James Ivory listens to Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, above/James Blue listens to Robert Rossellini, below.

Two Oscar nominated Oregonians share the same first name. To help readers keep them apart, Oregon Movies, A to Z has compiled a handy checklist of distinguishing characteristics.

1. James Ivory was born in 1928 in Berkeley. James Blue was born in 1930 in Tulsa.

2. Ivory grew up in Klamath Falls. Blue grew up in Portland.

3. Ivory studied architecture and fine arts. Blue studied theater. Both at University of Oregon.

4. Ivory graduated from film school at USC in 1957. Blue graduated from film school at L’IDHEC in Paris in 1958.

5. Both men served in the military between undergraduate school and film school.

6. Ivory made his first feature, The Householder, in India in 1963. Blue made  his first feature, The Olive Trees Of Justice, in Algiers in 1962.

7. Ivory received Oscar nominations in 1987, 1993 and 1994. He was nominated for a Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1979, 1981, 1983, 1992, 1995 and 2000. Blue beat him to this particular punch. He was Oscar nominated in 1969. He won the Critic’s Prize at Cannes in 1962.

8. More support for the hypothesis that all Oregonians are secretly French? I would say so, since four of Ivory’s films were made in France, while Blue went to film school in Paris, and his breakthrough film was in French.

9. Both men became New Yorkers. Ivory lives in New York City. James Blue lived in Buffalo, where he taught at SUNY. He died in 1980.

“Perhaps it is the climate, and then again, perhaps it is the illustrious example of the late Homer Davenport, but climate or whatever, the soil of Oregon seems to be prolific of cartoonists.”

The Oregonian, in 1914.

1. Homer Calvin Davenport (1867 – 1912) was the son of a well educated, politically progressive Oregon Trail pioneer. Brought up on a farm in Silverton, Homer became, after a series of vocational false starts, the most highly paid newspaper cartoonist in the world. His political cartoons, drawn for Hearst newspapers, were so influential legislation was introduced in New York State to outlaw them. As one of the country’s first media superstars, Homer Davenport was wealthy, powerful, well connected, and homesick. He dreamed of leaving New Jersey to return to Oregon, but his wife would not hear of it. Born in the Waldo Hills. Self taught.

2. Carl Barks (1901 – 2000) was the creator of Uncle Scrooge McDuck, and the writer-artist auteur behind Disney’s Duckville comic books. Revered for his story sense and superior draftsmanship, he has been claimed as an inspiration by figures as diverse as R. Crumb and Steven Spielberg. Barks was chosen as one of three figures to inaugurate the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall Of Fame in 1987.  Born and raised on an isolated ranch in Merrill. Self taught.

3. Basil Wolverton (1909 – 1978) was the first Pacific Northwest cartoonist to conduct his entire career by mail, without leaving the Portland area. Enormously influential, his innovative “spaghetti and meatballs” style challenged the boundaries of good taste and changed the face of American comics. Robert Crumb’s recently published Book Of Genesis is a tribute to Wolverton, while Jerry De Fuccio of Mad Magazine thought the comics industry version of the Oscar should be called “The Basil”.  Born in Central Point. Self taught.

4. Born in Oregon City in 1946, Bill Plympton worked as an illustrator and syndicated cartoonist in New York for 15 years before switching to animation. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Variety, Rolling Stone, Glamour and National Lampoon. Bill Plympton is the only filmmaker alive who hand draws feature length films. He has drawn six of them, and is a two time Oscar nominee. Matt Groening, for one, believes “Bill Plympton is God”.

5. Born in Portland in 1951, John Callahan began cartooning in the late 70‘s, after a car accident confined him to a wheelchair. He brought a portfolio of cartoons to a PSU class taught by Bill Plympton, and the rest is history. His syndicated cartoons appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Daily News, The London Observer, the Los Angles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Harpers, the Utne Reader, Willamette Week and 50 other publications. Two animated television series, Quads and Pelswick, were based on his work. He died in 2010, of complications related to his quadriplegia.

6. Born in Portland in 1954, Matt Groening is the creative force behind  the longest running scripted show in television history. The Simpsons has won 27 Emmy Awards, 30 Annie Awards and a Peabody Award. He is the third Oregonian to have a star on Hollywood Boulevard, after Jane Powell and Mel Blanc. Throughout all this, Groening has remained active as a cartoonist, publishing his syndicated strip, Life In Hell, every week since 1977. He cheerfully admits “Cartooning is for people who can’t quite draw and can’t quite write. You combine the two half-talents and come up with a career.”

7. Born in Portland in 1959, David Chelsea was selling cartoons before he was in high school. His work appears in hundreds of publications including the New York Times (where he illustrated the Modern Love column), The Wall Street Journal, The New York Press, Seattle Weekly, Chicago Tribune, Reader’s Digest, Boston Phoenix and Portland Monthly. For years, the New York Observer carried David’s celebrity caricatures on the front page.

