue was a man of firsts. First Oregon director to go to Cannes, and the first to receive an Oscar nomination. First person ever to receive Ford Foundation funding for a film project. He helped start the Center for Advanced Film Studies at American Film Institute. The documentary programs at Rice University and at the Center for Media Study in Buffalo were both established by him. He served on the 1970- 1972 NEA funding panel which launched the first network of regional film centers, as proposed by Sheldon Renan. Northwest Film Center is the result of that NEA initiative.

Two Oregonians, James Blue and Sheldon Renan, on that panel!

The reason you haven’t heard of James Blue, or seen his films, is that his films have no distributor. They are not digitized. I am not sure even SUNY Buffalo, the school where he was teaching at the time of his death, can offer access to his films.

Here’s the crash course on Blue:

His IMDB page.

An interview with one of his students

A booklet compiled to accompany a retrospective of his films.

I am still trying to make sense of this new-to-me filmmaker. James Blue never returned to live/teach/work in Oregon. He is buried in Willamette Cemetery.

Katherine Wilson stepped into the role of writer-producer with Animal House Of Blues (2012)  after a lifetime working in location casting and location scouting.

When John Landis needed local college girls for the pillow fight in Animal House, it was Katherine who auditioned them. When Milos Forman came to Oregon State Hospital to shoot One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, it was Katherine who served as the liaison between that production and the Oregon Film Commission. Having seen for herself what Oregon had to offer Hollywood, and vice versa, she spent her entire career encouraging her home state to develop the economic potential of its film industry.

She worked on Stand By Me, The High Cost Of Living and Personal Best, among others. Without leaving home, she worked with Michael Douglas, Milos Forman, Rob Reiner, Robert Towne, John Belushi, and Jack Nicolson.

Her first film as writer-producer, Animal House of Blues, uses interviews and archival photos to tell the story of how Curtis Salgado, a young Eugene blues singer, taught visiting actor John Belushi how to sing the blues. Belushi paid close attention and later used  Salgado’s trademark sunglasses-fedora-harmonica combination to create The Blues Brothers with Dan Ackroyd. As a friend of both Salgado and Belushi, Katherine Wilson was witness to the entire, slightly Faustian, saga.

Here you can see Katherine Wilson preparing extras for the parade scene finale in Animal House, the film which launched her career.

Here’s Katherine in Deafula, a lost Oregon movie I am dying to see. Katherine acted in Deafula and did the make up and art direction.

Here she is with Ken Kesey, who taught her to splice videos using scotch tape, a lesson she definitely wouldn’t have learned in film school.

Along with launching Animal House Of Blues, Katherine Wilson is also in pre-production for a feature length narrative film about the legendary Nez Perce rodeo champion, Jackson Sundown. She is the fifth Oregon Movies, A to Z film figure to come from Klamath Falls, joining an illustrious list which includes James Ivory, Marc Davis, William Kittridge and Chris Eyre, pictured with her below.

Five year old James Francis Ivory moved to Oregon in 1933. His father owned a mill in Klamath Falls, and took his son on business trips to Los Angeles where James saw immense sets being built with his father’s lumber on movie studio back lots. He prepared for a career in movies by studying architecture and art at the University of Oregon, graduating in 1950.

Drafted in 1953, he served in the Seventh Army Special Services, booking entertainment for troops overseas. He received a Masters Degree from University of Southern California in Cinematography in 1957. While in school he wrote, shot, directed, edited and produced a documentary film, Venice: Theme and Variations which was selected by the New York Times as one the ten best non-theatrical films of 1957.

In 1961 he met Ismail Merchant, who, completely disregarding James Ivory’s inexperience directing actors, immediately began raising money for their first feature film together.

The rest is history. James Ivory and Ismail Merchant remained partners, going down in film history as the longest lasting film collaboration in the world.

One name kept coming up. Ellen Thomas said “Homer Groening”. Will Vinton said “Homer Groening”.Bill Plympton said “Homer Groening”. What was the question?  Dennis and I were asking them who we should know about in Portland film history.

From the Seattle Times obituary for Groening, in 1996.

Homer P. Groening was born Dec. 30, 1919, a U.S. citizen in Main Centre, Saskatchewan, the son of Mennonite farmers. He spent his youth in Oregon.

He earned the rank of Eagle Scout and was a co-founder in 1936 of Camp Pioneer at the base of Mount Jefferson. He graduated from Linfield College in McMinnville, Ore., in 1941.

He met his wife, Margaret, at Linfield. They married in 1942.

Mr. Groening flew a B-17 over Europe during World War II and participated in the D-Day invasion, winning a Distinguished Flying Cross.

After the war, he returned to Portland and joined the Botsford, Constantine and Gardner ad agency as a production assistant.

He was called up again to fly transport planes in Korea.

Upon his return, he became a vice president at the ad agency, working on accounts such as Jantzen, Pendleton, Olympia beer, Idaho potatoes and Western Hotels. He started his own agency in 1958.

“He was an absolute creative genius,” said former Advertising Federation President Mick Scott, who worked with Mr. Groening to found the American Advertising Museum in Portland.

When film caught his interest, he taught himself the craft.

