Click here to view the embedded video.

Every once in a while you drive past a house in Portland with one or two glum looking palm trees planted out front. Those California imports are starting to look prophetic, not pathetic.

1. Reese Witherspoon has just optioned Wild, Cheryl Strayed’s forthcoming memoir.

2. Kristen Wiig had already optioned Clown Girl, Monica Drake’s novel.

3. Chelsea Cain’s Heartsick may still be under option.

4. Chuck Palahniuk led the way.

5. It is a good time to be a Portland writer. Or a hyphenate!

6. This year Patrick DeWitt joined Jon Raymond in the rare category of author-screenwriter.

7. Mike Rich became a writer-producer on his fourth movie, following the example, perhaps, of the similarly named Mike Richardson, who has been known to combine writing and producing.

8. Then there’s writer-directors Gus Van Sant, James Ivory and Bill Plympton, who were born to be hyphenates.

Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy and Meek’s Cutoff, collectively titled the “Oregon trilogy” by the curators of the 2012 Whitney Biennial, will screen continuously throughout one week of the exhibit, which runs from March 1 to May 27, 2012.

All three films are collaborations between screenwriter Jon Raymond and director Kelly Reichardt. Reichardt did not conceive of them as an Oregon trilogy – she looked hard all over the country for the perfect location for Wendy and Lucy. When she found it, it happened to be right in Raymond’s North Portland neighborhood.

The other film artists included in the Biennial are Thom Andersen, Mike Kelley, Kevin Jerome Everson, Jerome Hiler, Nathaniel Dorksy, the late George Kuchar, Laura Poitras, Matt Porterfield, Michael Robinson, Frederick Wiseman, Luther Price, and Laida Lertxundi.

John “This Is What True Self Acceptance Looks Like” Waters came out of the closet as a fan of Oregon filmmaking in his Top Ten For 2011 film list in Artforum.

Three of his ten are Oregon films.

#2 on Water’s list: Mildred Pierce

Qualifying criteria: Portland screenwriter Jon Raymond’s first collaboration with Portland director Todd Haynes.

#6 on Waters’ list: If A Tree Falls: The Story Of Earth Liberation Front

Qualifying criteria: Brooklyn filmmakers Marshall Curry and Sam Cullman followed their subject, an environmental activist, to Oregon.

#9 on Waters’ list: We Were Here

Qualifying criteria:  Like Todd Haynes, David Weissman is now a Portland director. Up until We Were Here, he was based in San Francisco. (Perhaps he maintains dual citizenship.) He co-directed We Were Here with Bill Weber.

John Waters is obviously begging for a invitation to come out to the Rose City and see what’s going on – let’s invite him!

Click here to view the embedded video.

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?”

Timeout London has tallied up their favorite Westerns. A wonderful list filled with movies I never heard of, and a few I now want to see.

Readers of Oregon Movies, A to Z will recognize:

#45. Meek’s Cutoff (2010) Dir. Kelly Reichardt, written by Jon Raymond, shot in Harney County

# 44. Day of the Outlaw (1959) Dir. by Andre de Toth, shot on Mt. Bachelor

#23. Stagecoach (1939) Dir. by John Ford, based on a short story by Ernest Haycox

#11. My Darling Clementine (1946) Dir. by John Ford, with Walter Brennan

#6. Dead Man (1995) Dir. Jim Jarmusch, scenes shot in Grants Pass, Takilma, Rogue River, Applegate River & the Oregon Coast

Joaquin Miller, pony express rider/lawyer/horse thief/literary figure.

When did Oregon writers start exploring the bi-culturality of our state ?

(This list is an excerpt of a previous post, designed for people who are list crazy.)

1873: Joaquin Miller writes Life Among The Modocs: An Unwritten History

1883: Sarah Winnemucca writes Life Among The Piutes

1890: Frederick Homer Balch writes Bridge of the Gods

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. Movie connection: In 1975, the television movie I Will Fight No More Forever dramatized the events to which Yellow Wolf was eyewitness in 1877.

1960: Don Berry writes Trask

1962: Ken Kesey writes One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Movie connection: In 1975, Milos Forman’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest won Best Picture and four other Academy Awards.

1987: William Kittredge writes Owning It All.

1993: Elizabeth Woody writes Seven Hands, Seven Hearts

1995: Craig Lesley writes Winterkill

1998: Chris Eyre directs Sherman Alexie’s Smoke Signals.