8. Born in 1960 in St. Paul, Minnesota, Jack Ohman moved to Portland in 1983 to begin working as a cartoonist for The Oregonian. His cartoons appear in hundreds of newspapers including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The Seattle Times, and The Baltimore Sun. He is the author of ten books, and winner of numerous awards, including the 2009 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, the 2010 Society of Professional Journalists Award and the 2012 Scripps Howard Journalism Award.

9. Born in Malta in 1960, Joe Sacco moved with his family to Beaverton in time to attend Sunset High School. Graduating with a journalism degree from University of Oregon, he found his true calling when he began using the comic strip format to cover the war in Palestine. Internationally renowned, he is the winner of the 1996 American Book Award, 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2001 Eisner Award.

10. Two emerging Oregon cartoonists share the #10 spot.

Shannon Wheeler moved to Portland in 2010. You’ve seen his cartoons in the New Yorker.

Matt Bors received the 2012 Herblock Prize, the first alternative editorial cartoonist to win that honor.

Learn more about Homer Davenport, the first in this illustrious string of Oregon cartooning geniuses, in this month’s issue of the magazine 1859. Or attend your choice of three Homer Davenport events taking place in Portland this month:

Saturday, April 21, 2:35 – 3:45 PM
“Occupy Davenport: Cartoons for the 99%”, panel at Bus Project’s Rebooting Democracy @ Backspace Cafe

Tuesday, April 24,  7:30 PM @ Jack London Bar
“Stumptown Stories: Homer Davenport Covers Dempsey vs Fitzsimmons Prizefight” Speakers: Gus Frederick & Gordon Munro

Saturday, April 28, 11:00 – 11:45 AM
Homer Davenport Presentation & Panel Discussion @ Stumptown Comics Fest

All three events are the brainchildren of Gus Frederick, lead organizer of the Davenport Project. Frederick was inspired by last summer’s Mel Blanc Project, a series of public history/arts education events presented by  Oregon Cartoon Institute.

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This post brought to you by Oregon Cartoon Institute, a colloquium of individuals and organizations interested in raising awareness of Oregon’s rich animation and cartooning history.

Five years after Sleater Kinney disbanded, all three members continue to make music.

One decided to supplement her music career by becoming a television writer-producer-actress. If you decide that you would like to follow in Carrie Brownstein’s footsteps, I recommend that you live in a city which provides you the following role models.

#1. The Oscar winner. In Portland, this is Joan Gratz.

#2. The Pathbreaker. In Portland, this is Penny Allen

#3. The Visionary. In Portland, this is Rose Bond

#4. The Wise One. In Portland, this is Ursula LeGuin

To keep yourself from becoming discouraged/taking yourself too seriously, its always good to have the wisecracking Best Friend Who Has Been There Already And Survived. Portland provides young female artists with a wide assortment of these.

For example:

#5. The Crazy One. In Portland, this is Courtney Love. (OK, so Courtney’s not here any more. Mary’s Club, where she got her start, still is.)

#6. The Self Deprecating Funny Bisexual One. In Portland, this is Storm Large

#7. The  New York Times Best Selling One. In Portland, this is Chelsea Cain

Q: How many female role models does it take to achieve gender parity in the entertainment business?

A: As soon as we achieve it, we’ll know.

In the meantime, Carrie looks very at home in the spotlight at last year’s Portlandia premiere in Manhattan.

This post is the promised second installment to the first, which addressed the Portland peer group role models which might have helped influence Carrie Brownstein.

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.

Its hard out there for most retired rockers, even for Carrie Brownstein, who spent her years post-Sleater-Kinney reinventing herself as a writer-actor-producer. Not that she had to build her new career from the ground up : Carrie’s greatest gift has been an ability to lose herself in performance.

And she brought this with her to Thunderant, her webseries with Fred Armisen.

But Carrie’s considerable talent is not solely responsible for her success tonight, as Portlandia premieres on national television. Art takes strength. An independent filmmaker has to have the heart of an Alaskan sled dog and the stamina of a long distance runner. You have to see what no one else can see and  believe it can happen. How is this ability nurtured?

Miranda July had the idea that the reason there were no women filmmakers was that there were no women filmmakers. No role models, no company, no mentors = no women in film. Carrie arrived in Portland just as Miranda was getting her anti-isolation Miss Movieola project off the ground.

The third member of Carrie Brownstein’s Cinematic Sisterhood of Portland Peers, Marne Lucas, made a prizewinning film her first time out and then placed her full attention on still photography.

That’s Marne in a self portrait taken at the Hall of Northwest Coast Indians at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where she now lives. I believe Marne, retired from indie filmmaking by the time Carrie arrived in Portland, still counts as a member of her support team because of her legendary skepticism when it comes to the fanfare of success, and her disciplined focus on creating new work.

