I always thought this scene was shot on the Oregon Coast, and wondered where.

Katherine Wilson clears up the mystery, and supplies an exact location.

Not on the Coast!

He was here in Oregon in the 60’s; in the town that Stan Brakage called “the Poetic Cinema Capitol of the World, Eugene, Oregon.” He arrived on the scene like his character in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest:” Randall Patrick McMurphy, to tell us we weren’t crazy, to legitimatize what we were trying to do with our 16mm cameras, and over the years, to help us get a break in the business.

My friend Ron Vidor, a Cinematographer who worked as a cameraman on “Five Easy Pieces” said that in 1969 Jack and the rest of the cast and crew were just traveling through on I-5, when Director Bob Rafelson saw the Eugene Denny’s Restaurant. Within minutes they had permission from the manager to shoot the classic “chicken salad sandwich” scene with Karen Black and Lorna Thayer, the Waitress. More…..

Thanks, Katherine! We needed that.

Now if we can just ascertain if Ron Vidor is related to King Vidor, we’ll be golden.

Stanley Kubrick used the real Timberline Lodge (for establishing shots) AND built a fake Timberline Lodge replica ( for exterior shots) on the studio backlot in England when he adapted Stephen King’s The Shining to the big screen.

The Shining would be Jack Nicholson’s fourth Oregon film – after Five Easy Pieces; Drive, He Said (which he directed and co-wrote); and the Oscar winning One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

I hereby claim The Shining as an Oregon film, based on the cameo appearance made by the WPA project on the hill we call Timberline Lodge.

Michael Douglas, Milos Forman, Louise Fletcher, Jack Nicholson and Saul Zaentz celebrate their 1975 Oscar sweep for One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

From filmbug.com

“I holed up in the Chelsea Hotel in Greenwich Village, he recalls, sleeping 23 hours a day. My close friend Ivan Passer, another Czech filmmaker, would visit a psychiatrist, tell him my symptoms, and then come back to my hotel to relate what the doctor had said.”

Forman was close to a nervous collapse in 1973 when he got a package from Michael Douglas and Saul Zaentz containing a copy of Ken Kesey’s hit novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

This apparently jinxed project had been turned down by all major Hollywood studios: “Who wants to go see a film about a bunch of loonies?” Douglas and Zaentz asked Forman if he would be interested in making a film of the book. “Of course I said yes. I loved the novel from the start and thought it would make a wonderful movie. This showed me that it’s much more comfortable to slip into a state of acute depression here than back home. In Prague, if the government says, ‘no-you can’t make this film,’ that’s it. But in America, if one studio tells you ‘no,’ the next day comes along Michael Douglas and Saul Zaentz who say, ‘yes-we want you to make this film.”

When Milos Forman came to Oregon to shoot One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, he was following in the footsteps of three of his new colleagues.

Star Jack Nicholson had just finished directing his own Oregon film.

Producer Michael Douglas had just finished starring in his own Oregon film.

Father Kirk Douglas, who gave the film rights to Kesey’s novel to son Michael, began his own producing career years before with his own Oregon film.

Total number of Oregon filmmakers working on Cuckoo’s Nest: 4 (counting Milos himself)

Kirk Douglas was miffed, and no wonder. It is easy to see why Kirk Douglas saw himself as Randal P. McMurphy, the man who challenges his roommates in the looney bin to think for themselves. As a producer, Douglas defied industry practice in 1960 when he openly credited blacklisted Dalton Trumbo with authorship of the screenplay for Spartacus, a decision widely viewed as bringing an end to the blacklist all together.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Spartacus was the ninth film made by Kirk Douglas’ Bryna Productions company. The Indian Fighter, an Oregon film, was the first.

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest was nominated for nine Academy Awards, and made a clean sweep of the top five: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor and Best Actress.

Based on a book by an Oregon author, and shot on location in the Oregon State Mental Hospital, Cuckoo’s Nest is the most widely recognized Oregon film.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Director Jack Nicholson auditions actresses for Drive He Said (1971).

Jack Nicholson directed Drive He Said in Eugene, the year after the U of O campus was used as the setting for Getting Straight.

“Drive, He Said,” loosely adapted by Jeremy Larner and Jack Nicholson from Larner’s 1964 Delta Prize novel, and directed by Nicholson (his directorial debut), comes close to being the sort of movie about the anxieties and dilemmas of the sixties that no one ever made in the sixties—which were constantly confused with the more innocent fifties. It is not a great film, but it is an often intelligent one, and it is so much better than all of the rest of the campus junk Hollywood has manufactured in the last couple of years that it can be indulged its sentimental conventions.