2000 Marv Ross and Thomas Morning Owl, Jr begin writing & composing The Ghosts Of Celilo

2010: Matt McCormick writes & directs Some Days Are Better Than Others

2010: Jon Raymond writes Meek’s Cutoff

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 — see Walt Curtis Recommends: Top Nine For Oregon Bookworms. Another great list, created by David Milholland and Walt Curtis,  can be found on the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission website.

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 in Some Days Are Better Than Others which he eventually gave Renee Roman Nose. 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 four Oregon writers – Jon Raymond, Matt McCormick, Ken Kesey and Marv Ross –  told stories set in biracial worlds, possibly 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 directs 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 directs Sherman Alexie’s Smoke Signals

2000 Marv Ross and Thomas Morning Owl, Jr begin writing & composing The Ghosts Of Celilo

2010: Matt McCormick writes & directs 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 the decisions we made ever since.

Two of these four stories deal with the damming of Celilo Falls, an event which is pictured on the front of Whaley’s new book. So maybe we add Whaley as the fifth story teller.

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.

An Indian came to us, pointed out the course to [The Dalles] to which he said it was 5 days journey, and so far from refusing to follow the advise of the Indian, at my request he was employed by Mr. Meek to pilot us to Crooked River, which he did for a blanket. Solomon Tetherow, 1845 pioneer

Kelly Reichardt, Jon Raymond and Neil Kopp tell the story of a wagon train which misplaced itself in Harney County. Paul Dano and Michelle Williams star.

Willamette Week let the cat out of the bag last year:

Meek’s Cutoff … is based on the true story of an ill-fated wagon train that attempted a shortcut on the Oregon Trail……the tale includes starvation, a legendary lost gold mine and a Native American scout who might or might not be inclined to save the day. Neil Kopp confirmed that the screenplay, written by Portland’s Jon Raymond, is “loosely based on Stephen Meek…who basically becomes lost.”

Adam Yauch, head of Oscilloscope, the distributor of Meek’s Cutoff has an interesting theory.

“As a side note,” Yauch continued. “‘Meek’s Cutoff’ is so real feeling and looking that I suspect Kelly may have completed work on a time-machine…. and ….‘Meek’s’ is actually a documentary that she went back and shot in 1845. If anyone has any evidence to that effect, please contact me directly ASAP.”

Faithful readers of Oregon Movies, A to Z recognize that the wagon train genre has intersected with the documentary genre at least once before.  James Cruze’s The Covered Wagon had meticulous art direction, far beyond the call of narrative duty, faithfully recreating the living conditions aboard the Oregon Trail prairie schooners. Cruze did this because it was 1923, and some of his audience had actually been in covered wagons, as children, themselves.

Kelly Reichardt was under no such pressure. Yet attention to historic accuracy seems to have been a source of artistic inspiration for herself and for Jonathan Raymond, the screenwriter.

Shot in Oregon, based on real life Oregonians, written by an Oregonian, produced by an Oregonian – not hard to preemptively declare Meek’s Cutoff as an Oregon film.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Todd Haynes’ mini series is reputed to the closer to the source material, a James M. Cain novel, than the 1945 Mildred Pierce, directed by Michael Curtiz.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I hereby claim Mildred Pierce (2011) as an Oregon film, based on the Oregon citizenship of director  Todd Haynes and screenwriter Jon Raymond.

Born: Kansas City, Missouri, 20 February 1925.

Education: Attended University of Missouri, Columbia (three years).

Military Service: Bomber pilot, U.S. Air Force, 1943–47.

Career: Directed industrial films for Calvin Company, Kansas City, 1947; wrote, produced, and directed first feature, The Delinquents , 1955; TV director, 1957–63; co-founder of TV production company, 1963; founder, Lion’s Gate production company (named after his own 8-track sound system), 1970, Westwood Editorial Services, 1974, and Sandcastle 5 Productions; made Tanner ‘88 for TV during American presidential campaign, 1988; directed McTeague for Chicago Lyric Opera.

Awards: Palme d’Or, Cannes Festival, and Academy Award nominations for Best Film and Best Director for M*A*S*H , 1970; New York Film Critics’ Circle Award, D.W. Griffith Award (National Board of Review), and National Society of Film Critics Award, all for Best Director, for Nashville , 1975; Golden Bear, Berlin Festival, for Buffalo Bill and the Indians , 1976; Academy Award nomination for Best Director, New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Film and Best Director, for The Player , 1992; Academy Award nomination for Best Director, for Short Cuts, 1993. more