Oregon Movies, A to Z » Sam Elliott

Tombstone (1993)

Anne Richardson — Tue, 24 May 2011 05:14:36 +0000

Oregon grown Sam Elliott began his career in Westerns. This one is a daisy.

Sam “Moustache Champion Of The World” Elliott plays Virgil Earp, brother to Kurt Russell’s Wyatt Earp in this big budget restaging of the gunfight at the OK Corral. Both Elliott and Russell step aside, and let Val Kilmer’s tubercular, sardonic, ferociously loyal Doc Holliday saunter off with the picture.

Students of the Western can move from Tombstone to the other OK Corral reenactments. Some are straightforward, as in Wyatt Earp (1994) which starred Kevin Costner. Some are revisionist, as in Open Range (2003), also starring Kevin Costner, which tells a similar gunfight story, but from the point of view of the Clantons/outsider figures.

John Ford’s contribution to this Western sub-genre is My Darling Clementine starring Henry Fonda. My Darling Clementine is an Oregon film, by virtue of Walter Brennan’s ice cold performance as Old Man Clanton.

Why do American directors love this story, and perpetually re-make it? Must have something to do with the fact that a) it is based on a real gunfight and b) Wyatt Earp ended up in Hollywood. Then there’s the death dealing/death seeking ex-dentist, Doc Holliday, who remains one of the most charismatic enigmas in the history of the West.

I hereby claim Tombstone as an Oregon film, on the basis of Sam Elliott’s performance as Virgil Earp.

Road House (1989)

Anne Richardson — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 05:50:10 +0000

In Point Break, Patrick Swayze gives advice.

In Road House, he gets it – from Sam Elliot, graduate of David Douglas High School, Class of 1962. Young Sam studied theater at Clark Community College in Vancouver, Washington before heading south to Hollywood to sidle into movies via television. In Road House, twenty years into his career, he plays Wade Garrett, the Jiminy Cricket to Swayze’s Pinocchio.

If, like me, you haven’t ever seen Road House you can do one of two things. You can see it or you can go see what Meagan Kate, Courtenay Hameister, Ted Douglass, Sean McGrath, Nicholas Kessler, Karate McQueen, Rob Campbell, Michael Fetters, Shelley McLendon, Kate Piatt-Eckert, Scott Engdahl, Tony Marcellino, Wm. Steven Humphrey, and Brad Fortier ( pictured below) have done to it.

Road House: The Play! opens May 8 at the Ellyn Bye Studio in the Gerding Theater at the Armory, located in the Pearl District of Portland, Oregon. Here’s where you can get more info (plus tickets).

Road House: The Play! returns in May 2011 after sold out runs and rave reviews in 2010.

First released as a film in 1989 and starring the late Patrick Swayze, Road House tells the timeless tale of a bar bouncer with a mysterious past who lives by his own rules, a small town terrorized by a wealthy senior citizen, a sexy doctor, and karate. Road House: The Play! is the magic that results from taking the original film script, putting it on stage, and adding original songs.

Created by Shelley McLendon
Adapted to the stage by Shelley McLendon and Courtenay Hameister, aka The Witty One
Directed by John Breen

I hereby claim Road House as an Oregon film, based on the Portland origins of Sam Elliott.

Sam Elliott

Anne Richardson — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 05:30:21 +0000

Samuel Pack Elliott was born August 9, 1944, and graduated from David Douglas High School in Portland, Oregon in 1962. He began acting as a student at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington, and was cast in Card Player #2 in Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid in 1969.

Along the way to playing Wade Garrett in Road House, The Stranger who narrates the action in The Big Lebowski, Virgil Earp in Tombstone, and Cher’s lover, Gar, in Mask, Eliott has also put in an appearance as the Father of Portland, his own hometown.

In I Will Fight No More Forever (1975), Elliot played “Captain” (he was actually a lieutenant at the time of the dramatized events) Charles Erskine Scott Wood, a soldier-turned -lawyer-turned-poet who liked to both read and spend money, and in the pursuit of both pleasures helped to civilize Stumptown.

Here’s Tim Barnes’ excellent description:

C.E.S. Wood may have been the most influential cultural figure in Portland in the forty years surrounding the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. He helped found the Portland Art Museum and was instrumental in making the Multnomah County Library a free and public institution. He secured the services of his friend Olin Warner, a nationally known sculptor, to design the Skidmore Fountain and his words, “Good citizens are the riches of a city,” are inscribed at its base. The Portland Rose Festivalwas his idea. He numbered among his friends Mark Twain, Emma Goldman, John Reed, Clarence Darrow, Lincoln Steffens, AnselAdams, John Steinbeck, Charlie Chaplin, James J. Hill, and Langston Hughes. Soldier, lawyer, poet, painter, raconteur, bon vivant, politician, free spirit, and Renaissance man, Wood might also be the most interesting man in Oregon history.

Here’s C. E. S. Wood:

I doubt Sam Elliott knew that he was playing the Father Of Portland when he appeared as Capt. Wood in I Shall Fight No More Forever. I’d love for him to return to television to reprise this role. Maybe Carrie Brownstein will ask him to make a guest appearance during the next season of Portlandia.