Oregon Movies, A to Z » Sheldon Renan

Will Vinton Talks: How He Broke In

Anne Richardson — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 03:23:18 +0000

Will Vinton, David Altschul, William Fiesterman and Marilyn Zornado at a 25th anniversary screening of The Adventures Of Mark Twain at the Whitsell Auditorium.

Will Vinton and Bob Gardiner won Oregon’s first Oscar in 1975 for their stop motion tour de force, CLOSED MONDAYS. Will grew up in McMinnville and began making films as an architecture student at Berkeley (where he happened to hear lectures given by Sheldon Renan!). The list of award winning animators trained at Will Vinton Studio includes Craig Bartlett, Barry Bruce, Joan Gratz, Brad Schiff (PARANORMAN), Travis Knight (CORALINE, PARANORMAN) and Mark Gustafson (THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX). Will continues to teach stop motion animation at Northwest Film Center.

Anne Richardson: Will, when you arrived here after Berkeley and were starting to make CLOSED MONDAYS, you were able to support yourself with day jobs working as a filmmaker. What was your very first job?

Will Vinton: I was initially hired by Dan Biggs, who was working for Northwestern, Inc. doing industrial documentaries. They had a recording studio and a nice little sound stage. This was in the days when Tektronix was big. Companies like that spent alot of money on media. Georgia Pacific was one of Dan’s big clients.

Anne Richardson: This is training films? Sales films?

Will Vinton: Training, sales, those were the main things. We did corporate image films. Maybe one third of the work was commercials. I was hired to do editing. Maybe about a year into working at Northwestern, Dan wanted to split off and service the Georgia Pacific accounts himself. So we decided to found Odyssey Productions. Bill DeWeese, the industrialist at Esco, had been a client in the past, so they worked out some terms, and he came on board. Reagan Ramsay, myself, Dan Biggs were the worker bees. Bill DeWeese was the president. Dan put together a terrific board of directors: Patty Kaplan, who was head of Evans Products Co.; Tom Moyers, Sr., Moyers Theaters; Bob Farrell, Farrell’s Ice Cream. The idea was to create a base of really good, strong, big clients – Evans, Tektronix, Georgia Pacific, Louisiana Pacific – and to base a company around doing commercials and industrials, but with the intention of growing to do entertainment.

Anne Richardson: Homer Groening set up his own advertising agency in 1958. Were you aware of him?

Will Vinton: Oh yeah. In fact I edited one of his productions. During the time I was freelancing for Northwestern, I did one for Homer which (laughs) I’ve always thought of as a cross between e. e. cummings and Benny Hill.

Anne Richardson: You told me once about finding help when you had to build special equipment to shoot claymation.

Will Vinton: When I was just starting out, I didn’t have a synchronizer, couldn’t afford one. Somebody told me about Walt Dimick whose father was a machinist and kind of a wild mechanical guy. I went to talk to him, and he felt sorry for me, and gave me a bunch of sprockets and hardware necessary to build a synchronizing part which allowed me to hold my film in place.

Anne Richardson: Did you have that same kind of mentor relationship with Homer Groening?

Will Vinton: No. I was just hired to do a freelance job. But it was important to me because it was one of my first jobs in Portland.

Anne Richardson: Did you feel inspired by Homer’s career?

Will Vinton: Well, you have to consider the films! Neither the e. e. cummings part or the Benny Hill part seemed to be exactly what I wanted to do. (laughs) What I did like about Homer COMPLETELY was the kind of wild freedom. That anything’s possible, and someone will pay you to do it.

Anne Richardson: Thank you, Will.

A crash course on Will Vinton’s place in Portland film history can be found here.