Miranda July, Vanessa Renwick and Marne Lucas are three Portland contemporaries Carrie Brownstein witnessed up close and personal, staying the course, exploring their gifts as artists. I’ll save for another post the longer history, and deeper roots, of women in film in Portland.

We’ll let Carrie play us off…..

]]> http://www.talltalestruetales.com/2011/01/carrie-brownsteins-sisterhood-of-the-traveling-pants-vanessa-renwick-miranda-july-marne-lucas/feed/ 5 http://www.talltalestruetales.com/2010/12/walt-curtis-recommends-top-ten-for-oregon-bookworms/ http://www.talltalestruetales.com/2010/12/walt-curtis-recommends-top-ten-for-oregon-bookworms/#comments Sun, 26 Dec 2010 20:25:54 +0000 Anne Richardson http://www.talltalestruetales.com/?p=11299

For Oregon newbies who want to get to know their new home better, here’s some advice. You can’t go wrong going straight to the source, and reading Oregon authors. Even where they do not take Oregon as their subject  (but choose, say,  Pancho Villa), much is revealed about the regional character just in the way they write.

Walt Curtis compiled this list of his top recommended Oregon books originally for the Clinton Street Quarterly. It is still the best list I have ever seen: direct, pure, idiosyncratic. Just like Walt.

Walt Curtis Recommends

1. Far Corner: A Personal View Of the Pacific Northwest by Stewart Holbrook. Debunking and delighting, the Portland historian writes of the Wobblies, Erickson’s Saloon, Aurora Colony, logging, and the myths and symbols of our region of the U.S.

Anne’s commentary: Stewart Holbrook cast a long shadow. Brian Booth edited a collection of Holbrook essays, Wildmen, Wobblies and Whistle Punks, and spoke about Holbrook at a recent Dill Pickle Club meeting. John Daniels chose The Far Corner as the title for his most recent collection of essays as a tribute to Holbrook.

2. The Selected Poems of Hazel Hall is the crippled seamstress’ marvelous work. Beth Bentley introduces this only volume of Hall in print, which needs to be amplified. An early feminist, her distinguished poetry deserves national attention once again. She is as good as Emily Dickinson.

Anne’s commentary: As Walt predicted, a second collection of Hazel Hall’s poetry did find its way into print. John Witte published a collection with OSU Press in 2000. Oregonian film critic Stan Hall, no relation to Hazel Hall, named his daughter after this forgotten Portland poet.

3. The Distant Music by Harold Lenoir Davis. This chronicle of the Mulock family and their relationship to the land is Davis’ last novel. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1936 for Honey in the Horn, Davis wrote as well as anyone in the Pacific Northwest, including Ken Kesey. He has justly been compared with Faulkner and Twain.

Anne’s commentary: Walt’s contrarian choice, to list a lesser known work by Davis rather than his Pulitzer Prize winner, means there must be something to The Distant Music. I have not read it but this year I will.

4. The Conquest, or the True Story of the Lewis and Clark Expedition by Eva Emery Dye. Dye popularized the expedition, creating a memorable feminist heroine in Sacajawea. She is the Northwest’s finest historical novelist, readable, upbeat, well researched. Her books should be brought back into print so school kids can get a sense of Northwest history. The Oregon Trail and all of that! Go to the library to read her work.

Anne’s commentary: Eva Emery Dye uses dialogue in a way which astonishes modern readers — putting words in the mouths of all her historical figures – but what a storyteller!  Read her (out of print, as Walt noted) novels for a still vivid portrait of a community trying to balance their ideal of a democratic society where all men are equal against their own historical record of  displacing the First Oregonians.

5. Life Among The Modocs: Unwritten History by Joaquin Miller. A seventeen year old boy went to live with gold miners and Indians near Mt. Shasta. From his experience would come an American classic. Miller himself would become the archetype of the Western man, making Buffalo Bill jealous.

Anne’s commentary: Joaquin fights both for the Indians and against the Indians, ping ponging from one side to the other. He knows exactly who he is and where his primary allegiance lies — with himself. The self portrait of a scoundrel in love with language. Is this the blueprint for future Oregon wildmen Ken Kesey and Gus Van Sant? Written in 1873, when Joaquin Miller was a lionized poet living in London.

6. The Bridge Of The Gods, a Romance of Indian Oregon by Frederic Homer Balch is reminiscent of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The missionary Cecil Grey has been drawn to the Northwest by a vision of the bridge and a need to convert natives to Christianity. Himself a melancholy preacher, Balch died tragically at age 29 of tuberculosis.

Anne’s commentary: Walt has been after me to read this 1890 novel for as long as I can remember. I promise this year I will repair to Cascade Locks to sit and read this book within view of the steel cantilevered Bridge of the Gods which replaces the land bridge commemorated by its title. I will do this as a tribute to Walt, and despite the great misgivings I have about works of art created by melancholy preachers. Available on Google Books.