Specifically, it’s about a star college athlete, Hector Bloom, to whom basketball is what boxing is to Private Prewitt what playwriting maybe to Tennessee Williams and what risking an arm or a leg or a life probably is to Peter Gimbel. Like some forms of art, it is, simultaneously, a heightened response to the world, a mystical retreat from it, and a practical way of getting along in it.

In the course of his senior year, Hector begins to feel, in his word, disconnected. The old game doesn’t quite mean what it once did. He is more than a little surprised to find that he is in love with Olive, the professor’s wife with whom he’s been having an affair, and he is shocked when the joy of his discovery isn’t shared by Olive, who is not so simply pregnant.

Hector admires and envies the campus radicals, who are so committed to a cause that they can interrupt a basketball game for an anti-Vietnam demonstration, staged as guerrilla theater. He himself hasn’t the faintest idea where he is going or why. When a pro ball club asks him to sign, he demands only that the club improve the quality of the frankfurters it sells to the public, and cut the price from 50c to a quarter.

In fact, Hector is so disconnected—at least in terms of the character as written—that it comes as a major surprise, late in the film, to learn that he is a Greek major. This bit of information, which I assume is presented seriously, is as unsettling as learning that someone you thought you knew extremely well is, in reality, one-half of a pair of twins. It means that an important (or, at the least, a time-consuming) part of Hector’s life has been kept secret.

Also fairly secret is Hector’s state of mind, though William Tepper, a tall, dark-haired young man who may or may not have studied the collected works of Dustin Hoffman, defines well enough Hector’s individual attitudes of frustration, anger and what might be called romantic campus lassitude. A reading of Larner’s novel fills in a lot of these gaps, but otherwise the novel might mislead the filmgoer into expecting satiric fantasy (which the movie never achieves), having to do with unnamed wars (not in Vietnam), with a lot of bizarre characters who might have been created by Waugh, and with middle-class American-Jewish intellectual and social life.

One result of this secrecy—perhaps simplification is a better terms—is that most of the other characters in the film, just because they are the supporting characters in the film as well as in Hector’s life, are more thoroughly and quickly defined, and thus more vivid and appealing than Hector. I especially liked Karen Black as the besieged Olive, a woman who once might have ben fated to be misunderstood and badly used by men, but who finally liberates herself; Robert Towne, as her husband, who would prefer to dry his beard with an electric comb than wory about cuckoldry; Bruce Dern, as the intensely clean-living coach, and Michael Margotta, who looks like a young Elisha Cook Jr., as Hector’s radical roommate whose ultimate act of survival provides the film with its obligatory, if shopworn, irony.

Most importantly, all of the film’s characters, and all of the performances, are touched with the kind of unexpected sensibility and decency that are rare in most films of this genre. It’s a quality that I associate with the performances Nicholson himself gave in both “Easy Rider” and “Five Easy Pieces.” Nicholson not only is good with actors, but he also chooses to avoid most of the visual (and aural) clichés of the day, and when he does indulge himself—as in the fine basketballl sequences—they no longer seem clichés since the rhythm of the sport more or less demands the treatment. I wish I could report that Hector was as interesting as the film that surrounds him.

Because Drive He Said was shot in Eugene, and because it features the first screen appearance of an Oregon actor, David Ogden Stiers, I hereby claim it as an Oregon film.

In Five Easy Pieces, Robert Dupea (Jack Nicholson) runs away from his musical talent by working as an oil rigger and drinking beer with beautiful women, far below his social class, such as Betty, played by Sally Struthers (far left).

If you turned on a TV sometime between 1971 and 1978, you might recognize Struthers- she played Gloria Bunker, Archie’s daughter, in All In The Family.

The second perky blonde NE Portland sent to Hollywood,  Sally Struthers graduated from Grant High School, the school Jane Powell said she would have preferred to stay home and attend.

“…I remember the explosive laughter, the deep silences, the stunned attention as the final shot seemed to continue forever, and then the ovation. We’d had a revelation. This was the direction American movies should take: Into idiosyncratic characters, into dialogue with an ear for the vulgar and the literate, into a plot free to surprise us about the characters, into an existential ending not required to be happy. ‘Five Easy Pieces’ was a fusion of the personal cinema of John Cassavetes and the new indie movement that was tentatively emerging. It was, you could say, the first Sundance film.” – Roger Ebert, on the powerful effect of the movie debut, from New York State Writers Institute website

Five Easy Pieces’ famed Chicken Salad Sandwich scene was shot in a Denny’s Restaurant in Eugene, Oregon.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I hereby claim Five Easy Pieces as an Oregon film on the basis of  a) the Oregon location shooting and b) the casting of Portland born and raised Sally Struthers.