Sheldon Renan Talks: How He Broke In

Anne Richardson — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 02:09:18 +0000

When National Endowment of the Arts put Sheldon Renan on a funding panel in 1970, he wasted no time persuading them to fund a network of four regional film centers. 40 years later, all four – including Northwest Film Center – are still going strong. After a lifetime of reading, writing, producing, directing, watching and just plain loving film, he currently writes and consults about the importance of connectivity. Sheldon Renan grew up in Oregon City and graduated from Cleveland High School in 1957.

Anne Richardson: When you went off to Yale, did you have any glimmer of a glimpse that you would become a filmmaker?

Sheldon Renan: No. I grew up on a turkey farm. My senior year we moved from Oregon City into Portland and I was three blocks from Reed College. I had a jazz program on the radio station, but the most important thing was every Friday night there were foreign film showings in the chapel.

Anne Richardson: You said you wrote An Introduction To The American Underground Film because you had seen all the movies. You were inspired by the lack of a guide, because one didn’t exist?

Sheldon Renan: It was a combination of things. I’d seen alot of the movies. Andy Warhol had asked me to write a book about him. It was just a sense that there needed to be a book. I got into the Junior Council at the Museum of Modern Art just when they were doing an exhibition of underground film, their first one. Willard Van Dyke was taking over as director and I think I claimed I was doing a history of and introduction to underground film. It just popped out of my mouth. What often happens is that I tell a lie, and then it sounds like a good idea. So I go ahead and do it.

Anne Richardson: And it changed everything.

Sheldon Renan: In 1968, I was in New York to meet Henri Langlois, and there was a knock on the door one morning, and a butler was standing there, holding a plate with a top on it. He said “Is Sheldon Renan here?” He lifts the top off the plate, and it was an invitation to have lunch at a mansion across the street. So I go to the lunch and there’s Jean DeMenil (CEO of Schlumberger, an international oil fields equipment company), Henri Langlois, Simone Swan, and, to my amazement, Francois Truffaut and Fritz Lang. I was so upset I popped a button off my suspenders. Literally in front of Truffaut and Lang, I had to have my button sewed back on. So I asked Fritz if he would come out (to Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archives) and do a film series. I was trying to write my first script at the time and Fritz kinda became my coach.

Anne Richardson: So your primary identity is as a writer.

Sheldon Renan: Yes. Its too complicated to explain that I sometimes produce and sometimes direct. I never know what I am doing until the phone rings.

Anne Richardson: When you were at the NEA, your main input was “I don’t think it (federal funding for film) should all go to American Film Institute.”

Sheldon Renan: I wanted to create something for everybody because if it wasn’t for everybody I would be excluded. I’m doing what I do about film and filmmaking so that people won’t have a hard time finding their way into the kitchen the way I had.

Anne Richardson: Thank you, Sheldon.

More about Sheldon Renan:

His first film

His most recent film

His book

What keeps his interest these days

His place in Portland film history

David (2012)

Anne Richardson — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 01:42:37 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sheldon Renan recently sat down in the director’s chair, a spot he has occupied on and off throughout a long career, to make a short tribute to city employee David Olson.

I hereby claim David as an Oregon film on the basis of numerous qualifying criteria.

Basic Film Terms: A Visual Dictionary (1970)

Anne Richardson — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 06:51:19 +0000

Sheldon Renan made the fifteen minute educational short, Basic Film Terms: A Visual Dictionary, as a follow up to his 1967 book An Introduction to the American Underground Film: A Unique, Fully Illustrated Handbook To The Art Of Underground Film And Their Makers.

I believe Basic Film Terms is a lost film.

(Late breaking development – an eagle eyed reader found some copies! )

(Even later breaking development – a resourceful reader found copies for sale, see comments below.)

I hereby claim it as an Oregon film on the basis of the contribution of writer-director Sheldon Renan.

James Blue, Oregon filmmaker

Anne Richardson — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 04:58:13 +0000

When I began exploring Oregon film history, I knew I would run across surprises. I never expected to run across a filmmaker as accomplished, and as forgotten, as James Blue.