7. Heavenly Discourse by Charles Erskine  Scott Wood. Can you imagine someone’s life spanning the era from the days of Chief Joseph to the bombing of Pearl Harbor? Wood’s satirical sketches, disgracefully out of print, would rock conservative minds even today. Intelligent, classical, radical, libertarian, “Ces” Wood is the patriarch of Portland arts and letters.

Anne’s commentary: Walt is right. C. E. S. Wood is the patriarch of Portland arts and letters. He commissioned the Skidmore fountain, helped found the public library, worked as a corporate lawyer for lumber companies by day and as an essayist for radical East Coast magazines by night.  A litmus test: You’re not a real Oregonian if you don’t know who he is.

8. Insurgent Mexico by John Reed, the Northwest’s most internationally acclaimed author! What do we gringos know of the history of Mexico, our closest neighbor? John Reed was there, riding with Pancho Villa in 1913. Raw, passionate, poetic, the great journalist gives us a visceral, unforgettable account.

Anne’s commentary: Another contrarian choice by Walt, since Reed is more famous for writing Ten Days Which Shook The World, his eyewitness account of the Russian revolution.

9. The Singing Creek Where The Willows Grow : the rediscovered diary of Opal Whiteley by Ben Hoff . This rediscovered diary and biography is a standard for the re-issuing of Northwest classics! Opal is the “flower child”, charismatic and schizophrenia, who captivated readers of the Atlantic Monthly in 1920. She grew up in a Cottage Grove lumber camp, and is still alive in a mental hospital in London. Fascinating story!

Anne’s commentary: Since Walt wrote this, Opal Whiteley died. I belong to the camp which classifies her early childhood literary achievements as fraud. Hoff takes the opposing view. Her story, real or no, is part of Oregon history.

Walt’s original list, written for the Clinton Street Quarterly, was a full dozen titles. The additional three were by Washington State writers.

Here again is Walt:

1. The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald. Life on a Puget Sound chicken ranch. Ma and Pa Kettle are their closest neighbors! This book is still a bestseller. A housewife’s eye-view of geoducks and other curiousities peculiar to our landscape, including the people.

2. Paul Bunyan by James Stevens. In a literary manner, Stevens popularized the mythical logger of American folklore. Stevens also co-authored Status Rerum, a manifesto on the deplorable state of Northwest letters, with his close friend, H.  L. Davis.

3. Skid Road by  Murray Morgan. The first skid road, logger’s Valhalla or bowery was located in Seattle. Where the human and wood debris were dumped in the bay! Ox teams skidded logs to Yesler’s mill. Doc Maynard took over and the red light district became legendary.

The New York Times has published, in Marilyn Monroe’s own handwriting, her recipe for stuffing. Unbuckle your belts! It uses French bread, sausage, dried herbs, two hard boiled eggs and lots of raisins. Sounds disgusting but the Times intrepid food writer reports that it is divine.

The writer theorizes that Marilyn was recording a dish tasted at the home of her DiMaggio inlaws. We don’t know if she ever made it. All we know for sure is that for at least the several minutes it took for her to copy it down, this is a dish she wanted to make.

Was Marilyn a big fan of stuffing? During her lean years, when she was  trying to break into the movies and her figure was her calling card, she stayed slim by eating steak tartare.  During this period of time she also lifted weights, and jogged.

But the young starlet chapter of her life is getting ahead of the story I want to tell. The Oregon connection I’m focusing on happened before she met Joe DiMaggio, before the steak tartare, before she was even Marilyn Monroe.

It happened in 1945, when her full name was Norma Jean Baker Dougherty. She was 19 years old.  Her husband was overseas in the Merchant Marine, and she was working as a model in Los Angeles. That  summer she took a job which required her to travel with the photographer to Washington State. They stopped for pictures on Mt. Hood.

Either before the shoot or after it, I don’t know which, they drove into Portland so Norma Jean could visit her mother, Gladys Pearl Monroe Baker.

Gladys Baker had just moved in with her Portland aunt, Dora Hogan Graham. Dora had agreed to spend a year supervising Gladys’ transition to independence after nine years in California’s mental health care system. Norma Jean, excited by the prospect of her mother’s restored health, was hoping to catch up on lost time.

Q: What kind of mother was Gladys Baker?

A: Gladys Baker early on recognized that her mental illness meant that Norma Jean needed to be cared for by others. She selected professional foster parents, and visited her daughter on weekends. She worked for the studios as a film cutter to support herself and her child. At one point, she tried to integrate the role of mother into her life, and brought Norma Jean home to live with her. Within a year, she suffered a complete breakdown and was committed.

Gladys Baker petitioned energetically to be allowed to leave the hospital. Everyone hoped that with Dora’s help she could hold down a housekeeping job in Portland and manage on “the outside”.

Norma Jean was a beautiful, intelligent, emotionally hungry teenager with a husband, and a start on a career for which she showed unusual talent. She had seen her mother only once in past nine years.

I believe what happened next shaped the rest of her life.

She came in the door with presents. Lots of presents.

