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Luke Perry plays real life rodeo champion Lane Frost. Stephen Baldwin plays his best friend.

I have never seen 8 Seconds, but I hereby claim it as an Oregon film on the basis of location shooting in Pendleton.

Vacations can be scary. If you don’t know this, try going on this river raft trip with Meryl Streep.

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Other movies to choose from for an Oregon double feature:

Something Wild

The Wild Party

Where The Wild Things Are

A Wild American Forest

The Practice of the Wild

Strange but true: cast member John C. Reilly is coming to Portland on May 26, 2012 to perform with John C. Reilly and Friends (with Becky Stark and Tom Brosseau).

I hereby claim The River Wild as an Oregon film on the basis of location shooting on the Rogue River.

When Mel Gibson and Jodie Foster sit down to the climatic card game at the end of Richard Donner’s big budget valentine to the Western, they are aboard a St. Louis river boat moving down the Columbia Gorge (!)

Geographic sleight of hand aside, the greater importance of Maverick to American film history lies in the friendship which Jodie Foster and Mel Gibson began during shooting. In all their scenes, you can see them having a whale of a time.

It was on the basis of this friendship that Jodie Foster cast Mel Gibson in her 2011 film The Beaver.

The Beaver is the genre defying Hollywood art film about a depressed man who speaks through a puppet. It is in every way, shape and form the exact inverse of Maverick.

Jodie Foster had come to Oregon earlier in her career to play opposite Michael Douglas in Napoleon and Samantha. She played a runaway. Michael Douglas played the wise, helpful, John Day sheepherder who counsels her to go home. I doubt he enjoyed it – he looks bored out of his mind in the role. What we do know: he kept developing a literary property his dad gave him, and three years later he won an Oscar for his first film as a producer. Made in Oregon.

Meanwhile, Foster herself became a producer and a director. The Beaver was her third feature film.

In Maverick, Foster plays a gambler. In The Beaver she is the real deal, staking her reputation as a Hollywood insider on an exceptionally risky project. If someone (say, Richard Donner) sat down and spelled out to Foster exactly what kind of film would be most likely to damage her career, he very well could have come up with a description of The Beaver. Choose a screenplay which tackles mental illness. Accept the screenwriter’s goal without modifying his work to be more mainstream. Cast an actor everyone in Hollywood has come to dislike, and do it because you see him as a) great for the role and b) in need of some therapeutic employment. Once the film is made, and everyone is stupefied by it, go on tour with it and maintain an open, non defensive attitude about the choices you made.

High stakes gambling, indeed!

Gibson would understand this, because he himself also produces and directs.

I hereby claim Maverick as an Oregon film on the basis of the location shooting in the magnificent Columbia Gorge.

Strange but true: A River Runs Through It, the Montana family saga/fly fishing tale, is an Oregon film. Director Robert Redford shot the fishing scenes on the Rogue River.

Thanks, and a tip of the hat to Grant McOmie for mentioning this particular chapter of Oregon film history  in the course of profiling Wolf Creek Inn, Oregon’s little known getaway to the stars.

Other Hollywood luminaries who loved Wolf Creek Inn were Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, who came for the duck hunting, and Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, who came for the privacy.

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But that’s not the only Oregon connection. One of the co-producers of A River Runs Through It is from Oregon: William Kittredge.

I spoke on the phone with William Kittredge to confirm my suspicion that he attended high school in Klamath Falls. He said yes, and that it was his English teacher there who inspired him to dream of becoming a writer.

William Kittredge, Marc Davis, James Ivory, and Chris Eyre all graduated from Klamath Union High School, a track record unmatched by any other Oregon high school, including Lincoln High School (Ernest Haycox, Mel Blanc, Matt Groening), the oldest high school in the state; Catlin Gabel (Gus Van Sant, Eric Edwards, Margaux Hemingway), the richest high school  in the state; or Ashland High School (David Fincher), the high school voted most likely to succeed in producing show business oriented graduates.

I hereby claim A River Runs Through It as an Oregon film on the basis of  the location shooting on the Rogue, and on the basis of William Kittredge’s contribution as co-producer. Go Pelicans!

Keanu Reeves is a law man who male bonds with the thief  he is supposed to bring to justice. Patrick Swayze shows his willing student a thing or two about surfing (in the dark) and skydiving (holding hands) and choosing when/when not to obey the law. Keanu is from Ohio, so this is all new to him. Swayze’s spectacular physical grace temporarily blinds him, as it does everyone in the theater.  There is a moment in the skydiving scene where Swayze pirouettes in thin air. He spins around his own axis, just as if he was wearing ice skates and not a unopened parachute. Keanu, who is ambitious, impatient, and nursing an old football injury, is defenseless against this gratuitous display of physical confidence, strength and joy.

