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There has been much head-scratching and hand-wringing over the U.S. Bancorp Tower, aka Big Pink, and what owner Jeff Swickard has in store for Oregon’s largest skyscraper, which the auto dealership mogul purchased for the fire-sale price of $45 million in July 2025.
Big Pink’s vacancy rate stands at about 70% after the exit of SurveyMonkey, law firm Miller Nash, and U.S. Bank itself. Swickard seemed ready to get creative: A few weeks ago, he floated the idea of a rooftop deck.
He told Willamette Week (“Risky Business,” Oct. 7) that he’s “not afraid of investing in businesses that I believe in, in things that I believe in.”
This fall, it looks like one of the things that Swickard believes in is independent film.
Big Pink was the somewhat surprising venue for the Portland Film Festival, which hosted five days of screenings, events and workshops in the downtown office building, from Sept. 30 to Oct. 4. The executive director of the 14-year-old independent film festival slid into Swickard’s DMs on Instagram, explaining that he needed last-minute space due to safety concerns about the fest’s planned Northwest Portland location.
“I contacted a lot of building owners. What Big Pink had for us was security, parking and one location for everything,” says Josh Leake, Portland Film Festival’s executive director (and candidate running for Portland City Council in District 4).
The Portland Film Festival has been held at all kinds of venues over the past decade and a half, such as the Center for Native Arts + Cultures and McMenamins’ Kennedy School and Mission Theater. (Leake would not reveal the exact Northwest Portland location that fell through.) Leake and his team of volunteers brought in their own projector, screen, seating and red carpet.
The Portland Film Festival is not to be confused with the Portland International Film Festival, which was founded in 1977 by Bill Foster of the NW Film Center but never came back after the pandemic shutdowns of 2020.
Swickard took to Instagram himself this week touting the partnership.
“When I talk about investing in Portland, I don’t mean just buildings and dealerships,” he said. “I mean investing in things that make Portland Portland. So it’s culture, it’s people, it’s community and, of course, the film festival represents all of those things.”
Swickard owns the Swickard Group, a network of 54 auto dealerships on the West Coast and in Alaska and Hawaii. He lives primarily in Las Vegas but has snapped up a handful of Portland’s corporate buildings in short order. In addition to Big Pink, Swickard owns the Five Oak Building at 421 SW Oak St. and has part ownership of the “Black Box” at 200 SW Market St. and the mixed-use apartment building Park Avenue West at 750 SW 9th Ave.
