The following are notes Anne Richardson, founder of the Oregon Cartoon Institute, typed up and sent in an email to herself on September 21, 2014 at 6:52 a.m., in preparation for a talk titled, “Who Makes Pop?” In it, she references an essay she wrote on her blog (now defunct), about Robert Johnston’s analysis of the “radical middle class” in Portland and work she was doing on a cultural history of minstrelsy,
When Anne was diagnosed with cancer in 2020, she spent her last few months curating what aspects of her intellectual life she wanted to move into the future, and how. While she decided to deactivate her blogs, the attached essay is one she made sure I had a record of. She also printed out and put in my hands the following email to herself. This is how we know these ideas were the most central to Anne’s thinking about independent arts in Oregon. Of all else she had done, these were the ideas she wanted to move into the Oregon Cartoon Institute’s future as we kept the work going.
The email to herself contained occasional typos which I have cleaned up for readability. I have inserted paragraph breaks when I thought they would help the reader follow changes in the direction of her thinking. There are also moments in her writing where it’s clear she intended to pull in material from external sources, read interview quotes, or make abrupt topic shifts in ways that, as a talk, would have been for dramatic effect. Where needed, I have noted these in brackets. Aside from these minor editorial adjustments, the text is pure “Anne on Anne.” She is writing to herself about who she is, how Robert Johnston’s analysis of Portland explains its outsize role in the independent arts (and thinking) scene, and why no other city but Portland could have made Portlandia.
-Katherine Richardson Bruna
Anne Richardson. “Why Carrie Brownstein was Wrong about Portlandia” (2014).
What do I do? I explore regional identity by looking at Oregon artists, including the artists who choose film, and artists who choose to work in pop culture. Creating film artists who are independent, internationally known, writer-director-producers is Oregon’s under-recognized regional specialty. Will Vinton, Joan Gratz, James Ivory, Bill Plympton, James Blue, and Gus Van Sant, all Oscar nominated or Oscar winners, are all independents. Gus Van Sant switch hits, and both makes films inside and outside Hollywood. The one Oscar winner from Oregon who based his entire career inside Hollywood is Brad Bird, and within that system he also is a writer-director-producer. My question was – how did this happen? Where did these careers come from? And, separate from the high proportion of animators, four out of seven, which is the mystery which provoked the founding of the Oregon Cartoon Institute, why do we see the remarkable uniformity, across the state, of the choice to conduct a career as an independent?
Conducting the investigation, I was struck by the constant presence of its shadow, which was the question “Why so little interest in this topic?” What kind of regional identity devotes itself to NOT knowing its history? I wrote about this in an essay titled It’s the Ignominy, Stupid: Portland, Portlandia, and the Cultural Legacy of Robert Johnson’s Radical Middle Class, and that is what landed me here today, speaking to you.
But before I get to the ways Robert Johnston’s research into the voting patterns of Progressive Era Portland [hyperlink] advanced both my understanding of why there was so little interest in that history, I just want to tip my hat to another writer who illuminated my thinking. Theodore Winthrop visited Oregon Territory in 1853, and wrote about that trip in The Canoe and the Saddle. [hyperlink]. Here’s the image which stopped me in my tracks, as an early and powerful expression of a central thread in regional literature and later film. Winthrop wakes up from sleep. It is daytime, and he is in a canoe midway across the Puget Sound. The canoe is floating on a reflection of the white slopes of Mt. Rainier. He is floating on the mountain. Winthrop details his sense of disorientation: Is he asleep or awake? Is he on a mountain, or a cloud, or a body of water? He is not calm in his confusion. He is centering himself in his confusion. Being grounded in confusion – we will see this again and again in the literature of the PNW.
