It has been quite a year for Oregon film history buffs!

Oregon used to confine its film history love to an annual celebration of The Goonies in Astoria.

But in the past year……

Katherine Wilson made Animal House of Blues (2012)

Allison Elwood & Alex Gibney made Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place (2011)

Alexia Anastasio made Adventures In Plymptoons: A documentary on the art and animation of Bill Plympton (2011)

Umatilla County Historical Society screened Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty Men (1952)

Deschutes County Historical Society screened Jacques Tourneur’s Canyon Passage (1946)

Clinton Street Theater screened Don Zavin’s Fast Break (1977)

Oregon Cartoon Institute screened Lew Cook’s The Little Baker (c. 1925)

Brian McWhorter composed and performed a new score for Ed’s Coed (1929)

John Paul plans to tour, conducting his original chamber orchestra score for F. W. Murnau’s City Girl (1930)

Matt McCormick re-issued the Peripheral Produce AUTO-CINEMATIC Video Mix Tape (1996) on DVD

Miranda July saluted her Peripheral Produce days with a Portland-centric screening at the Hollywood

David Walker lectured on Portland’s B Movies

Oregon Cartoon Institute brought Robert Johnston to lecture on Mel Blanc’s Portland

Matt Love wrote Sometimes A Great Movie

Dan Fiebiger wrote a history of Oregon filmmaker Tom Shaw

Bill Plympton wrote Independently Animated: Bill Plympton: The Life and Art of the King of the Indies

Anne Richardson presented Oregon Goes To The Oscars at Oregon Historical Society

Ken Nolley hosted a One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) retrospective in Salem

Northwest Film Center hosted mini-retrospectives of Will Vinton, Joanna Priestley, Chel White, Lawrence Johnson, Kelley Baker, Ron Finne (with Jim Blashfield upcoming ) at the Whitsell Auditorium

Anne Richardson introduced the Dill Pickle Club’s Portland film lecture series with David Walker, David Cress, Walt Curtis, Shawn Levy, Jim Blashfield, Brooke Jacobson, Matt McCormick, Joanna Priestley, Joan Gratz, Rose Bond, Tom Robinson, Tom Chamberlin, Dennis Nyback.

Michele Kribs secured National Film Preservation Board protection for The Boy Mayor (1914)

Mary Erickson’s University of Oregon dissertation on independent filmmaking in the Pacific Northwest went online

Heather Petrocelli completed her masters thesis about the Center For The Moving Image at PSU

Lucy Burningham wrote about Oregon film history in the Bend based magazine 1859

Stan Hall wrote about Oregon film history in OMPA’s annual directory

And tomorrow, Portland Monthly’s November 2012 issue hits the stands with an article by yours truly, Anne Richardson, about Portland’s history of  independent filmmaking.

SCORECARD:

Number of new films: 3

Number of new books: 2

Number of new scores to silent films:  2

Number of articles:  3

Number of academic papers: 2

Number of public lectures: 15

Number of retrospectives: 9

Number of public screenings of historic films: 4

Number of films permanently protected by the Library of Congress: 1

Sandra Osawa kicked off the trend with Pepper’s Pow Wow, her profile of Jim Pepper, in 1996. Since then there’s been a steep increase in the number of films about Oregon artists.

Mel Blanc, Mel Blanc: The Man Of 1,000 Voices (2008)

Walt Curtis, Salmon Poet (2009), Walt Curtis: Peckerneck Poet (1997)

Ken Kesey, Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place (2011)

Morten Lauridsen, Shining Night: A Portrait of Composer Morten Lauridsen (2012)

Henk Pander, Painted Life (2005)

Bill Plympton, Adventures In Plymptoons (2011)

Jim Pepper, Pepper’s PowWow (1996)

Elliott Smith, Heaven Adores You (2014)

Gary Snyder, The Practice Of The Wild (2010)

William Stafford, Every War Has Two Losers (2011)

Docs in progress: James Blue, Richard Brautigan, Ursula LeGuin, Homer Davenport

Ones I’d like to commission: James Ivory, Johnnie Ray, Jane Powell, PhiI Moore, Curtis Salgado, Doc Severinsen, CarI Barks, BasiI WoIverton, WiII Vinton

While we’re waiting for a documentary about Johnnie Ray, here’s a 1953 film which spoofs him, about a pop singer who is suspiciously similar to Ray.

Please send in ones I have missed!

I first met Bill Plympton at the Oregon Book Awards. He arrived at the Scottish Rites Temple with Walt Curtis, who was wearing a tie and jacket several sizes too large, his hair in its signature white aureole around his poet’s brow. Walt was with Marjorie, his long time friend and familiar. They entered single file, circling around the back of the room.

I was at the refreshments table, eating miniature cream puffs. Bill joined me, and we began discussing the evening’s awards, our shared New York City citizenship,  and fact that I had been to a party he gave in New York some years before, although neither he nor I remembered anything about it. We stood there talking these things over, and I remember realizing that I was thinking of things to say so that I could continue eating cream puffs, and furthermore, that he was doing the same thing. That was my bonding experience with Bill Plympton. Eating cream puffs, waiting for Ken Kesey to receive a lifetime achievement award, and silently plotting how to meet Walt Curtis.

The next time I met Bill Plympton, I was with Walt Curtis, taking him around New York.  Walt had come to give a live introduction to Peckerneck Poet, the feature length documentary Bill had made about him. Bill didn’t come to the screening, so Walt and I visited him the following day, on the roof of the building which held his studio in Chelsea. We sat around in the dusk of the city, and talked. I had picked Walt up at Bill’s apartment. It was spare and featureless, the home of a man who was never home.

