Oregon Sesquicentennial Film Festival

[April 29th, 2009]

Mention Oregon filmmaking, and certain images spring to mind. John Belushi impersonating a zit on the U of O campus. Chunk performing the Truffle Shuffle. River Phoenix riding tandem with Keanu Reeves past Mary’s Club. Kristen Stewart and a vampire, sittin’ in a tree. Mr. Holland, opusing.

Dennis Nyback and Marylhurst University contend that the perception should be expanded to include Leonard vanquished by a bookcase in Howard’s End, Humphrey Bogart consorting with working girls in Marked Woman, Eric Bogosian unsettled by his callers in Talk Radio, and an obscurity from expressionist legend F.W. Murnau called City Girl. Nyback and fellow Marylhurst curator Anne Richardson have compiled 10 days of programming ranging back 79 years to create the Oregon Sesquicentennial Film Festival, a birthday tribute to the state’s movie scene that also serves as an attempt to redefine it.

If it was ever defined. “One problem with this is, if you ask 99 out of 100 random people in Oregon what they thought was an Oregon film, they’d say, ‘Huh?,’” Nyback says, laughing. “So the old definition, I don’t think anybody really cared much about. But we still think there was an old definition, and we need to educate [citizens about] the greater thing of Oregon film.”

That “greater thing” means reminding audiences that James Ivory, one half of the Merchant-Ivory team, was born and raised in Klamath Falls before making vedy vedy British pictures—so Ivory will discuss his work (and show clips from a new Anthony Hopkins project, The City of Your Final Destination ) with Gus Van Sant on Friday, May 1. It means linking famous movies to their Portland roots—so local playwright Tad Savinar will take questions Tuesday, May 5, about Talk Radio, which Oliver Stone based on his drama that debuted on the Portland Center for the Visual Arts stage in 1985. It means harkening back to Oregon’s contributions to Hollywood’s golden age—so Monday, May 4, brings a screening of Marked Woman (where Portland-born actress Mayo Methot met Bogie, and later became his third ex-wife); Thursday, May 7, revives The Lusty Men, a Robert Mitchum cowboy picture shot at the Pendleton Roundup; and Friday, May 8, digs up the 1930 Murnau film City Girl, shot in Athena (a town outside Pendleton) and screened with an original score by Marylhurst music department chair John Paul.

It’s an embarrassment of celluloid riches, though I’d still maintain that Mr. Holland’s Opus deserves further consideration for its own mortifying status. But I’ll save that argument for 1 pm Sunday, May 10, when I’ll join Shawn Levy, David Walker and Ted Mahar in a panel discussion of—take a wild guess—Oregon film. We’ll have no shortage of material.