But Gladys had just one request: Get me out of here.

This photo was taken one year later.

That’s Gladys in front.

She was living in Los Angeles with Norma Jean, who  peeks out from between her legal guardian, Grace McKee, and Ana Lower, Grace McKee’s aunt. The woman with the dark hair and dubious expression is Enid Knebelkamp, Grace’s sister. Grace, Ana and Enid had each served, in turn, as foster parents to Norma Jean during the nine years Gladys was hospitalized. The young woman on the far left is Berniece Baker Miracle, Norma Jean’s half-sister, who was visiting from Florida. The child is Mona Rae Miracle, Berniece’s daughter.

This all female crew was twenty year old Norma Jean’s posse.

It was during this brief summer of family togetherness – living with a mother she barely knew and a sister she just met –  that Norma Jean dyed her hair, ditched her husband (who wanted to veto her career), signed a studio contract, and changed her name.

At the end of the summer, Berniece and Mona Rae went back to Florida. Gladys returned to Portland (she would later come back to LA to stay). Norma Jean entered the Hollywood studio system, where she enacted the dazzling, unexpectedly brilliant, stupefyingly tragic work of performance art known as Marilyn Monroe.

Things You Didn’t Know About Marilyn Monroe: As soon as Norma Jean became Marilyn, she began helping support her mother, eventually moving her to LA’s best care facility. She covered all her mother’s bills for the rest of her life. She provided instructions for continuing this support in her will.

Gladys Baker lived to be 82. She died in 1984.

Which brings us back to the stuffing.

Marilyn Monroe’s attraction to this recipe, and to Joe DiMaggio’s large Italian family, is not so surprising, considering the role family ties played in her own life. Of the twenty people the recipe is intended to feed, Marilyn may have pictured, in her mind’s eye, chairs set around the table for her mother, her sister, her sister’s family, and perhaps, one day, all the little DiMaggios she and Joe were going to have.

We don’t know if she ever made this recipe. We do know she never had that dinner.

If you want to take time out from making the gravy and pie crusts today, you can read more about Marilyn’s relationship with her birth family in My Sister Marilyn: A Memoir Of Marilyn Monroe, by Berniece Baker Miracle (pictured below) and Mona Rae Miracle. Deep within this unusually frank portrait of how mental illness impacted one American family is buried the story of Marilyn Monroe’s brief but pivotal Oregon visit.

I began suspecting  Oregon artists Marne Lucas and Bruce Conkle of being secretly French when they invented Eco Baroque. But here’s a few reasons to entertain the theory that all Oregonians share their hidden dual identity:

1. Wine

2. Food

3. Movies

4. Mass transit

5. Public spaces (beaches, parks, Pioneer Square)

6. Focus on quality of life (see above)

How French is Oregon?

The first ever Palme d’Or (as adjudged in 2003) went to a film based on work by an Oregon author.

In 1939, a brand new film festival on the French Riviera at Cannes was cancelled due to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. In 2003, Cannes went back and revisited the list of films that would have competed that year. That jury awarded the Palme d’Or to Union Pacific (above), directed by Cecil B. DeMille and based on a novel by Portland author Ernest Haycox.

Currently, four Oregon directors are much beloved in France.

#1: James Ivory (Klamath Falls), 6 nominations for the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Winner of Cannes 45th Anniversary Special Award for Howard’s End(1992).

#2: Gus Van Sant (Portland), 3 nominations for the Palme D’Or at Cannes. Winner forElephant(2003). Winner of the Cannes 60th Anniversary Special Award for Paranoid Park(2007).

#3: Bill Plympton (Oregon City), 2 nominations for the Palme d’Or at Cannes. His latest feature, Idiots and Angels (2009), received theatrical release in France, and was seen all across that country.

#4: Penny Allen (Portland), whose latest film,The Soldier’s Tale (2007), has been seen by more filmgoers in France than America. It was a recent hit at the Nyon Festival Visions du Reel.

Oregon is so French, Bill Plympton says that everyone in France accepts without question the immediate assumption that Pink Martini is a French band.

I am one of the many who believe Keanu Reeves comes from a superior race on another planet.  The Visitant has made five Oregon films so far. Please alert me if there are others.

Permanent Record (1988)

Point Break (1991)

My Own Private Idaho (1991)

Even Cowgirls Get The Blues (1993)

Thumbsucker (2005)

In honor of the Film Preservation Blogathon, Oregon Movies, A to Z asked Dennis Nyback to talk about nitrate film. Nyback was a union projectionist in Seattle before opening his own movie theater in 1979, which started him on an international career as a collector and curator.

1. When/where/how did you learn to project nitrate film?

I was never taught to project nitrate film. I was taught to project 35mm film. I had one lesson on “threading” the projector and making a change over. After that I learned on the job. After about six months I really knew what I was doing.

