Katherine Wilson stepped into the role of writer-producer with Animal House Of Blues (2012)  after a lifetime working in location casting and location scouting.

When John Landis needed local college girls for the pillow fight in Animal House, it was Katherine who auditioned them. When Milos Forman came to Oregon State Hospital to shoot One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, it was Katherine who served as the liaison between that production and the Oregon Film Commission. Having seen for herself what Oregon had to offer Hollywood, and vice versa, she spent her entire career encouraging her home state to develop the economic potential of its film industry.

She worked on Stand By Me, The High Cost Of Living and Personal Best, among others. Without leaving home, she worked with Michael Douglas, Milos Forman, Rob Reiner, Robert Towne, John Belushi, and Jack Nicolson.

Her first film as writer-producer, Animal House of Blues, uses interviews and archival photos to tell the story of how Curtis Salgado, a young Eugene blues singer, taught visiting actor John Belushi how to sing the blues. Belushi paid close attention and later used  Salgado’s trademark sunglasses-fedora-harmonica combination to create The Blues Brothers with Dan Ackroyd. As a friend of both Salgado and Belushi, Katherine Wilson was witness to the entire, slightly Faustian, saga.

Here you can see Katherine Wilson preparing extras for the parade scene finale in Animal House, the film which launched her career.

Here’s Katherine in Deafula, a lost Oregon movie I am dying to see. Katherine acted in Deafula and did the make up and art direction.

Here she is with Ken Kesey, who taught her to splice videos using scotch tape, a lesson she definitely wouldn’t have learned in film school.

Along with launching Animal House Of Blues, Katherine Wilson is also in pre-production for a feature length narrative film about the legendary Nez Perce rodeo champion, Jackson Sundown. She is the fifth Oregon Movies, A to Z film figure to come from Klamath Falls, joining an illustrious list which includes James Ivory, Marc Davis, William Kittridge and Chris Eyre, pictured with her below.

Producer Michael Douglas and screenwriter Bo Goldman, on location at Oregon State Hospital.

On Oct. 6, 2012, 400 film lovers came to Hudson Hall at Willamette University to hear a panel of  luminaries speak about the 1975 film One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. The evening was sponsored by Michael Douglas, Cuckoo’s Nest’s producer, and opened with a short letter from him.

In his letter, read by Albert Bendich of Saul Zaentz Company, Douglas gracefully sent his regrets, and saluted those present for supporting Salem’s brand new Museum Of Mental Health.

Ken Nolley, professor of English and Film Studies at Willamette introduced the four speakers:

Louise Fletcher, who played Nurse Ratched

Charles Kiselyak, who directed Completely Cuckoo, the 1997 documentary about the making of Cuckoo’s Nest, and Asylum, a documentary which meditates on the role for which mental hospitals were originally intended.

Antoine De Gaudemar, who directed Once Upon A Time…..One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, a 2011 French tribute to Milos Forman’s contribution to Cuckoo’s Nest

Robert James, who directed Library Of Dust, a 2011 documentary about the cremated remains of 3,500 Oregon State Hospital mental patients, and OSH attempts to find the families of those former patients

Ken Kesey’s novel, which he described as a “Christ allegory set in a looney bin”, was only one year old when Michael Douglas read it in an English class at University of California at Santa Barbara. He’d heard about it before, of course. His dad was starring in the stage adaptation, in San Francisco.

After graduation, Douglas followed in his father’s footsteps by becoming an actor. A series of unremarkable roles in forgettable films, and a looming future on television, drove him to pick up a property which had been sitting on his father’s desk for ten years.

Good call! Cuckoo’s Nest was nominated for nine Oscars. It won five.

Following in Kirk Douglas’ footsteps, Michael Douglas made sure the production was entirely independent.  Saul Zaentz put up the whole budget himself – $2.5 million dollars.

Here’s how Pauline Kael described the impact of Kesey’s book: “It preceded the university turmoil, Vietnam, drugs, the counterculture. Yet it contained the prophetic essence of that whole period of revolutionary politics going psychedelic and… has entered the consciousness of many – perhaps most – Americans.”

Ken Kesey’s first novel became the basis for Bo Goldman’s first script for Michael Douglas’ first film (as producer). Except for director Milos Forman, who was more famous in Europe than America, and actor Jack Nicolson, who was Hollywood’s most recently minted star, this was a film made by beginners.

During the question and answer period, Prasanna Pati, one of the OSH psychiatrists who appeared in the film as a young doctor, delivered an impassioned impromptu speech about the damage done by budget cuts to the mental health care system. Several speakers echoed this concern.

Many speakers, both on stage and in the audience, testified to the moral courage of Dean Brooks, the former  head of Oregon State Hospital, who cooperated with the filmmakers in the making of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, and who appeared in the film as Dr. Spivey.

The evening was a fundraiser for the new Museum Of Mental Health, which is located at 2600 Center Street NE, Salem, Oregon. The documentary films of Charles Kiselyak, Antoine De Gaudemar and Robert James will be available in the museum.

A star is born! That’s Jody Foster riding a circus lion in Southern Oregon. This completely implausible and uninspired children’s film also stars Michael Douglas.

What is this film about?! Everyone knows you can’t run away with a circus lion. Jody Foster was mauled by her feline co-star during the production, and has said in interview she still has scars from the stitches — in her neck– today.

This is why you don’t want your kids to star in movies with lions. However Jody survived and now owns two Oscars.

I hereby claim Napoleon and Samantha as an Oregon film, based on its location shooting.