At the same time Theodore Winthrop was traveling across what would become the state of Washington, Joaquin Miller was writing his Unwritten History (how disoriented can you get?) Life Among the Modocs. The dreamy, possibly brain damaged traveler shows up in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho. It was central to the narrative of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and later Fight Club. But the insight I owe Theodore Winthrop is that he brought pop culture with him to the West, in the joking titles he gave his Native American guides. The canoe is paddled by Indians he has hired, and who he has given jokey nicknames which endow them with royal birth. This is straight out of popular culture of the time – just as slaveowners in the South gave their slaves names from classic Greek and Roman literature. When John Winthrop arrived in the frontier New England, he did not have “Polly Wolly Doodle” and “Camptown Races” and “Why did the chicken cross the road?” as part of his cognitive compass. The Euro Americans who came to Oregon, including his descendant, Theodore Winthrop, did. They brought with them the minstrel show. The same year of the first big wagon train was the year the Virginia Minstrels made their Bowery debut in N.Y.: 1843. Maybe everyone on the train was fleeing that new phenomenon. Maybe they were just moving out here in order to get a wider view of it.
But the confusion in which we still ground ourselves, and I would cite Portlandia as an example, and, I am arguing, in which we still ground ourselves, is very pragmatic. Where are we? Temporally, where are we? Developmentally, where are we? Will Portland, a medium sized city founded in 1851, eventually, given enough time, become New York? Is that the plan? Or maybe L.A.? How far are we behind? When will we catch up? To come to a deeper understanding of Portland’s film history I had to discard this model, which has us doomed from the start.
Here’s an interview that Carrie Brownstein, an actress-writer-producer of the IFC television show, Portlandia, did with David Letterman.
David Letterman: Could you have done the same show in Scottsdale, Arizona. “Scottsdalia”? Could you do the show anywhere?
Carrie Brownstein: I think so. I think anyone out there who is living in a small town, or even a medium-sized city, or even New York, knows there’s pockets of weirdness and curiosity, but Portland is such a good stand in for those cities. You know I think we all have a version of those dreamy (she said this! Not me! Hats off to Theodore Winthrop) cities that are in our mind, and sometimes I think it is more of a mindset than a place.
So to review, in response to the question “Could you do the show anywhere?, ”Carrie said “yes.” She said “I think so.” Now I will show you why Carrie is wrong.
Between the years 1905 and 1910, Portland’s population grew 50%. During these years, Portland’s streetcar system reached its peak. After then, with the introduction of the automobile, the system lost ground. In 1911, competing lines consolidated into one system, and acres of new middle-class housing which was going up were served by rapid transit. These years coincide with the years Robert Johnston examined in his book. He was interested in Portland’s middle class, or what he called Portland’s middling class. These middling folks included, above all, small employers who, because of their tenuous economic condition, low level of property ownership, and limited opportunities, cannot be considered capitalists.
While the street car lines were going in, the movie houses were going up alongside them. By 1915, Portland had 70 movie theaters, about the same number it has today. Portland entrepreneurs embraced this new medium. Electricity was cheap and plentiful, and the bounding population growth meant a steady stream of customers.
Andy Warhol: What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest.
David Cress. What was his first job, out of film school?
He worked for Odyssey Productions, a production company founded by Will Vinton [there is no record of this company; even Vinton does not mention this company.]
For people old enough to remember the California Raisins television campaign, you know Will Vinton’s work. He won an Oscar in 1975 for a short film which used stop motion to animate clay figures. He coined the term “claymation” for this art form, and went on to get every award in the book for his filmmaking. David Cress is not at all unusual in tracing his career start to Will Vinton. Will Vinton transformed Portland from a city without a motion picture studio to one with several.
And, referring back to the map of 1924 Portland, all this activity took place in the west side of Portland. The urban side, the downtown side, the business/ commercial district. Will Vinton moved to Portland after graduating from Berkeley. He was familiar with Portland, having grown up in McMinnville, less than an hour away. His mother drove him and his sister several times a week to Portland to take dance lessons, Here’s an aside: Will began as a rock musician, a background he shares with Carrie and Fred [Armisen]. So he was familiar with Portland from childhood.
But what about Will Vinton’s entry into filmmaking? Who did he first work for? Will Vinton used his father’s home move camera to experiment with stop motion while he as an undergraduate at Berkeley. He needed to modify the camera mechanism for this kind of specialized shooting. During a school break, while he was visiting Portland he was complaining that he couldn’t solve this mechanical problem. Here’s Will’s words:
[Anne was going to supply a quote here. She was most likely going to reference Vinton’s famous camera track described here.]
