Slide Show: Portland's Film Family Tree
October 19, 2012
In the 1920s, Lew Cook learns the newsreel business as a teenager and sets up a one-man production company. In his basement circa 1925, he makes one of Oregon’s first clay animated shorts, The Little Baker, about a piece of dough coming to life. He then
In 1975, McMinnville-born Will Vinton and codirector Bob Gardiner win Oregon’s first Oscar for the stop-motion tour de force Closed Mondays, pictured here. Image courtesy Will Vinton, freewill.tv.
Rather than head to Hollywood, Vinton fatefully stays in the Rose City and founds an animation studio, Will Vinton Studios. He's pictured here with the swirly glasses and red hat amid his production team for The Adventures of Mark Twain. Photo courtesy N
Vinton coins the term “Claymation” and produces a string of iconic characters, from the California Raisins and talking M&Ms to Eddie Murphy’s The PJs. Image courtesy Will Vinton, freewill.tv.
At its height, Will Vinton Studio employs more than 400 people, training an entire generation of animators. “[Vinton] is an inimitable talent and major contributor to stop-motion animation,” says Henry Selick, director of The Nightmare Before Christmas.
Vinton pictured in his office with figures of many of his most iconic characters. Image courtesy Will Vinton, freewill.tv.
A storyboard from Joan Gratz's Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase, which won Oregon's second Oscar in 1992. An early member of the hardy band of animators working at Will Vinton Studios, she brought with her her own trademark technique: clay painting.
A still from one of Gratz's more recent shorts, Puffer Girl. Image courtesy Joan Gratz, www.gratzfilm.com.
Dubbed the “Queen of Indie Animation” by renowned animator (and Oregon native) Bill Plympton, Joanna Priestley makes work that is loved around the globe. MOMA held two retrospectives of her work in 2000. This is a still from her recent film Dear Pluto.
Priestley has also made an interactive animated app called Clam Bake, set to a soundtrack by dubstep composer Seth Norman, available at www.primopix.com. Image courtesy Priestley, www.primopix.com
Gratz and Priestley collaborated on Pro and Con in 1993. Image courtesy Priestley, www.primopix.com.
Travis Knight gets his start as an intern at Vinton Studios with the help of his father, Nike’s Phil Knight. In 2003, Phil buys Will Vinton Studios, dismisses Vinton, and names Travis, a gifted animator, the CEO of the company now renamed LAIKA. Its firs
LAIKA's second project, ParaNorman, came out in August. Image courtesy LAIKA, www.laika.com.
Image courtesy LAIKA, www.laika.com.
Having started a small studio in 1974, Jim Blashfield and his producer, Melissa Marsland, send his surreal short "Suspicious Circumstances" to the Talking Heads in 1985. The band hires him to direct a music video for “And She Was.” He's pictured here fi
A month later, the video airs on MTV. Image courtesy Jim Blashfield, blashfieldstudio.com.
Over the next 20 years, Blashfield makes blockbuster music videos for the likes of Michael Jackson and Joni Mitchell. Here, his producer, Melissa Marland, is pictured on the set for Paul Simon's "Boy in the Bubble." “He was the man who set the leading ed
His music video of Michael Jackson's "Leave Me Alone" won Blashfield a Grammy. The Northwest Film Center will screen an evening of Blashfield's music videos on October 26 at 7pm, and a night of his short films on November 8 at 7pm. www.nwfilm.org I
Penny Allen’s first feature film, Property (1978), a satirical look at urban renewal’s impact on South Portland, screens at the first Sundance and is hailed as an indie breakout. “My film grew out of my experience in my neighborhood,” she says, “and, no
Penny Allen hires Eric Edwards as the cinematographer and Gus Van Sant as soundman. She introduces Van Sant to Walt Curtis, whose memoir becomes Van Sant's first film, Mala Noche. Image courtesy NW Film Center, www.nwfilm.org.
Gus Van Sant then hires Edwards, a Catlin Gabel School chum (pictured here filming in 1987), as cinematographer on My Own Private Idaho, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, and To Die For. Image courtesy NW Film Center, www.nwfilm.org.
Eric Edwards goes on to serve as cinematographer on David O. Russell's Flirting with Disaster, James Mangold's Copland, Larry Clark's Kids, and Judd Apatow's Knocked UP, among many other films. He's pictured here filming a BBC documentary about Mount St.
Kinged “an American auteur” by the New York Times, Gus Van Sant adapts Walt Curtis’s Mala Noche into his first feature in 1985, filming entirely in Portland. He becomes a world-class filmmaker with the release of Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and My Own Privat
By 1997, when Van Sant gets his first Oscar nomination for Good Will Hunting, starring Matt Damon (pictured here) and Ben Affleck, he has inspired a generation of aspiring filmmakers with the idea that they don’t need to start in L.A. Image courtesy
Van Sant’s now made 14 films and garnered a second Oscar nomination for Milk in 2008. He's pictured here on the set with actors Sean Penn and Josh Brolin. Image courtesy Focus Features, www.focusfeatures.com.
Van Sant has shot six of his films in Portland, including Paranoid Park (pictured) and his most recent, Restless. "Gus has been an animating force for over three decades," says the northwest Film Center's director, bill Foster. "Not just because he has p
David Cress, pictured (right) with Portlandia costar Carrie Brownstein and director Jonathan Krisel, creates a makeshift film-school curriculum by combining a business degree at PSU and a television production degree at Mt Hood Community College. He ope
Matt McCormick starts the experimental film/music series Peripheral Produce in 1996. “The film center seemed oblivious of local experimental filmmakers,” he says—although he gives the NWFC credit for catching on quickly. Image courtesy Matt McCormick
McCormick’s first feature, Some Days Are Better Than Others, starring Carrie Brownstein and the Shins frontman James Mercer (McCormick had previously directed both in their respective bands' music videos) is selected for MOMA’s prestigious New Director/N
McCormick's new film, The Great Northwest, closes the Northwest Filmmakers’ Festival on November 18 at 6 p.m. Image courtesy Matt McCormick, www.rodeofilmco.com.
Carrie Brownstein arrives in Portland in 2001 as a member of the celebrated riot grrl band Sleater-Kinney. After the band calls it quits, she experiments with a number of projects before cocreating and starring in the Peabody Award–winning Portlandia w
Miranda July moves to Portland in 1996 and makes several experimental videos, as well as narrates Matt McCormick's The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal, before leaving for LA to make Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) and then The Future (2011).
Jon Raymond makes experimental films before gaining fame as a quintessential Pacific Northwest author.
Director Todd Haynes, who since moving to Portland has become a guiding presence (he executive produces Buoy, a film premiering at the NW Filmmakers’ Festival), introduces Jon Raymond to Kelly Reichardt, and Raymond writes screenplays for her Oregon film
Raymond also cowrites Todd Haynes’s HBO miniseries, Mildred Pierce, starring Kate Winslet, which gets an Emmy nomination for writing in 2011.
A poster child for Portland filmmaking, James Westby moved to town “because I was obsessed with Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy,” he says, going so far as to move to the William S. Burroughs character's neighborhood. Westby lasts less than a semester at NWFC
Of last year’s Rid of Me, directed by James Westby and starring Portlanders Katie O’Grady and Storm Large, the Huffington Post writes: “Rid of Me is cheerfully obscene, hip, and wickedly funny! Director James Westby is a talent on the march.”