The third time I met Bill Plympton was at his annual summer gathering on the banks of the Clackamas River, on his parents’ property. He was demonstrating to a young child how to use a water cannon which shot great burst of water. His mother had waved us down to the path to the river, telling us to look out for the llama. Bill was everywhere, a solicitous host. There was no hostess, although there were several women in bathing suits who were jostling for position next to Bill.

The fourth time I met Bill Plympton was at a party in SE Portland. I had come specifically to invite him to speak at a film festival the following spring. It sounds as if I only go to parties to proposition people, and that’s pretty much true. So be forewarned, when you see me at a party. Bill listened, and said yes. From that moment on, I no longer met Bill as a distant friend of a friend. By asking Bill to speak at the festival, I had invited him to join me in some serious work. This is the way to Bill’s heart, to be hard at work on something. Bill understands work. He works all the time. How else can he draw all the tens of thousands of frames he needs to complete a feature length film? Bill lives in his work. It vivifies him. Once he and I were working together on something, all the other pretexts, the cream puffs, the water cannons, the Manhattan rooftops, fell away. We achieved perfect communion in the shared vision of work. So I have been privileged to collaborate with Bill. This is what it feels like to work with an Academy Award nominated director.

It feels like this:

Bill is practical.

Bill is concise.

Bill is effective.

Here’s the things he is not:  he is not neurotic, not self aggrandizing, not long suffering, not wasteful, and not filled with false modesty.

He is extremely focused.

Bill showed me something I hadn’t known before. It is possible to carry on an extended, productive conversation with an extremely busy person IF you are willing to grab it during interstitial moments. In the months Dennis and I planned the festival Bill was coming to, he gave us more input than I dreamed he would have time to give. Some of it came over the phone from New York.  Some of it came during brief moments we could grab while he was in transit from one place to another. We talked during a ride he needed to the airport, or between courses during a dinner he was having with friends at Jake’s, or between speaking gigs at the Ashland Independent Film Festival. He wasn’t multitasking, he was eliminating empty spots in his day. Why do nothing, when he could consult with us and improve our film festival? So that’s what he did.

At the festival, Gus Van Sant tapped Bill to present James Ivory with the Oregon Sesquicentennial Lifetime Achievement Award. I knew Bill was jet lagged, so tired he could barely stay awake, so I was surprised at the end when he asked James Ivory the final question of the evening: what is your dream project? what film would you most like to make?

I never knew that film directors wondered these things about each other.

James Ivory said the film he next wanted to make was a love story set in Peru. He told us “I want people to clutch at their hearts at the beauty I’ve made.” After the festival, perhaps not coincidentally, Gus’ next film was a love story. Bill’s next film, which he is still drawing, is a love story

All of Bill’s films may well be love stories. The stories are getting deeper, the love more mysterious and spiritual. It is as if Bill, having grown accustomed to sharing his innermost sexual fantasies in vivid, comic detail, has become so divested of inhibition that there is nothing to stop him from sharing his deepest worries, his sorrows, his pain and his soul. In Idiots and Angels, the story is so large, so expansive and so filled with grief, that it requires three endings.

Since the festival, Bill has written two books, toured the world with an award winning short, adopted an entirely new identity as a film preservationist, started an animation school, and transformed himself into a married man. And all the while, he continues to draw his next feature. I won’t say “I don’t see how he does this!” I do see how he does this. He takes everything he does very seriously. He likes to work. He likes the people he works with, he is a clear communicator, and he doesn’t waste time. Bill’s  formula for filmmaking success, repeated to audiences around the world,  is “short, fast and cheap.”

Excuse me, Bill, but what an act of artistic camouflage!  Some of your films may meet these three criteria, but your entire career defies that description.  I write this appreciation as a salute to that fact.

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Photo credit: Shawn Levy took the photo of James Ivory, Gus Van Sant, Bill Plympton and Mike Rich on May 1, 2009 at Marylhurst University’s Oregon Sesquicentennial Film Festival.

“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.

Oregon Cartoon Institute is holding its second public meeting on Sunday, Feb. 12, at 2:00 PM at 5th Avenue Cinema.

All friends and fans of Oregon Cartoon Institute are invited. If you think you might belong to this group, you do.

The agenda includes a brief introduction to the all volunteer Institute, and a discussion of what is up next. We’ll have announcements from the Mel Blanc Project and the Homer Davenport Project, some proposals to consider, and some hand outs to take home.

Reminder: last time the Institute met, Dennis Nyback supplied home made refreshments.

This year our featured attraction is a rare screening of The Little Baker, a stop motion animation short by early Portland filmmaker Lewis Clark Cook (1909 – 1983). We will also screen a ten-minute profile of Cook, made for OPB in the early 1980’s by Portland artist Jim Blashfield.

Michele Kribs, who was trained by Cook to succeed him as head of Oregon Historical Society’s Moving Image Archive, will be in attendance.

In the photo above, use of which was generously made possible by the Oregon Historical Society, Lew Cook is 15 years old. That is his own 35mm camera. A doting aunt, knowing that he was in love with the movies, bought it for him. He quit selling newspapers and went to work as a newsreel photographer.

Top Four Reasons You Might Want To See The Little Baker:

4. Cook made his living as an independent filmmaker using more tricks than you can imagine. Just as Bill Plympton turned down Disney, Lew Cook turned down Warner Brothers. He chose independence. Besides Plympton, the other Portland filmmakers who followed Cook’s lead include Homer Groening, Will Vinton, Joan Gratz, Jim Blashfield, Gus Van Sant, Rose Bond and  Joanna Priestley.

