From MOMA:

The Great Northwest
2012. USA. Directed by Matt McCormick. This experimental documentary centers around a re-creation of a 3,200-mile road trip made in 1958 by four Seattle women who documented their journey in an elaborate scrapbook of photos, postcards, and brochures. Fifty years later, Portland artist and filmmaker Matt McCormick found that scrapbook, and set out to follow their route as precisely as possible. Simultaneously observational and voyeuristic, The Great Northwest is a lyrical time capsule that explores how the landscape and roadside culture of the Pacific Northwest has changed over the past half century. 70 min.

I hereby claim The Great Northwest as an Oregon film, based on the Portland citizenship of director Matt McCormick.

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?”

Benjamin Popp’s Laszlo Lassu won Honorable Mention at the 38th NWFF.

The name has changed, but the mission remains the same. The Northwest Film & Video Festival, now the Northwest Filmmakers’ Festival, encompasses the full range of Northwest filmmaking. Cinematic locavores will find it all, from the obsessive self contained world of stop motion animation to harrowingly intense documentaries to hand made, small scale, sotto voce features.

This year, three features were directed by artists who cut their teeth at the festival.

Gus Van Sant’s fourteenth feature, RESTLESS, opened the festival on Nov. 12. His first NWFF entry, ONE HALF OF A TELEPHONE CONVERSATION, was in 1978. It was two minutes long.

Chel White’s first feature, BUCKSVILLE, closes the festival with its Portland premiere on Nov. 20 at 6:00 PM. White won an Honorable Mention from judge Christine Vachon for his first NWFF entry in 1998. Titled DIRT, it was four minutes long.

Matt McCormick’s first feature, SOME DAYS ARE BETTER THAN OTHERS, screens on Nov. 16. In 2001, he competed against Courtney Taylor-Taylor, Jim Blashfield, Brian Lindstrom, Chel White, Marilyn Zornado, Vanessa Renwick and Andy Blubaugh with his first NWFF entry, THE SUBCONSCIOUS ART OF GRAFFITI REMOVAL. It was 17 minutes long.

This festival is also the place to see Peter Richardson’s HOW TO DIE IN OREGON, in case you missed that, and Taggert  Siegel’s QUEEN OF THE SUN: WHAT ARE THE BEES TELLING US?.

We’re not a ghoulish bunch, here in the Pacific Northwest, I swear we are not.  However, since Gus made a film in which death looms, Matt made a film which features cremains, Peter made a film about physician assisted suicide and Taggert made a film about the collapse in bee population, I think it is fair to observe that the filmmakers of Salmon Nation tend to see death as part of life.

This must have been an usually tough year for festival director Thomas Phillipson. So many films to choose from!

Lazlo Kovacs makes himself at home in the Pacific Northwest by improvising a regionally appropriate camera mount inside a production vehicle for Five Easy Pieces. Taken in Eugene, this photo is by cameraman Ron Vidor.

Q: What are you doing, Anne?

A:  My goal is to write about Oregon film history, film by film. Oregon Movies A to Z has been up, in some fashion, since October 2008.

Q: That’s not what it looks like! You’re writing about all kinds of stuff.

A: I also write – not comprehensively at all – about current film events. I go back and blog about older films when I discover one I missed when I was going through that particular year. But chronological progress is still taking place, if you look for it. The forward thrust of my walk through film history is there in the blog, although it is obscured with distractions and digressions.

Right now I am moving through 1993, an unusual, and unusually trying, year. I was warned about it by the panel of fellow critics who spoke at the Oregon Sesquicentennial Film Festival in 2009. They were openly skeptical of my ability to maintain interest in Oregon film, which to them meant films shot in Oregon. I dismissed their concern – I knew they were not factoring in the great films Oregon filmmakers (and actors and writers) had made outside the state boundaries. It was only when David Walker specifically mentioned “1993″ and they all turned, with one motion, David Walker, Shawn Levy, Ted Mahar and Aaron Mesh, to look at me, that I began to have some grasp of what I would have to endure.

I thought my film loving peers were underestimating me when they expressed concern over my headlong flight into a wall of deeply unenjoyable cinema.

But they were right. It took weeks to recover from seeing The Temp (1993), and the one two punch of The Temp followed by Body Of Evidence (1993) nearly caused me to give up movies all together.

A: So how do you identify an Oregon film?

Q: Here’s the rules. I am creating a chronological record of Oregon film history. I define “Oregon film” to include films made in Oregon, and also to include films featuring the work of Oregon artists – directors, actors, writers, you name it – regardless of their location. I try to pair each film with a companion post, either about the director or about the Oregon artist who caused the film to qualify as an Oregon film.

A rule of thumb: I write this history chronologically. Right now I am still in 1993.

Another rule of thumb: I use the year IMDB lists as the year of the film. Oregon Film Commission lists the films by the year of shooting. I list them by year of release.

Handy Guide to Nomenclature:

I denominate as Oregon films all films which qualify under the expanded definition detailed above.

I denominate as an Oregon director an artist who was born/born and raised/raised in Oregon or one who has made Oregon his/her home as an adult.

I denominate as Oregon filmmakers directors who came here to make films. My logic:  how can we call One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest an Oregon film, and not call Milos Forman an Oregon filmmaker? So, in the spirit of inclusion, on Oregon Movies, A to Z, he is one.

But he isn’t an Oregon director.