At that time if I had been handed a reel of nitrate film I would have had no idea what it was. Cursory inspection of a reel of nitrate and a reel of safety film would not reveal any difference. The weight and dimensions are the same.  Both would be projected in exactly the same way.  Only later did I find that looking at the edge codes for the words”safety” or “nitrate”  would reveal the difference. Tearing off a piece at the end and lighting it with a match is another way to check.   Safety film will slowly melt.  Nitrate will burst into flames.

I did learn about nitrate, but in a more casual way.

After I got into the Seattle projectionist union in 1977, I worked in many theaters that had been built during the nitrate days.  Those projection booths had metal lined walls and ceilings, guillotine type shutters for the projection port windows, and “heat fuse linked” metal chains hanging over the projectors.  The chains were connected through rollers to heavy weights and then to the shutters.  The chain was also connected to the projection booth door.  In the event of a nitrate fire the heat would melt the the “fuse” and the weights would drop, the port windows would all slam down and the door would slam shut. It was a neat system, since a fire in either projector would have the same result.  The idea was that the metal walls and ceiling would contain the fire, and only the projectionist would die if he didn’t get to the door fast enough.

In just about every booth I worked in I found this archaic system still in place.  It wasn’t in the way, so there was no reason to do remove it.

Two projectors were used because film came on twenty minute, two thousand foot, reels.  Every twenty minutes the projectionist would change from one projector to the other. The crowd had no idea what was going on.  With the advent of Xenon projection lamps which replaced  the carbon arc system, automation became the norm. Automation used a single projector. The film would be spliced together to run continuously from opening title through the credits. I became curious about the heat fuses and shutters and stuff and was told by older operators about nitrate film. Like everyone else, I assumed that nitrate had been discontinued over safety concerns.

It was my buying a very old 16mm film in the early eighties that led to the correction of my error. It was an original World War I newsreel.

I asked the projectionist Doug Stewart if this 16mm print could be nitrate.  He told me there had never been any 16mm nitrate. I asked him, if they had safety film that long ago – in World War I – why did they keep using nitrate into the fifties?

Doug said “Because it  looked better.”

Nitrate film had a very high silver content.  If you see it on the screen you’ll be struck at how black the black is.  If you pause to think, you’ll realize that you’d never really seen black in a motion picture before. Safety film is literally a pale imitation of the gold standard of nitrate.

Television cut into the profits of the studios in the fifties. Before that there was never a need to cut corners by getting rid of nitrate.  At the same time the Hollywood studios were searching for ways to keep the profits up, introducing Cinemascope, 3-D, and stereo sound, they were dumping nitrate for the cheaper safety film. If you think about, if nitrate was so dangerous, why did we end up tearing down most of the old movie palaces, when they should have burned down by themselves long before that.

2. Did you ever have any close calls, safety wise?

I would generally stand by with a fire extinguisher in my hand just in case whenever I would project a nitrate print ( Ed. note: he means from his own collection).   No, I never had a problem.  Nitrate film first used during the first twenty years of the century was much more flammable than later nitrate.  The early years were when most of the nitrate fires happened.  The really big fires occurred in film storage buildings.  That is one reason so many films from that era are now lost.  The newer nitrate was generally referred to as “safety nitrate.”

There were other safety measures to prevent nitrate fires.  The projectors had ‘fire rollers.”  Those were rollers at the top and the bottom of the projectors that were calibrated to snuff out any burning film that passed through them.  In most instances they worked well and the take-up (bottom) reel almost never caught fire.  The greater risk was the fire would jump to the top reel.  A fire would almost always start with the film jamming in the film gate with the heat of the projection light igniting it.

In most instances there would be flash of flame and then it would go out. If it jumped to the top reel the fire shutters would slam shut.  A projector also had a “fire shutter.”  That was device that blocked the projection light from going through the gate.  As the projector gained speed it would rise up.  If the projector stopped it would drop down.

Most of the heat in a projector came from the light.  The shape of the projected picture is cut down from round to square by the “aperture” plate, which is in the projection gate.  It would get very hot. Projectors in the bigger theaters were “water cooled”.  Water would run from a pipe in the wall through steel or copper lines  to cool the gate. The film reels were also contained in a metal housing with a door that swung open  to enter or replace a reel. In most modern theaters the doors were often removed just to make the job a little easier.

The Stanford Theater in Palo Alto has been running nitrate prints for the last thirty years.  Last year it had a fire.  Apparently all the safety measures worked and the fire was contained in the projection booth.   Most of the damage was caused by the water sprinkler system.

3. Did you ever hear of other projectionists who had close calls?

On my website, you can read a story I wrote about a nitrate incident that happened in Seattle in the thirties.  The story was told to me by the projectionist Ash Bridgeham.  I trained with Ash at the Duwamish Drive-In Theater at the same time I was working at the Green Parrot Theater.  Ash had entered the projectionist union in 1927.