3. The Little Baker was made “in the 1920’s” which means Cook could have made it anywhere between age 11 and age 20. Come help us sleuth out clues as to whether this is the work of a hard working child or an uninhibited adult.

2.  No one else you know has seen this film.

1. Although you may think The Little Baker inspired Will Vinton to consider clay animation, what actually happened was that Will saw it after he had made his start with Closed Mondays. Nevertheless, there is some powerful history here. Who knows what it will inspire you to do!

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This event is a partnership between Oregon Cartoon Institute, Oregon Historical Society and 5th Avenue Cinema.

Thank you to Kerry Tymchuk, Michele Kribs and Scott Rook of Oregon Historical Society.

Thank you to Heather Petrocelli of 5th Avenue Cinema and PSU’s Public History Interest Group.

Pittsburgh has George Romero, Baltimore has John Waters, and Boulder has the memory of Stan Brakhage.

Portland has Gus Van Sant, Bill Plympton, Matt Groening, Mike Richardson, Jon Raymond, Aaron Katz, Chel White, Jacob & Arnold Pander, James Westby, Jim Blashfield, Joan Gratz, Joanna Priestley, Matt McCormick, Rose Bond, Vanessa Renwick and Will Vinton.

Ever wonder why?

For cities wishing to replicate Portland’s densely populated cinematic scene, here’s a handy “how to” guide.

1.  Start early.

As soon as people were making films in New York and Fort Lee, they were making them in Portland. Portland’s first film studio, American Lifeograph, opened in 1910. That’s the same year movies came to Hollywood.

2. Have a show business friendly mayor.

During the 16 year tenure of theater-owner-turned-mayor George Baker, downtown Portland was wall to wall theaters. John Gilbert, Clark Gable, William Powell, Edward Everett Horton and Eugene Pallette are some of the actors who jumpstarted their acting careers on the Portland stage, some of them in Baker’s own stock company. It was Baker who renamed Seventh Avenue “Broadway”.

3. Support innovation.

Oregon’s oldest source of print media, The Oregonian, responded to the puzzling new medium of radio by setting up a station, KGW, right in their own building, the Oregonian Tower. Radio later served as an Early Warning System to identify the talent of Portlanders-gone-Hollywood Mel Blanc, Suzanne Burce (renamed Jane Powell by MGM) and Johnnie Ray.

4. Grow your own film processing lab.

After WWII, Portland inventor Frank Hood went to work for a brand new electronics firm (originally conceived as a radio supply store) named Tektronix. He processed films he made for them, after losing patience with the delays of sending films to out of town labs. Eventually, he went into business as Teknifilm Lab. A filmmaker himself, he acted as teacher and mentor to customers. More important to the development of independent filmmaking in Portland:  Hood’s lax attitude toward payment schedules, which subsidized generations of Oregon artists working in film.

5. Provide a home for an exiled Hollywood film scholar.

Andries Deinum came to Portland during the blacklist. His vision of film as a mode of social discourse laid the groundwork for PSU’s Center For The Moving Image, housed in Lincoln Hall. Jim Blashfield, Bill Plympton, and Matt Groening were among the faithful attendees of the Center’s influential screening series, run by the Portland State Film Committee.

6. Provide a day job for the guy who wants to mentor the guy who wants to revive the archaic art form of stop motion animation.

Homer Groening led a dual life – ad man by day and experimental filmmaker by night. He had a family, a home, and his own business doing what he loved – and he did it all without leaving Portland. Aspiring filmmaker Will Vinton paid attention, and followed suit. His career, like Groening’s, would encompass both television commercials and art house films, but on a much larger scale.

7. Work with, not against, a pair of cinema addled students who want to start a regional film center.

When Sheldon Renan succeeded in persuading National Endowment for the Arts to seed regional filmmaking, they went looking for the right person to submit a grant for a film center in Portland. They were pointed to Brooke Jacobson and Bob Summers, members of the Portland State Film Committee. Brooke and Bob wrote the grant, Portland Art Museum acted as fiscal sponsor, and the Northwest Film Center went into business. This year marks its 40th anniversary.

8. Work with, not against, a visionary film preservationist who wants to create a moving image archive.

Lew Cook was trained as a newsreel photographer by the first generation of Portland filmmakers. His stop motion film, The Little Baker, made circa 1925, proved prophetic when it came to Portland’s future claim to cinema history. He and Thomas Vaughn conceived Oregon Historical Society’s moving image archive, and Cook personally trained the preservationist, Michele Kribs, who currently presides over it.

To re-cap: by the end of the 1970’s, Portland had a film program at Portland State University, a film archive at Oregon Historical Society, and a regional film festival (now the NWFF) located at Portland Art Museum. That nucleus of film creativity on the park blocks was balanced by a film processing lab, an emerging animation studio, and a warehouse waiting to be filled with  filmmakers’ offices over in northwest Portland. No one entity owned the scene – the infrastructure and the support system served all comers.

The following timeline concentrates on factors which contributed to a culture where independent filmmakers supported each other in Portland. It does not address the important role played by Hollywood productions shooting in Oregon. The symbiotic role of Hollywood and the Indies in Portland is embodied in the career of Gus Van Sant who slips and slides with ease between these two worlds.