James Blue (1930-1980) grew up in Portland. He studied speech and theater at University of Oregon, graduating in 1953. After some years of military service, he entered film school in Paris where he was influenced by Jean Rouch. Although he first distinguished himself by winning the Critics Prize at Cannes for The Olive Trees Of Justice, a feature length narrative film, he spent the rest of his life making socially engaged documentaries.

Blue was a man of firsts. First Oregon director to go to Cannes, and the first to receive an Oscar nomination. First person ever to receive Ford Foundation funding for a film project. He helped start the Center for Advanced Film Studies at American Film Institute. The documentary programs at Rice University and at the Center for Media Study in Buffalo were both established by him. He served on the 1970- 1972 NEA funding panel which launched the first network of regional film centers, as proposed by Sheldon Renan. Northwest Film Center is the result of that NEA initiative.

Two Oregonians, James Blue and Sheldon Renan, on that panel!

The reason you haven’t heard of James Blue, or seen his films, is that his films have no distributor. They are not digitized. I am not sure even SUNY Buffalo, the school where he was teaching at the time of his death, can offer access to his films.

Here’s the crash course on Blue:

His IMDB page.

An interview with one of his students

A booklet compiled to accompany a retrospective of his films.

I am still trying to make sense of this new-to-me filmmaker. James Blue never returned to live/teach/work in Oregon. He is buried in Willamette Cemetery.

Underground Film Is Oregon Territory: Sheldon Renan Wrote The Book

Anne Richardson — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 06:41:16 +0000

Everyone read An Introduction to the American Underground Film: A Unique, Fully Illustrated Handbook To The Art Of Underground Film And Their Makers when it came out in 1967. Everyone. It covers the work of Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger in Los Angeles; James Broughton, Bruce Conner in San Francisco; Harry Smith, Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol and the Kuchar Brothers in New York, among others.

Its author? Oregonian Sheldon Renan.

Sheldon told me that when he was in high school, there were only three hip people in all Oregon City. He was one, and Walt Curtis was the other. I am dying to know who the third was. Sheldon went off to Yale, Walt to PSU. Both men made foundational contributions to independent filmmaking in Oregon.

Walt did this by writing Mala Noche, the novella on which Gus Van Sant based his first feature.

Sheldon did this by writing the first National Endowment for the Arts proposal for a network of regional film centers, launching the process which led to the formation of the Northwest Film Center.

Subtract Gus Van Sant and the NWFC from Portland’s current film scene, and you can see how large the contributions of these two Oregon City beatniks were.

Was Sheldon the first person to write a guide to American underground filmmaking? I believe he was.

Sheldon has returned to Oregon and continues to be hopelessly hip. The simplicity of his insight, “Devices can be small on the outside, but large on the inside”, provides the clinching argument for cyber anthropologist Amber Case’s description of Liquid Modernity.

Handy Guide To Growing Independent Film Outside of LA & New York: What Portland Did Right

Anne Richardson — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 16:05:46 +0000

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, KGW, right in their own building, the Oregonian Tower. Radio later served as an Early Warning System to identify the talent of Portlanders-gone-Hollywood 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 (originally conceived as a radio supply store) named Tektronix. He processed films he made for them, after losing patience with the delays of sending films to out of town labs. Eventually, he went into business as Teknifilm Lab. A filmmaker himself, he acted as teacher and mentor to customers. More important to the development of independent filmmaking in Portland: Hood’s lax attitude toward payment schedules, which subsidized generations of Oregon artists working in film.

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 Sheldon Renan succeeded in persuading National Endowment for the Arts 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, with a push from Sheldon Renan

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

Ron Finne, Tom Taylor and Brooke Jacobson found Northwest Media Project 1974

Will Vinton and Bob Gardiner make Closed Mondays 1974

Don Zavin makes Fast Break 1977

Penny Allen makes Property 1977

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.

Vanessa Renwick makes The Yodeling Lesson 1998

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?”