There was another funny nitrate story from the Embassy Theater.  I worked there in the early eighties.  There was a big dent in the metal ceiling above the toilet in the corner of the projection booth.  The story was that a reel of nitrate had caught fire and the projectionist had grabbed it and tossed into the toilet and the toilet had exploded.  A new toilet was installed.  A while later the projectionist was cleaning his gun, or something like that, when it went off.  The bullet struck the toilet and broke it a second time. The dent was either from a piece of the first toilet, or the second, hitting the ceiling.

I worked with dozens of old guys who had run nitrate.  Those are only actual fire stories I ever heard.

The stuff didn’t just burst into flames by itself.  You should realize, movie theaters weren’t the only places where nitrate film showed up.  It was the film stock shot and processed all over the world.  It was routinely shipped on trains, boats and planes.  I have some of the old containers used to ship nitrate prints.  The only difference between them, and newer containers, is the presence of stickers saying to keep the container away from open flame.  The tank of gas in your car is a lot more dangerous than a nitrate film print.

4. You said you preferred jobs projecting nitrate. Why?

I never said I preferred jobs projecting nitrate. There were no jobs projecting nitrate.  It wasn’t just from another era, it was against the law. What I did prefer was to show movies with carbon arc light.  When Ash Bridgham retired in 1980, the Duwamish Drive-in closing down, the projectionist union president, Tommy Waters Jr., wrote “All the different forms of automation are upon us here in Seattle. We have only five theaters left that are manually operated with carton arcs.”  I think I worked at all of them.  I ran carbon arc reel to reel at the Moore Egyptian, Embassy, Duwamish, Bellvue,  Northgate, Southgate and King, theaters, and maybe some others.  To me it was the standard, as opposed to exotic.

I first used carbon arc at the Moore in 1975.   The last place I ran carbon arcs was at the King Theater in the early nineties.  That was a 70mm house.  Many smaller or medium size theaters used copper clad carbons that were 8 and 9mm.  Those were about as big around as a pencil.  Big theaters used 13s and 14s.  Those rods would be as big around as your thumb.  One of my great pleasures was running Lawence of Arabia in 70mm with those huge carbon arcs putting the beautiful light on the screen.

5. Can you explain the mechanics of carbon arc projectors? Is it true that the image on the screen comes from a complex interplay of fire and water, light and dark, dream and material reality — all interacting in real time within the projection booth, under the supervision of a real live human being? Tell us how it works.

You got that right!   Film is a very tangible thing.  You can hold it in your hands. You can look at it against a light and see the picture.   It is for all intents a series of photographs, or more properly, photographic slides.  It is a directly captured moment in time.  Digital looks at an image  and breaks it into little pieces and then puts it back together again.  It is the difference between a Vermeer and a jigsaw puzzle.

I already mentioned the water cooled gate.  The fire is from the carbon arc light.  To put the picture on the screen you have to set it in motion at 90 feet per minute.  It is carried through the projector by spinning teethed sprockets meshing  with sprocket holes on the edges of the film.   If you projected a beam through the film outside the gate you would have a blur.  The film has to stop briefly  while it is running.  Below the gate is what is called the intermittant sprocket.  There are four sprocket holes per individual frame of film.  The intermittant pulls the film down four sprocket holes and  pauses and does that 24 times per second. .At the same time a shutter is cutting off the carbon arc light 24 times per second to coincide with the pull down movement of the intermittant.  The light only passes through the film when it is stopped.  There is a brief flash of dark every time the shutter cuts the light.  Something called “persistence of vision” keeps you from noticing that.

Carbon arc lamps have a small open flame that burns very very bright.  Old search lights used carbon arcs.  If you see old movies of search lights scanning the sky you are seeing how a carbon arc light could put a light on an airplane in the sky.  Spotlights in theaters, such as the Super Troupers, used carbon arc.

The way it works is that inside the lamp house  two rods, held by metal teeth,  would face each other across a short gap. The rods are placed there by the projectionist with the lamp house door open.  That was called “trimming” the lamp. The door is then closed.  Each rod is connected to direct current electricity from a rectifier.  A switch turns on the current.  The projectionist  gives a knob, about the size of a door knob, a quick  turn, which kisses the two rods together,  a flame is created, and then with the a quick reverse of the  wrist movement,  pulls the rods apart just enough to keep the flame arcing between them.  A concave mirror in the back of the lamp house turns the arc light to a reflected beam. The beam goes through a condenser lens, the motion picture film, the projection lens, and puts the the picture on the screen.

The rods consume themselves as they burn.  A small motor in the lamp house moves them inexorably together as they use themselves up.  You can monitor the arc through a dark view window and adjust it, if it varies from perfect.  If you were to look at the open flame you’d  be blind in nothing flat.   The lamp houses have little metal chimneys on the top of them for the smoke to go out .  Underneath the arc is usually a small removable square pan.  The copper casing on the rods fall off in drips.  The drippings fall into the pan.  In most booths there would be a coffee can at the base of the lamp to toss the copper drippings into.   The copper in the cans  would then be collected at the union hall and sold as scrap.  The proceeds went  to the Jimmy Fund.  Most booths had a sign spelling out the practice.  In the days when every theater in America used carbon arcs, the era extending into the early seventies, the drippings generated real money for the charity.