A timeline:

American Lifeograph founded 1910

Lewis Moomaw makes The Chechacos 1924

Lew Cook makes The Little Baker c1925

PGE makes It Can Be Done c1936

Tektronix founded 1946

Frank Hood founds Teknifilm Lab, early 1950’s

Andries Deinum arrives 1957

Homer Groening starts his own ad agency 1958

Center For The Moving Image founded 1965

Bob Summers and Brooke Jacobson found Northwest Film Center 197o, with a push from Sheldon Renan

Tim Smith and Matt Groening make Drugs: Killers or Dillers 1972

Ron Finne, Tom Taylor and Brooke Jacobson found Northwest Media Project 1974

Will Vinton and Bob Gardiner make Closed Mondays 1974

Don Zavin makes Fast Break 1977

Penny Allen makes Property 1977

Rose Bond makes Gaia’s Dream 1982

Gus Van Sant makes Mala Noche 1985

Bill Plympton makes Your Face 1987

Matt Groening makes The Simpsons 1987

Jim Blashfield makes Leave Me Alone 1988

Joan Gratz makes Mona Lisa Descending A Staircase 1992

Gus Van Sant makes Good Will Hunting 1997.

Vanessa Renwick makes The Yodeling Lesson 1998

Miranda July makes The Amateurist 1998

Chris Eyre makes Smoke Signals 1998

Will Vinton makes The PJ’s 1999

Travis Knight makes Coraline 2009

Jon Raymond writes & Neil Kopp produces Meek’s Cutoff 2010, one of five Oregon films at Sundance in 2011.

This post is dedicated to Portland filmmaker/film writer David Walker, who inspired it by raising the question “how rare is regional filmmaking, anyway?”

Mayor Sam Adams added to his collection of original portraits of Portland filmmakers last week, unveiling a brand new painting of Todd Haynes by Jasper Marks.

City Hall custodians grumbled about the amount of work they face – Portland’s active film scene means the entire wall will soon be filled. The Mayor did not announce whether Marks, who moonlights in another profession under the name Steven Cohn, would be asked to paint the entire series. Some people believe Arnold Pander may be approached to help out.

Here are the names of some of the directors who, taken in conglomerate, represent Portland’s cinematic wealth:

Aaron Katz

Brian Lindstrom

Chel White

David Weissman

Donal Mosher

Gus Van Sant

Irene Taylor Brodsky

Jacob & Arnold Pander

James Westby

Jim Blashfield

Joan Gratz

Joanna Priestley

Lance Bangs

Larry Johnson

Marilyn Zornado

Matt McCormick

Michael Palmieri

Mike Shiley

Peter D. Richardson

Rose Bond

Sue Arbuthnot

Vanessa Renwick

Will Vinton

It is because Sam Adams is only Mayor of Portland, and not Governor of the State of Oregon that the following filmmakers will escape inclusion on his Hall of Fame:

Alex Cox

Bruce Campbell

Bill Plympton

Chris Eyre

Matthew Lessner

James Ivory

James Longley

Shelley Jordon

Susan Saladoff

Caricature by Martinus Van Tee

Myth #1. Mel Blanc graduated from Lincoln High School in Portland, Oregon.

False! Lincoln High School has no record that Melvin Jerome Blanc ever graduated. He did attend.

Myth #2. Mel Blanc moved to Los Angeles in order to become a voice artist.

False! Mel Blanc already was a voice artist when he arrived in Los Angeles. His first professional gig was here in Portland, on KGW radio, in 1927.

Myth #3. Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Porky Pig formed the center of Mel Blanc’s professional universe.

False! Mel Blanc’s first love was radio, and he worked steadily in radio throughout his entire life.

Myth #4. Mel Blanc’s phenomenal talent was a freak of nature.

False! Mel Blanc worked hard to develop his talent. He conducted two parallel careers in Portland from 1927 to 1935: he was both a musician and  a radio performer. As a musician, he had front row seats (in the orchestra pit) to study the comic delivery of the nation’s top vaudeville comics, a group which included Jack Benny, with whom he would eventually work. As a radio performer, he spent 6 years on a nationally syndicated one hour weekly show at Portland’s KGW, and two years on his own daily one hour show – which he wrote, produced, and starred in – on Portland’s KEX. He was eight years into a show business career when he moved to Los Angeles.

Myth #5. Matt Groening, Oregon’s other animation supernova (who did graduate from Lincoln High School), idolizes Mel Blanc.

Not sure! Matt Groening has gone on record stating that Bill Plympton is God.

Here’s Mel Blanc himself, in a clip introduced by Dennis Nyback. Mel appears at 2:55.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This post brought to you by the Oregon Cartoon Institute in honor of Bugs Bunny’s 70th birthday.

From one of Walt Curtis‘ notebooks.

PART ONE, PORTLAND

Walt calls me up. “Anne, there’s a reading at Powell’s tonight. Do you want to go?” Hazel Hall was an invalid who wrote tiny jewel-like poems about the clothes she embroidered for rich people. She wrote poems about the people she saw walking past her window, about the sound of rain, about the sight of her own hands in moonlight. I want to hear her poems like I want a hole in the head. But I say yes. We get there and Walt, walking with his characteristic weave, escorts me to the only two empty seats. Walt’s unsteady walk is present all the time, making it difficult to tell when he is drunk and when he isn’t. As if in recognition of the confusion this can create, he occasionally produces a clarifying statement, such as “I’m drunk”, whenever this does happen to be the case. That he is able to state this fact without guilt or defiance, without self-pity or implied invitation – this is one of the Seven Wonders of Walt Curtis. Walt pulls a copy of the new Hazel Hall anthology from his pocket and silently underlines for me the lines which are his favorites with his thumb. One poem is coming at me from the podium, another one is being presented to me as a personal present by Walt. I see that the readers defer to Walt in their body language, and I am puzzled as to why this should be the case. True, Walt is a poet, but several other writers so identified are gathered in that room. I know this, since Walt whispers this information to me when they rise to read. Finally one of the readers, a young woman, thanks Walt directly for introducing her to Hall’s work. As the evening progresses, other speakers repeat her tribute. Hall died in 1924, and was completely forgotten when Walt picked up one of her books from a dusty box in Goodwill.  It was Walt, I learn, who, by writing about her, speaking about her, and advocating for the memorial which now stands in front of her house, inspired the renaissance of interest which resulted in the book which led to this reading. It is Walt, who does not teach writing (as does one reader), nor seek tenure (as does the editor of the anthology), nor write plays (what the young woman who thanked him does – she wrote one about Hall), who brought us all here tonight.  I have learned to let Walt drag me places.

