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 right in the Oregonian Tower. Radio later served as an Early Warning System to identify the talent of Portlanders 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 named Tektronix. He set up his own home lab to process films he made for them, after losing patience with the delays of sending film to LA. Eventually, he went into business as Teknifilm Lab. For decades, independent filmmaking in Portland was supported by Hood’s lax attitude toward payment schedules.

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 the National Endowment for the Arts decided 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

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

Brooke Jacobson founds Northwest Media Project 1974

Will Vinton and Bob Gardiner make Closed Mondays 1974

Don Zavin makes Fast Break 1977

Penny Allen makes Property 1979

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.

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?”

Go find out.

When you get back, here’s some movies which feature Oregon musicians:

Click here to view the embedded video.

1. Whoopee (1930) George Olsen and His Music

Born and raised in Portland, George Olsen was discovered in 1923 and brought to Broadway where he wasted no time becoming a huge star. How huge? Whoopee, an early color film and an early sound film, was such an enormous financial gamble that Samuel Goldwyn had to make sure he had a sure fire draw on the soundtrack. His solution was a one two punch: Eddie Cantor PLUS George Olsen. It is Olsen’s band you hear all throughout Whoopee.

Click here to view the embedded video.

2. Three Little Pigs (1933) Pinto Colvig

Pinto Colvig’s early career as a newspaper cartoonist kept getting stalled because he was prone to leaving with the circus every time it came to town. Born and raised in Jacksonville, Oregon, Pinto had his own career as an animator before going to work for Disney. He is sometimes given credit for helping write “Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf?”, the song which got the country through the Great Depression. Everyone agrees that he sang it, as the voice of Practical Pig.  Like Mel Blanc, Pinto Colvig’s first identity as an artist was as a musician. He is most famous for providing the voice of Goofy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

3. Born To Dance (1936) Del Porter

Del Porter, born and raised in Newberg, Oregon, was a singer, composer and arranger. He came to Hollywood as a member of the stupendously well behaved, ocarina playing quartet, The Foursome.   He left Hollywood as a member of Spike Jones’ musically anarchic City Slickers, whose virtuosic mashups inspired Adam Spiegel to rename himself. In the above clip, Porter is the second from the left in The Foursome behind Eleanor Powell.

I include Del Porter in this list, not because of the size of his contribution to Hollywood, because he is truly a footnote, but because of the size of Hollywood’s contribution to him. If Porter hadn’t gone to Hollywood, there would have been no City Slickers. He might have spent his entire life playing the ocarina.

Click here to view the embedded video.

4. Gone With The Wind (1939) Louis Kaufman

Louis Kaufman’s parents were so disoriented by the prodigious gifts of their musical son that they sent him out on a six month tour of the vaudeville circuit at age ten. They came to their senses and sent him to Julliard three years later. Kaufman moved to Los Angeles because he liked the sun, and thought he would make his living teaching violin. Hollywood had other plans for him, and you can hear him now in over 400 classic Hollywood films. That’s him playing Tara’s Theme. Louis Kaufman was born and raised in Portland, Oregon.

Click here to view the embedded video.

5. There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954) Johnnie Ray

Much to his own astonishment, which he does little to conceal, Johnnie Ray’s film debut took place alongside Mitzi Gaynor, Marilyn Monroe, Ethel Merman and Donald O’Connor. Awestruck and ill at ease, he looks exactly like what he is, a singer waiting, waiting, waiting for a chance to sing. Hollywood took note and never asked him to than play anything other than himself, ever again. Born and raised in Dallas, Oregon, Johnnie Ray crossed racial lines to embrace rhythm & blues, and in so doing paved the way to rock. A colossally original talent, Ray was deaf, and performed wearing his hearing aid.

As proto-rocker Johnnie Ray became more and more famous, he threw caution to the winds and wore his hearing aid openly on stage.

Some Oregon musicals:

Whoopee! 1930 (George Olsen)

Born To Dance 1936 (Del Porter)

A Date With Judy 1948 (Jane Powell)

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers 1954 (Jane Powell)

There’s No Business Like Show Business 1954 (Johnnie Ray)

Sleeping Beauty 1959 (George Bruns)

Jungle Book 1967 (Ralph Wright, George Bruns)

Paint Your Wagon 1969 (Clint Eastwood, shot in Bend)

The Wild Party 1975 (Raquel Welch, James Ivory)

Hair 1979 (Ren Woods)

The Blues Brothers 1980 (John Beluschi & Dan Ackroyd’s homage to Curtis Salgado)

Portland’s track record backs up Vursatyl’s statements in that feature article.  Lee Morse and Johnnie Ray both were thought by radio listeners to be be black singers. Paul Revere and the Raiders‘ big hit Louie Louie is a reggae song.

Here’s an excerpt:

Yet Portland hip-hop’s conflicts about race and identity have their flip side. One of the city’s most popular hip-hop crews, Lifesavas, includes a white DJ, Rev. Shines.