Kathryn Bigelow shot a tiny sliver of her fourth feature on the Oregon Coast, at Ecola State Park. The criteria for granting a director recognition as an Oregon filmmaker is notoriously elastic, and changes from case to case. Bigelow inadvertently solidified her claim on this title, despite the short amount of time she spent shooting in Oregon, by describing Point Break in interview as a “wet Western”.

Oregon has faultless bloodlines when it comes to the Western. The source material for one of the most influential Westerns ever made, Stagecoach (1939),was written in a small office right off Sandy Boulevard in Portland. John Wayne’s breakthrough role, the Ringo Kid, was invented by Oregon native (and Reed drop out) Ernest Haycox. Orson Welles famously prepared for  Citizen Kane by watching Stagecoach over and over again. Kathryn Bigelow was rumored to have done the same thing while in film school at Columbia.

In fact, the rumor was that that was all she did at Columbia.

I hereby claim Point Break as an Oregon film, based on location shooting done on the Oregon Coast, and in the Oregon rain.

In Come See The Paradise, Dennis Quaid attempts to do right by his Japanese American wife (Tamlyn Tomita) even after his country has imprisoned her for the duration of the war in an internment camp.

Clinton Street Theater, Union Station, and an Astoria cannery appear as locations. This story could have been told about a Portland family – Japanese American Oregonians were likewise imprisoned in camps during the war, but the fictionalized events of Come To The Paradise take place in Los Angeles and Seattle.

Here’s more information about the impact of World War II on Japanese American Portlanders, as remembered by an eyewitness, who at the time was a teenaged participant in the events.

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I hereby claim Come See The Paradise as an Oregon film on the basis of the location shooting.

Finally! A movie which comes even a little close to describing the way I see life. The parallels are striking: I too devote my time to keeping helpless people safe, just as Viggo Mortensen does post-apocalypse. I too am unable to figure out the best way to do it, I too am unsure whether I will ever find a place of rest. I too am inspired by the concept of “warm”. No surprise to me that this shoot was divided between Pennsylvania and Oregon – tons of trees and economic wreckage in both states.

I hereby claim The Road as an Oregon film, based on location shooting done within our borders.

WNET -13 made it for $250,000. Ursula LeGuin’s powerful, priceless imagination is not perfectly captured in this film, but it still remains required viewing for people who want to understand what makes Oregon artists tick. LeGuin has gone on record with her preference for this version over the one made in 2002.

Ed Emschwiller was WNET’s artist in residence when The Lathe of Heaven was made, which explains why this tiny budgeted film has an extended sequence of Emschwiller’s (at that time) cutting edge computer animation. Other strange but true facts: the screenwriter, Diane English (Murphy Brown), would go on to an illustrious career in Hollywood as a television producer. Margaret Avery, the unearthly beauty who plays the  lawyer, would later be nominated for an Oscar for her performance as the enigmatic Shug in Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple (1985).

LeGuin’s opinion, from a January 2009 VICE magazine interview: The only good adaptation to film I’ve had so far is the 1980 Lathe of Heaven from PBS. It was made on a budget that wouldn’t pay for the hairdressers’ doughnuts these days, but the screenplay’s adequate, the directing is intelligent, the acting is super, and the special effects are really something else. Like, the spaceships are lighted Frisbees, being hurled into the air by Ed Emshwiller’s son. I love it.

Because it is based on a book  by an Oregon author, because it is set in Portland, and because it has some establishing shots of Portland, I hereby claim The Lathe Of Heaven as an Oregon film.

When the police announce they have rescued a woman with amnesia, single father Kurt Russell sees a way to solve his housekeeping problems. He rushes down to claim her as his own. Goldie Hawn finds herself taking care of kids she never had, cleaning a house she doesn’t recognize.

Oregon appears in Overboard two ways: in establishing shots of the Depoe Bay bridge, and as a symbolic stand in for the Garden of Eden. The purity and goodness of rural blue collar life in Oregon is continually contrasted with the inauthenticity of the high life Goldie Hawn left behind when she fell off her yacht.

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A great film for people who find Garry Marshall’s more famous romantic comedy, Pretty Woman, too challenging. I hereby claim Overboard as an Oregon film.

A struggling cowboy (Clint Eastwood) throws knives at a runaway heiress (Sondra Locke) under a Big Top of American flags. Most of Bronco Billy was shot in Idaho, but the production came across the border for some scenes in Ontario, Oregon.

This is the light hearted side of Eastwood. His sixth film as a director.

I hereby certify the long standing claim that Bronco Billy is an Oregon film, based on the cameo appearance of Ontario.