Walt calls me up. “There’s an opening night party at Mark Woolley Gallery. Do you want to go?” I get there before he does. I wander from painting to painting. They are on black velvet, or what the gallery notes call “the luminous velvet painting medium”. All are portraits of the Black Velvet Woman. Arnold Pander loves the Black Velvet Woman, and paints her with a reverential respect. You know the tradition as well as I do. The Black Velvet Woman’s black velvet flesh is separated from the black velvet universe in which she eternally floats only by a thin glowing line of paint. She is always naked. She always has a slightly hungry expression on her face. Her nipples stick up but she is never cold. Illuminated by moonlight, she waits for you to come to her. But I know I am putting off what I really came to see. I brace myself and enter the second room.

I enter just as Marne Lucas, the other artist in the show, and the first known pornographer I have ever wittingly laid eyes upon, clatters past me. She is in her early thirties, and the first thing I notice about her is that she looks tired. She is an established erotic photographer, a career she pursues in tandem with her work as a model for fetish magazines, but she has never shown in a gallery before, so she is everywhere – introducing people and being hugged.

The last thing I expect of a pin up model is exhaustion. I know how women look in men’s magazines look – like soft, firm gumdrops.

They look out at you with trusting expressions, seemingly unaware that their clothes are in the process of becoming, right before your eyes, much too small for them. Really naughty pictures are of girls who look like they know what is going on. But most wear the same expression you see on a freshly baked cake. I knew instinctively, even at age ten, going through my brother’s Playboy magazines, that the virginal bakery cake girls were the ones to emulate. In real life, where the proportion seemed to be the exact inverse of what was portrayed in my brother’s magazines, it was the innocent ones who were in short supply. I hoped someday to number myself among them. I harbored the dream that one day I would find a gumdrop in the mirror looking back at me. Secretly, I despaired of ever becoming that innocent. I was already regularly reading the Playboy sex advice column. I read about the insatiability of women, in particular I read about the hazards of too much oral sex (“be careful, she may become dependent on it”). I was rapidly becoming as world weary as Marlene Dietrich. Who ever heard of an exhausted gumdrop? And yet here, thirty six years later, was the first professional gumdrop I ever saw in person, and that is exactly how she looked.

THINGS THAT GROW

by Hazel Hall

I like things with roots that know the earth,

Trees whose feet, nimble and brown,

Wander around in the house of their birth

Until they learn, by growing down,

To build with branches in the air;

Ivy-vines that have known the loam

And over trellis and rustic stair,

Or old grey houses, love to roam;

And flowers pushing vehement heads,

like flames from fire’s hidden glow,

through the seething soil in garden beds.

Yet I, who am forbidden to know

the feel of the earth, once thought to make

Singing out of the heart’s old cry?

Untaught by the earth how could I wake

The shining interest of the sky?

PART TWO, WILLIAMSBURG

My friend Andy takes me to a party in East Williamsburg in Brooklyn. We arrive with Andy’s nerves already shot because the group of twentysomethings we travelled with felt compelled to discuss, a bit too loudly for Andy’s taste, their (white) impressions of the (black) housing project through which they had to pass. The loft is packed. The entertainment begins. A woman takes the stage.

She is naked. She blows up a sex doll, and begins having rough abusive sex with it, taking the role of the man. Her boyfriend sits in the front row, radiating pleasure. After this, a couple takes the stage. The woman is covered with balloons. She plays toreador, as her husband, on all fours, plays the bull, popping the balloons using his horns. Now she is naked. He continues to charge her. She stabs him and stabs him with her picador, until she draws blood.

“Real blood?“ I whisper to Andy, incredulous. I regard these party game playing twentysomethings as hopelessly, frighteningly decadent. I regard them all as trapped inside the house, watching life through a glass. They are so young. Why are they so lecherous?

PART THREE, PORTLAND

There is no question that Lucas’ photographs are sexy. They are designed to reach inside your pants and turn you on, and they do. The defining rule of engagement in porn is that the act of photography is itself a type of sex, with the camera an ever ready, ever busy, ever curious phallus. Of course this is true in other types of photography as well, but in pornography it is overt. The model sees the camera, the convention goes, and what she wants to do is come. As I walk around Mark Woolley Gallery, I see Lucas’ work falls well within this rule. In the gallery notes she writes that she uses porn ”as a platform for sexual narrative detailing tension and arousal” and she does this, but without recourse to several standard porn conventions, a feat similar to building an atom bomb without uranium. She takes the idea of mystery, so fundamental to the Black Velvet Woman’s allure, and throws it out the window. She shoots, for the most part, without using a flash. She uses, for the most part, totally recognizeable locations. She is not interested in turning her models into idealized icons of desire. The whole idea of sneaking a forbidden look, so fundamental to the appeal of bakery cake gumdrops, is completely absent. Lucas’ women fully realize a) they are undressed b) they are being photographed. It is impossible to leer at them. At least one or two of them have been caught in the act of leering at themselves.