This distinction is useful because Oregon does happen to have produced an unusual number of internationally recognized directors.

Q: How do  you choose which films to write about?

A: Its true. I can’t write about all Oregon films. I choose the films I write about based on the following criteria.

1. Availability

2. Fame, of the film itself or of one of its principals

3. Whether I feel like it

This year, the third Oregon Movies, A to Z has been in existence, saw a tremendous rise in the numbers and the visibility of Oregon film. An almost freakish number of Oregon filmmakers came to national attention, pretty much all at the same time. Eight at Sundance, one at New Directors, one at Tribecca, one at Anthology Film Archives, two picked up for distribution by Oscilloscope. Then there was Carrie Brownstein’s Portlandia, which she co-produced. That’s in addition to Gus Van Sant at Cannes with Restless, Bill Plympton making the Oscar short list with The Cow Who Wanted To Be A Hamburger, and Chris Eyre’s A Year At Mooring.

In the contest for best reviews this year, there is a running tie between Cold Weather and Meek’s Cutoff, with Cold Weather slightly ahead. Meek’s Cutoff fans are dazed by the unexpected nature of the film they saw, while Cold Weather’s fans applaud Aaron Katz’ ability to integrate a recognizable genre and still maintain his distinctive style.

Throughout all of this, I remained focused on writing primarily about Oregon film history, not Oregon’s wildly prolific current scene. The current explosion, of course, has everything to do with the past. Gus Van Sant was not born under a cinematic cabbage. Neither was Aaron Katz, Matt McCormick, James Westby or Vanessa Renwick.

Q: What is ahead for Oregon Movies, A to Z?

A: That giant sucking sound you heard last year was Oregon Movies, A to Z being pressed into service to cover the news of film premieres, film awards, breaking news of Oregon directors going into production. Nature abhors a vaccum! I post about current events because it fills a need, and allows me to link to previous posts which illuminate a connection to Oregon film history.

Q: So if you don’t always like these movies you’re watching, and writing about, why are you doing this?

3.  I am making sense, slowly but surely, of one of the great mysteries of life in Oregon, namely, what do we do here which has helped us create such wonderful directors?

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Thank you, Katherine Wilson, for the behind the scenes shot of Lazlo Kovacs preparing to shoot more of Five Easy Pieces.

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

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.

Is Matt McCormick the first Oregon director to have a film included in MOMA’s New Directors/New Films series?

From the listing in the 2011 New Directors/New Films lineup:

McCormick’s debut feature SOME DAYS ARE BETTER THAN OTHERS is a poetic character-driven film that asks why the good times slip by so fast while the difficult times seem so sticky. The film follows a trio of stranded characters that seem to be competing for first prize in a Saddest Job in the World contest as McCormick insists on the reality of work, distinctly rebutting the popular image of Portland as a paradise for under-achieving hipsters and the slacker ethos of “the unemployed, blissful lifestyle.”

New Directors/New Films runs March 23 – April 3.

Filmmaker Magazine asked McCormick how he came to make his first feature.

Filmmaker: How did the financing and production come together?

McCormick: I probably spent two years writing, and I had been in touch with [producers] Dave [Allen Cress] and Neil [Kopp]. They were aware I was writing a screenplay, and their timing was opening up around the time I was feeling ready. It was actually Gus Van Sant who helped bring the three of us together. He had read the script, and he said, yeah, you should make this movie. After that it went pretty quickly, but the slowest and longest part was the fundraising, and even though it was super-low-budget movie. We spent eight months trying to find the money.

Matt McCormick’s first feature film, Some Days Are Better Than Others, comes to Portland for the first time in February 2011, at the 34th Portland International Film Festival.

I don’t know too much about Matt, except that he wears a million different professional hats. You can find out everything he wants you to know here.

The following is from Andrew Rosinski’s introduction to a great interview with McCormick here.

Matt has had three films screen at the Sundance Film Festival, and has had work screened or exhibited at MoMA, The Serpentine Gallery, The Oslo Museum of Modern Art, the Reykjavik Art Museum, The Seattle Art Museum, and in 2007 he was selected to participate in both the Moscow Biennial and Art Basil.  He has received awards including Best Short Film from the San Francisco International Film Fest, Best Experimental from the New York Underground Film Fest, and Best Narrative from the Ann Arbor Film Festival.

]]> http://www.talltalestruetales.com/2011/01/matt-mccormickoregon-filmmaker/feed/ 0 http://www.talltalestruetales.com/2011/01/jumpers-2005/ http://www.talltalestruetales.com/2011/01/jumpers-2005/#comments Fri, 21 Jan 2011 21:27:19 +0000 Anne Richardson http://www.talltalestruetales.com/?p=11698 Click here to view the embedded video.

“I’m not a bird, I’m not a plane.”  Jumpers was the first film collaboration between Portland director Matt McCormick and rocker-writer-actress Carrie Brownstein.

Their second was when McCormick cast Brownstein opposite James Mercer in his debut narrative feature film, Some Days Are Better Than Others (2009).

Some Days Are Better Than Others will make its Portland premiere at the 34th Portland International Film Festival.

I hereby claim Jumpers as an Oregon film, based on location shooting in downtown Portland, and on the Portlander status of the quartet of artists who collaborated on its creation.

I would love to credit the actress who plays the thrifty and ingenious disaffected office worker who defies gravity with envelopes and scotch tape. Clue me in, and I will add her name to the post.