“He was a one-man show,” said his daughter, Lisa. “He did the producing, writing, shooting, sound recording, editing, directing and narrating.”

Among his film clients were Jantzen, Timberline Lodge, Johnson Motors, Eastman Kodak and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

He won numerous Golden Eagles, given by the Council on International Non-Theatrical Events (CINE), and awards from the Advertising Association of the West and the American Film Festival.

He produced a string of films about water in all its forms, including “Get Wet,” “Getting Wetter,” “Psychedelic Wet” and “Study in Wet.”

Mr. Groening’s son, Matt, said he received creative encouragement at home, in part because his father was a cartoonist himself. Mr. Groening took colored pencils and sketch pads home to his five children. He would make up the beginning of a story and his children would finish it.

When young Will Vinton stood in Portland with his brand new Oscar in 1975, wondering if he should stick around, he took a page from Homer Groening, and decided to stay.

One consequence of that decision…..

Travis Knight and Mark Gustafson next month will be in LA nervously waiting for the moment they open the envelope for Best Animated Feature. Both artists are former Will Vinton Studio employees, mentored by Will, who was in turn inspired by Homer.

After two restless years in Los Angeles, he decided his home state would be a more fertile place to write and develop his projects.  From an office in Northwest Portland and a beach house in Rockaway, in 1976, he conceived and produced a 13-part instructional series for the North American Soccer League, SOCCER FOR EVERYONE, which was aired by OPB public teleivison and nationally by its affiliates.

A lifelong basketball fan, he decided that same year to parlay his experitise as a sports producer into a new project which would tap into Portland’s affinity for its up and coming NBA basketball team, the Portland Trailblazers.  Assembling a crew of some of Portland’s leading freelancers (including cinematographer Mike McLeod, sound engineer Rick Johnson and producer Reagan Ramsey), he secured the  permission of Harry Glickman’s young club to follow the players and coaches for the entire season, both on the court and off.  Would the team make it to the championships?  Financial backers were willing to gamble with Zavin that it would, and a film known as FAST BREAK was born.

Superstar and counterculture figure Bill Walton quickly emerged as the film’s main character, both for his ethic as a player and excellence at the hoop, providing Zavin, who acted as writer/producer/editor, with a thread around which to wrap the season story.  Hours and hours of footage accumulated as the team stayed in the running and prospect of a World Championship rocketed toward reality.  Committed once again to resisting a narrator-driven approach, Zavin added devices to propel and flesh out the narrative:  the parallel story of local writer Larry Colton’s attempt at writing a book about the team, Walton on a bicycle odyssey along Highway 101 on the Oregon Coast and teaching basketball to kids on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation, and finally, rhythmic original music by the local progressive jazz group, Oregon.

Somewhere between being an observation, meditation and celebration, the two-hour long FAST BREAK premiered at the Fox Theatre in 1978 and to audiences of the 6th Northwest Film & Video Festival later that same year.  The hope that the film would have a major commercial release was subsequently thwarted by Walton’s rupture from the team and the negative public sentiment which ensued.  Attempts at distribution were abandoned.  The film and its hundreds of hours of outtakes are now housed in the Don Zavin Collection of the Oregon Historical Society Moving Image Archives waiting restoration and preservation.

In the 1980’s Zavin went on to found “The Electric Picture,” a Portland-based production company, which created industrial, promotional and training films for such clients as the Bonneville Power Administration, Oregon Associated Industries, various Portland hospitals, and the Lions Sight and Hearing Foundation.  He also worked on several Oregon-produced theatrical feature films including ST. HELENS, starring Art Carney; O’HARA’S WIFE, starring Ed Asner; SHADOWPLAY, directed by Susan Shadburne; Sam Peckinpah’s THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND; and Don Gronquist’s THE DEVIL’S KEEP.  In addition to his filmmaking career, he also taught video production and editing at the Northwest Film Center for nearly twenty years.

Thank you to Ellen Thomas, Oregon Movies A to Z’s first guest blogger, for this biography of her late husband.

Most famous for his Anthology of American Folk Music, issued by Folkways in 1952, Harry Smith also pioneered abstract animation, attempting to fuse color, motion and sound. His first films were created specifically to be shown in San Francisco jazz clubs.

Entirely self taught, Smith later used the same stop motion collage technique explored by Portland avant garde filmmaker Jim Blashfield.

Harry Smith, a truly unclassifiable American genius, was born in Portland in 1923.

This post brought to you by the Oregon Cartoon Institute.

On October 31, 1919, Lewis Moomaw and his wife traveled with Danish actor Jean Hersholt and his wife at the Crown Point Chalet in Corbett, Oregon. You can see Moomaw’s guest book signature, along with those of dozens of other silent era movie figures, on the wonderfully researched Crown Point Chalet website. ( Anne’s editorial note: Sadly, this website is no longer in existence. I trust that the guest book is still safe and sound somewhere, though!)

A wide range of Hollywood guests came to enjoy the views from the new Columbia Gorge highway – everyone from Ronald Colman to Theda Bara to Ilya Tolstoy (the filmmaking son of Count Leo, who knew?).