Walt finally arrives. He is instantly swallowed up by the many other people in the gallery who are just as glad to see him as I am. Walking six feet in front of Walt is his tiny imperious girlfriend Marjorie, and her consort, a Guatemalan girl. Marjorie knows that Walt hangs out with me, and she chooses to ignore me as she sweeps by. She nods in response to my hello, but basically, to Marjorie, I do not exist. I like this about her. Walt has told me that Marjorie is his girl, and I like that he has one, especially one as terrifying regal as this. I watch for her reaction as she passes Lucas’ photographs (of young women minus their undies, tying up their fetish boots, quietly contemplating their own arousal) since she at one time worked as a stripper. In Alaska, Walt tells me in a protective, confidential tone, as if that explains everything. It does. Portland women do this. Courtney Love stripped in Alaska before stripping in Japan. But Marjorie barely glances at the pictures of naked and semi-naked women. She moves straight to the bar.

In one photograph, a young woman stands beside an extremely expensive car. She is fully dressed and looking down at the hood of the car where she has gently rested the end of the fake penis she has on. In another, a young woman holds the yogic pose of the Tortoise. All we see is her naked, serene, moon-like bottom. Her high heels are crossed beneath her. I like this one best. Walt likes the one with the penis. He is gay, or identifies himself as gay. In PECKERNECK POET, the documentary Bill Plympton made about Walt, Marjorie is one of the women who surround him as he reads a poem about his horror of being forced to have sex with them. After the poem, Marjorie grabs him for a kiss, which he returns. She says to the camera “He’s not gay.” I am fascinated by Walt’s multiple lives.

Walt’s poetry has two subjects: nature and sex. No one writes about the celestial quality of Portland cloudscapes like Walt (although Gus Van Sant has photographed them), or the oversaturated fecundity of the forests, or the mild spiritual temperament of the mountains. Walt writes about cows, about geese, about carrots growing in his garden. He also writes about his own erections, and the people who inspire them.

I wait on the sidewalk outside Mark Woolley Gallery, thinking over the exhibit. At one point, a stunning blonde girl entered the room. I watch her scan the crowd, oblivious that all eyes are turned upon her. I have seen this happen before. Once a young woman got on the subway who was so beautiful everyone dropped all pretense at protocol and openly gaped. Before this miraculous apparition, we fell to our collective knees. It was a group decision. She modestly studied her own lap for the entire length of her ride. Another time I saw a beautiful woman make her way (OK, she was being escorted by Alec Baldwin) into a crowded New York movie theater. We parted for her instinctively. I remember thinking “Now that’s a beautiful woman!” even though all I saw was her hair, fanned out across a bulky winter coat. If a woman is beautiful enough, you do this. You get out of her way. You don’t do it because she is Kim Basinger, you do it because some part of you, over which you have no sovereignty, has crowned her Queen of Heaven. Marne Lucas runs to the young woman and they embrace, in a flurry of elbows. Walt appears at my side, admiring the new arrival. “Isn’t she gorgeous? I’d like to be her agent.” he says to me with admirable honesty and uncharacteristic greed.

It is tribute to the great beauty of Lucas’ little sister that Walt would say something so unlike himself. Walt, no slouch himself in the photographic good looks department, doesn’t even bother to sell his own books. He gives them away, as if they were zucchinis. Once I received a horrified note from him reminding me that I should have asked five dollars for copies of hisbook, Mala Noche, which I sold my class in preparation for his visit. That’s one third of the price the publisher listed on the back cover. He wrote that in ignoring these instructions and collecting full price, I had offended him deeply. He wanted everyone to have a book. He instructed me to pay each student back, and included the cash with which to do it.

Marne Lucas’ step-father stands, drink in hand, looking pleased, proud and a little uncomfortable. We learn Marne Lucas’ little sister is a freshman at Portland State, and that she recently made the soccer team. Henk Pander, Arnold’s father, joins us, and as I stand between them, I cannot escape the feeling, that I have suddenly stepped from a porn gallery into a PTA meeting.

Vincente Guzman Orozco arrives, throwing off his jacket as he makes his entrance. I query him about his reaction to the show. “Oh,” he says, flashing an enormous smile and drawing tiny circles around his own nipples, “I find it very titillating.”

PART FOUR, PORTLAND

If there is one thing Portland is good at, it is producing people who take one step back and examine sex as part of their professional lives. This is the town where Ursula Le Guin stayed home smoking her pipe and writing THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS while her husband worked needlepoint. This is the town where Sallie Tisdale wrote TALK DIRTY TO ME, where Callie Khouri wrote THELMA & LOUISE. This is the town where Chuck Palaniuk wrote FIGHT CLUB, Larry Colton wrote GOAT BROTHERS, and Gus Van Sant wrote MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO.

I am sitting in a Church of Christ Scientist temple, now converted to a children’s theater, listening to Susie Bright answer questions from the audience after giving a cheerful talk about the importance of recognizing the individuality of your own sexual fantasies. The first question from the floor was “Aren’t you a lesbian anymore?” She forthrightly admits to living with a man, and adds that categories are slippery. The second question was “Do you think it is possible for someone to have sexual relationships which are ongoing, loving, and committed, with more than one person at a time?” This one stumps her only briefly. She starts to answer it in the affirmative, but cautions that she has never seen it last. Immediately hands shoot up, and various groups of Portlanders identify themselves as involved in long term happily polyamorous relationships. I see Susie Bright’s jaw drop. I see the thought racing across her mind: am I in another time zone? The question is: is it ahead? Or behind?