This moment proved pivotal in Will’s career. He told me about it in informal conversation and he repeated it in formal oral history interviews. The encouragement he received from Norm Dimick was part of his decision, when he returned to Portland with his Oscar in 1975, to stay put and build his career outside Hollywood.
This is where Robert Johnston provides a new paradigm of understanding. If you are looking for precedents for Will Vinton’s career in Portland, you have to skip over several decades to return to the silent era, when Portland did have several movie studios, at times as many as five in the metropolitan area, making feature length films for both local and national distribution. But that is if you are looking for a through line of movie studios producing feature length films.
What if, instead, after reading Robert Johnston’s book, which talks about
[Anne was going to insert book material here]
You look for small business owners? What if you look for a network of small business owners participating in a network of mutually beneficial trade relationships?
Well, who was this mechanical genius who helped Will Vinton out by supplying him with parts and encouragement?
Norm Dimick made his first film while he was in high school in NE Portland, Grant High School. Now we are moving over to the side of Portland which Robert Johnston identifies as the stronghold of Portland’s Progressive Era thought leadership. Born in 1910, the same year as Portland’s first movie studio, American Lifeograph, also located on Portland’s East Side, Norm Dimick supported himself as an independent filmmaker and small business owner his entire life. When Will Vinton visited him for help, came to his office at [Anne was going to supply a location here. In a blog post, she mentions NE Sandy as a location.]
And so that’s the story of Norm Dimick, a small businessman whose career was providing services to filmmakers in Portland during a period of time when there were no movie studios in Portland, and the filmmaking was all industrial films, commercials. So here’s the question: Who helped Norm Dimick with his silent era filmmaking? From an interview with his son, Walt Dimick, I learned that Norm Dimick, brought his film to Jesse Sill to be processed. Jesse Sill, born in 1889 Bloomington, Indiana, arrived in Portland in 1912, equipped with a camera so early that it was handmade. Jesse Sill was one of Portland’s first independent filmmakers. He supported himself with his filmmaking his entire life starting as a newsreel cameraman.
Norm Dimick and Jesse Sill inhabited the Portland whose political behavior Robert Johnston describes in his book, The Radical Middle Class. The Portland criss crossed with street car lines and dotted with movie theaters and populated, on the East Side especially, with small business owners who sided with labor against capital strongly enough to pass the nation’s first minimum wage law, which happened in 1912. If you map the sites connected to the careers of Norm Dimick and Jesse Sill, they line up just as thoroughly on the East Side that is the middle class side of Portland, as the sites associated with Will Vinton’s career line up on the West side of Portland.
So we go from Jesse Sill to Norm Dimick to Will Vinton to David Cress.
I was lucky that there was, funded through, I believe, cable franchises, an Associates degree offered in Cable & Community TV, so I took a dual major in Television Production, and in Cable & Community TV. Cable & Community TV was really interested in activism and the First Amendment rights and your ability to make things and contribute and counter the big broadcast media. They basically taught a 16 mm single camera operation. The text was Primer for Film, the same book everyone was using if you went to NYU or whatever. I still use stuff that I learned in that one class, every day. I use mostly nothing else. David Cress, in interview, 2013.
Where is David Cress on Robert Johnston’s map of Portland? He attended Washington High School, Mt. Hood Community College, and I sat down to speak with him in a Portlandia office which was
[Anne intended an insertion here]
Who makes pop?
Portland’s secret weapon wasn’t the singular brilliance of our movie makers. It was and is the strength and deep, deep roots of our movie goers. Our audiences. That’s where our pop culture practitioners come from.
Draw a circle with City Hall as the center and the Hollywood Theatre as its edge, and you encounter more screens showing alternative, experimental foreign and otherwise specialized film than showing commercial Hollywood fare – something that no other major American city can say. Shawn Levy, Oregonian, May 1, 2010
These screens are located in theaters which were built during the first flush of Portland’s love affair with cinema. These buildings never came down. One of them, the Clinton Street Theater [hyperlink], a neighborhood theater of 300 seats, has been in constant use since it was built in 1914.
I’m saying that Portland’s radical, i.e. self empowered, self defining, self credentializing, anti elite middle class is the key to our history of producing independent filmmakers.
[And THAT’s why no other city could have put the “Portland” in “Portlandia.”]