“We’ve traveled with Shines into places like Houston, where we play all-black audiences,” says Vursatyl, one of the group’s two MCs.

“People are like, ‘Whoa, you got a white DJ?’ They’re not seeing it as often as we do. It’s not accepted.”

In Portland, it’s not a big deal. “We all genuinely have in common a love for what we do,” Vursatyl says. “Race never played an issue with us getting down with Shines. … Maybe that’s because we were born and raised in Portland. We weren’t raised with the same inhibitions or apprehensions.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Number of 1950’s Oregon films casting Native American Oregonians as hostile Indians: 3

Bend Of The River (1952), Indian Fighter (1955), Tonka (1958)

Number of 1950’s Oregon films starring actors who are part Native American: 2

Robert Mitchum, Johnnie Ray

Number of 1950’s Oregon films directed by a Portland born non-Native American director who grew up surrounded by, and deeply influenced by, Native Americans: 1

Heaven and Earth Magic (1957), directed by Harry Smith

It is possible Berlin saw a match between the material and Ray’s emotional, exuberant stage persona. Both artists made sophisticated use of cross racial musical influences which we see here in Johnnie Ray’s “call and response” performance of Berlin’s pseudo gospel stomp.

Ray’s career breakthough happened at the Detroit  black and tan (black neighborhood, white owner) nightclub Flame Showbar, where he was one of the only white performers, if not the only one. Similarly, Berlin’s career breakthrough happened when he wrote Alexander’s Ragtime Band, a song about the excitement generated when blackface minstrels (Alexander was a stage name traditionally used by minstrels) came to town.

Here’s Billy Murray’s version of Alexander’s Ragtime Band, a monster hit in 1911.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What! You don’t know who Billy Murray is?

That’s Oregonian Johnnie Ray on the right, next to Mitzi Gaynor. Marilyn Monroe, who plays the major plot point, is not pictured.

See this film if you are a completist, and must personally witness the deterioration of the Hollywood musical. Everyone else, do yourselves a favor and watch Ethel Merman in something, anything, else.

For people who are wondering why they never heard of this film — here’s why. Designed to showcase Irving Berlin’s music, it does a great job of steamrollering everything great out of his songs. Ditto the use made of Monroe, who elsewhere had proven herself a sexy, accomplished comedienne. Cast here as a humorless, driven  career girl, she is a big yawn, even when she is slithering across the screen dressed in almost nothing.

Strange but true: this story of a show biz family was written by Phoebe & Henry Ephron, the parents of three time Oscar nominee Nora Ephron.

Because of the presence of Johnnie Ray (who acquits himself admirably, given his apparent extreme stage fright, in his first, and last, movie role), I claim There’s No Business Like Show Business as an Oregon film.

Here’s Johnnie Ray with his Flame Showbar mentors. Bandleader Maurice King, with whom Ray recorded his first records, went on to be a big part of the success of Motown Records as Berry Gordy’s musical director. Fellow singer LaVerne Baker (Jim Dandy, Tweedlee Dee) recognized Ray’s originality and encouraged him to be himself.

For more about Ray’s pioneering role as a white performer who ignored racial boundaries, read this appreciation.

Johnnie Ray was one of the first to make me really open my ears. That was like 2 or 3 years before Elvis. -Rolling Stone Bill Wyman

Johnnie Ray was born in Dallas, Oregon in 1927.  He wrote The Little White Cloud That Cried, his first hit, while a teenager in Oregon. In December 1951, after serving an apprenticeship in a Detroit night club, he recorded that song for Okeh Records in New York. It went to the top of the charts.

Click here to view the embedded video.

From fansite  www.johnnieray.com: The executives at Capitol Records heard a Johnnie Ray demo record and thought the vocals were by a black female blues artist. Johnnie was thought at first by the radio listening audience to be a black blues singer, but soon it was revealed that he was a tall, thin, very fair complected, handsome boyish looking man of 24. Johnnie’s first Okeh release was a quick Detroit recording of “Whiskey & Gin”, a stomping R&B number, and ”Tell The Lady I said Goodbye”, a torchy ballad, both recorded May 29th, 1951, possibly in a radio station, with Maurice King and the Wolverines.

Ray skyrocketed to the top despite multiple challenges. A childhood accident left him deaf in one ear. He came out in public as a deaf person by wearing his hearing aid on stage but was unable, due to the times in which he lived, to come out as a gay man. He battled alcoholism.

Polite and soft spoken in person, on stage Ray was a physically uninhibited performer who prowled the stage, manhandled the microphone, threw himself on the floor, and attacked the piano as Jimi Hendrix would later attack his guitar.

A more sedate version of Ray’s stage persona is seen in There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954). His singing provides the only honest moments in that enormous, greedy, gaudy turkey.