Walt is across the street from Mark Woolley Gallery, trying to retrieve two Russian immigrant teenage boys from the garage where they work. I am on the sidewalk waiting for him to give up. He thinks they should see the show. He explains this to one boy, who goes to get the other. The other boy comes, and Walt explains it to him. He goes to get his father. Walt knows the father, knows the whole family. While I wait, I am talking with a friend of Walt’s who is sitting on a bench outside the gallery. Walt had greeted him joyfully, telling him he looked awfully healthy. “Why wouldn’t I be?”, the man said, making the motion as if he was pumping iron. “I just got out.” He tells Walt  the State of Oregon recently pulled the plug on an experimental co-ed prison.  I asked him “So, was it different?”  “Completely different.” he said. “All the guys are walking around lovesick. No one wants to get out.”

For sheer multiplicity of utopian vision, there is nothing like life in Oregon. In Oregon, a person deeply intrigued by the idea of men and women behind bars together can make it happen. Oregon is a place where you can take a chance. You can try something out. Marne Lucas was deeply intrigued by the idea that a woman could be photographed aroused by her own fantasies. If you want to see female sexuality, why look at pictures documenting male fantasies? If you want a close look at Eve, why cover her up with fig leaves? Lucas proposes to take you straight to the Garden. She pours the new wine of empowerment in the old wineskin of pornography. Why not? She can make it happen. Someone in Oregon thought it would be a good idea to open a 24 hour coin-operated Church of Elvis. Someone in Oregon thought it would be a good idea to be able to vote without leaving your house. Someone in Oregon thought it would be a good idea if the patient retained final authority in the decision to prolong or end life. Someone in Oregon thought running shoes could be improved if you stuck them very briefly into a waffle iron.  There is something in the sleepiness of life in Oregon which makes the dream of utopia so strong that once it overtakes a person it must be acted upon. Either that, I think darkly to myself, clutching onto my responsibilities as a skeptical visiting New Yorker, or the awareness of evil, supplying the dark background we have always needed to in order to see things clearly, has atrophied.

PART FIVE, PORTLAND

It is raining and Bob forgot his umbrella. He is rattled. We are having breakfast at a delicatessen in Northwest Portland. I like Bob, and once offered myself to him as a girlfriend. He turned me down flat, and we soldiered on as friends. He arrived in Portland years ago, a gentle Jesus with a pony tail who built geodesic domes. Now he is a judge. This morning Bob is upset by three things: the umbrella he doesn’t have, the allergy medicine he left at home, and the distressing number of young women he sees who are unacquainted with the most basic precepts of feminism. He is upset that a young woman we both know has responded to a unplanned pregnancy by marrying the father, who she just met, and preparing for motherhood. When you enter Bob’s apartment, the first thing you see is the framed certificate of appreciation from the National Abortion Rights Action League for the years of service he gave as president of the local chapter.

Bob is from the East Coast where the idea is to wait and have children when you are ready for them. In Oregon we don’t do this. This is one thing that hasn’t changed in the twenty-two years I have been away, raising my native born Oregonian daughter to be a New Yorker. In Portland young women are still forging ahead and having babies they are not in the least bit ready for. They marry the fathers, or not. Later they will divorce them, or not. The baby is the thing. A baby on the hip is an advertisement of safe passage through late adolescence. We don’t give birth out of defiance; it is not that calculated. We do it as part of our exploration of our bodies. We don’t do it because we need love; we do it because we’re curious, we want to be strong, intuitive women at peace with our bodies, and we can’t be stopped. I don’t expect Bob to understand this, so I don’t try to explain it to him. Instead I listen as he explains why he is upset by the young woman’s decision. He feels cheated. I ask him why. He says he worked hard to give women freedom to choose. I say “Do you hear what you just said? Freedom to choose? You’re trying to choose for her!” Controlling a temper I have never seen before, he says “What – I’m not supposed to have a stake in this? Those were years out of my life. Years! For what?” “Bitches, cunts and whores.” I respond, helpfully. “Fuck you” he says, standing up and throwing down his napkin.

Walt finally returns from his errand across the street from the gallery. He is beaming, half-crazed with delight. “Do you see that?! I know those people. I know them! They used to have nothing!” He stops marveling at the garage owning Russian immigrants long enough to say goodbye to Eric Edwards, the cinematographer, who he didn’t get a chance to see inside the gallery. Eric tells Walt he is hard to get ahold of, something I know to be true from my own experience, and Walt profusely promises to look into getting an email address. Then Eric is gone and Walt turns back to me. He is calmer now, but still preoccupied with the success of the family across the street. He had met them years ago when their paths crossed in thrift stores where  they were always looking for furniture and he was scouting books. At that time, they were newly arrived in this country. The boys, now grown, were then small. Walt shakes his head, amazed. “It’s the American dream. Right there! Look at it!” I have heard this tone of voice before. It is the one he usually uses to order me to look at the moon. I tell him I am going home. He is not listening. “Anne” he says, “our country is very great. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”

I am surprised to hear him say this. I have long thought Oregonians, who live in a region dominated by the continent’s second largest river, an absolute Amazon of biological abundance, to be somewhat less American than the rest of the country. In Oregon, life comes from decay, from different stages of death. Trees fall and the forest consumes them. Salmon return to give birth, and upon so doing, gasp their last. The result of this endless and grand wheel of destruction: more trees and more fish. There is no death; it is never over; it is always about to begin again. Oregon is the place where death can’t only kill you once, it can kill you over and over and over again. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness take place against this larger backdrop. This is what makes Oregonians open to trying new ideas. They are open to failure. Why? Because it doesn’t exist. Its never going to stop raining.