Carbon arc was replaced by Xenon starting in the fifies.  A xenon lamp is more or less a very bright light bulb.  The carbon arc rods were petroleum based.  When the first oil embargo happened in 1974 the price of carbons doubled and it was downhill from there.   A xenon lamp also doesn’t need to be trimmed.  It just turns on and off and gets replaced every three thousand or so hours.

There is an aesthetic  difference in the lights.  Carbon arc is warmer and more representative across the color spectrum.  Xenon often has a cold, blue tinge to it, some more so than others. You might not notice it in a multiplex. At the Film Forum in New York City they do reel changes with xenon lamps.  The color difference between the two projectors is jarring, especially with black and white film.   Xenon lamps were the first nail in the coffin for the projectionists.  Automation followed and the projectionist unions shriveled up and died. In the early days of movies the films were hand cranked.  There was also no motor advancement for the carbon arcs.  It generally took two operators, one to crank the projector, and one to feed the carbon.  The reels then were only 1000 feet, or ten minutes each.  It must have been a choreographed art to have the carbon feeder, at the end of a reel,  move to the second projector, strike the lamp, and crank the next reel up to speed for the change over.

6. As a private collector yourself, are there any nitrate films you want to see preserved, or lament because they were not preserved?

Any nitrate film should be preserved as long as it is in good condition and runnable.  It is possible to open a can that once held a reel of nitrate and find only dust inside.As the film deteriorates the more flammable it becomes.  There is a lot of old nitrate out there that is all that remains of  specific films. A tremendous number of silent films are unaccounted for.  The Vitaphone Project has done a great job in getting nitrate originals married with their sound discs and then printed as safety film.  They have a backlog of projects that are waiting funding.  There are tons of nitrate prints in a bunker in Denmark.  Hard to say how much is squirreled away in various other places around the world.  All of my nitrate prints are now in LA in a special warehouse for nitrate.

I’d like to see nitrate routinely screened.  The Hollywood directors in the silent era and into the fifties were masters of lighting.  All of their calculations were predicated on nitrate film being the conduit of their vision.  You might be knocked down by the visual beauty by a Hitchcock, Ford, Hawks, Borzage, Murnau, or other old Hollywood film you see now, but you aren’t seeing the film as the director intended it, or as the audiences first saw it when it came out.

Do I lament things not preserved?  Here is a specific story.   In the late nineties I was at the 6th avenue and 26th Street flea market in New York on a brutally hot summer day.  On an open table, baking under the sunlight, were dozens of old film cans.  I opened one can up and found a good condition silent nitrate reel.  I opened another can and found a good sound reel.   I went to the guy in charge of the table and offered him a hundred bucks for everything on the table.  He refused the offer.  That meant I had to look into more of the cans.  I found that maybe half of the cans contained dust, or deterioration.  I walked back to the guy and told him my offer was now fifty bucks for everything on the table.  I also told him it was nitrate film and shouldn’t be out in the sunlight.  He told me that if no one bought the film that day they would take it back to their store and I should check in on Wednesday, the next day they’d be open.

On Wednesday I went there.  I was told that they had freaked out about the film and had thrown it away the day before.  Hard to say what was in the cans. There might have been a print of Hats Off.  Too bad we’ll never know.

7. Anything else you want to say?

The last time I showed films at the Roxy Theater in SF I saw that they still used carbon arcs.  I hope they still do.  I would imagine there are a few more places in the United States clinging to the old technology.

When I owned my own theaters I would occasionally project nitrate for a very lucky few.  The last time I did that was at a theater I cannot name where I did a day of “secret cinema.”   It’s too bad we couldn’t spell out just how really secret it was.   The last time one of my nitrate prints was publicly screened was by accident.  It was an event at a theater doing a program of old films projected with live music accompaniment.  I had provided twenty minutes of 35mm and forty minutes of 16mm for the show.  The people putting it on really liked the 35mm material better.  I was in Europe showing films at the time, so a friend who had a key to my  film storage let them in to grab some more 35mm.

Later I heard from someone who had been to the show who told me that  she had loved one of the films.   I asked which one.  I was told “The boxing one, it looked so beautiful.”   Wow, the only boxing film I had was a nitrate original ten minute short.  Just by luck it was one that was grabbed and projected.  Luckily, no one was hurt.

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The National Film Preservation Foundation is the independent, nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America’s film heritage. They work directly with archives to rescue endangered films that will not survive without public support.

The NFPF will give away 4 DVD sets as thank-you gifts to blogathon donors chosen in a random drawing: Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934 and Treasures IV: American Avant Garde Film, 1947-1986.

Here’s where you can give generously to the National Film Preservation Foundation.