SALMON BOY

by Walt Curtis

Naked boy is on a spiritual trip.

He rides the backs of red

spawning fish, acrobat of water

and air. The river runs forever;

salmon will return again and again.

The hook of the crescent moon

invites danger on the journey.

Salmon boy’ll be reborn.

He is me.

=====================================================================

This is from an unpublished article I wrote about my return to Portland in 2000. I publish it here in honor of Walt Curtis’ 69th birthday.

Basil Wolverton displays his pioneering “spaghetti and meatballs” approach to human anatomy.

As Oregon Cartoon Institute heads into its fourth year, I sat down to retrace the steps that led to its creation.

This timeline of development was originally written for Jill Hartz, at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. Thank you, Jill, for providing me with the impetus to pull this together!

1990’s in New York

As I fly back and forth between Portland and New York, I begin noticing the way Oregon press underplays the fame of Oregon’s most well received artists (Chuck Palahniuk a great example ) while at the same time New York press omits the Oregon citizenship of an artist all together. I begin to understand the way this has created a misperception that Oregon does not produce artists.

At about this same time Columbia sportswear begins showing up on the subways. The Simpsons are becoming a cultural mainstay. Elliott Smith, the Dandy Warhols, Courtney Love, Gus Van Sant — I start to feel  surrounded by Portland even when I am 3,000 miles away.

1999 visiting Portland

David Chelsea tells me about Basil Wolverton.

I knew about Homer Davenport, the Hearst newspaper cartoonist from Silverton.

I’d heard about Mel Blanc, Portland’s most reknowned voice artist.

But I am stupefied by Wolverton. How could a guy from Central Point (pop: 12,000)  influence an entire generation of  Americans? And do it via Mad Magazine ?

A seed starts to sprout in my mind.

2001, in Portland

Dennis Nyback and I teach an avant garde film survey course at Northwest Film Center. Preparing for it, I discover avant garde animator Harry Smith was born in Portland.

Smith was both the disciplined, insightful, completely original collector behind Folkways’ enormously influential Anthology of American Folk Music and a self taught, extravagantly experimental, completely original filmmaker. I never dreamt he had anything to do with Oregon.

In my previous understanding, Oregon rarely produced nationally known artists.

Now with Harry “High Brow” Smith and Basil “Low Brow” Wolverton in the picture, I am completely confused.

2003 in New York

Standing in Kim’s Video, I stumble across a footnote in a book about Robert Crumb which identifies Carl Barks, creator of the comic books which were a huge influence on Crumb, as being from Merrill, Oregon.

I turn the book over to see who wrote it — D. K. Holm, from Portland.

At this point I compile a list of living and dead Oregon cartoonists and animators and send it to John Canemaker, asking what he thinks. He calls me, excited and impressed.

He adds two new names.

He tells me Marc Davis, one of Disney’s Nine Old Men, graduated from high school in Klamath Falls

and that Pinto Colvig, an early animator turned voice artist, is from Jacksonville.

2006 in Portland

Dennis and I interview Portland cartoonist  John Callahan for The Portland That Was.

Callahan is surprised to learn that Mel Blanc, a life long hero, is from his own home town. Our intern, a graduate of Lincoln High School, the school Blanc attended, tells us she never heard of him.

About this time, graphic journalist  Joe Sacco returns home to live in Portland, bringing with him his 1996 American Book Award.

Dennis and I return home too.

2007 in Portland

We hold the first Oregon Cartoon Institute public event, a three week screening series at Disjecta of 16mm animation from Dennis’ collection. Jim Blashfield and Rose Bond come and speak. Both have conducted far ranging film careers from Portland.

Blashfield made his acclaimed music videos here, and Bond her monumentally scaled installations. Both use animation.

Our model for engaging audiences emerges  — we will use living artists as interpreters as we raise awareness about the dead ones. Chel White, Bill Plympton, Joan Gratz, Joanna Priestly, Marilyn Zornado and Will Vinton loan us 35mm prints for the final night of the Disjecta series, which takes place at the Hollywood Theater.

Second Oregon Cartoon Institute event: Dennis conducts video interviews with visiting and local artists at the Platform International Animation Festival. We put these online.

At this point, I thought we had found all the historic Oregon animation and cartooning figures there were to find.

I was wrong.

In the course of researching Oregon film history for the Oregon Sesquicentennial Film Festival, I stumble across George Bruns, a four time Oscar nominee for animated film scores, from Sandy

and Dennis stumbles across Ralph Wright, who won the Golden Bear in Berlin in 1957. He’s from Grants Pass.

2009 in Portland

Third Oregon Cartoon Institute event: we co-sponsored Bill Plympton Day at the Oregon Sesquicentennial Film Festival at Marylhurst.

Bill is as fascinated with this history as we are.

Not all our research comes from history books. Some comes from the news. Just when we weren’t looking,  Brad Bird received first one, then two Oscars.

Looking ahead:

An interview about Oregon Cartoon Institute’s next public event, which will take place in 2011, can be found online at  KBOO.fm. Conducted by S. W. Conser as part of his Words & Pictures series, this interview introduces our first artist in residence, Heather Perkins.

Oregon Cartoon Institute is all about partnerships. As soon as the details get finalized, we will announce our upcoming partnerships with others who share our goal of raising public awareness of  this state’s rich animation and cartooning history.