Focus Features

In recent years, Portland has become a hotbed of indie culture in music, literature art, and especially film. Focus filmmakers, like Gus Van Sant (Milk) and Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven) live there, and Laika Studio, which produced the stop-motion animation Coraline, is headquartered in Portland. What makes Portland so inspirational? Gus Van Sant, whom Governor Ted Kulongoski recently heralded as “a true Oregon artist,” finds being away from LA and Hollywood essential: “If you're here, you have a different point of view of life.”

Portland was used by trappers and settlers in the early 19th century, but didn’t become a city until 1843, when William Overton and Asa Lovejoy filed a claim to make it a municipality. It gained its name from a bet with a developer who wanted to name the Oregon village after his hometown in Maine. Now considered one of greenest––both in terms of vegetation and environmental awareness––cities in the world, Portland was originally a rough and tumble frontier town that The Oregonian called in 1889 “the most filthy city in the Northern States."

Since the advent of silent movies, Portland has been a center of film appreciation. In 1923, the Laurelhurst Theater became an art deco destination. Now there are scores of theaters across town offering first-run, art-house and retrospective films. Our piece “Portland's Picturehouses and Production Palaces” gives an overview of theaters and other cinema locales, many of which, keeping with the Portland spirit, serve micro-brewed beers and ales inside. The 1926-built Hollywood Theater found a new life when it was acquired by the Oregon Film & Video Foundation and turned into a landmark.

Free speech and free spirits have helped develop Portland’s civic spirit. Free Speech rulings have guaranteed Portland fiercely standing up for first amendment rights, a consequence being that the town has more strip clubs (like its oldest venue, Mary’s) per capita than either San Francisco or Las Vegas. But it’s also provided writers and artists the space to create. Author Jon Raymond, profiled in “Jon Raymond's Portland,” acknowledges the city’s open spirit: “the different disciplines are not Balkanized like they are in New York and LA. There is not a huge social difference between musicians, and writers and artists and others.”

As Jon Raymond suggests, artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians inevitably end up in the same party in Portland. In “The Indie City: Why Portland is America’s rock Mecca,” Taylor Clark tries to understand what draws all these very different talents––the Daddy Warhols, M. Ward, The Shins, Pink Martini (shown performing at the zoo), Viva Voce, Menomena, Richmond Fontaine, and more––to live in Portland. In the end his only answer is simple: “It's easy to live here.” We tapped a few of the local band members (who find it easy to live there) for our Five in Focus: “Portland Bands on Film Soundtracks.”

Portland has been appearing in films since Raymond Wells made the nature silent In the Land of the Setting Sun in 1919. After disappearing for decades, the city started making guest appearances in work like Five Easy Pieces and First Love (shot on the campus of Reed College). Other famous Portland films include Body of Evidence and Mr. Holland’s Opus. With the advent of filmmakers living in Portland, the city has been showing up more and more, especially in many of Gus Van Sant films, like Elephant and Paranoid Park (shown here). Most recently, the town and its surrounding areas have been the backdrop to the Twilight movies.

The recent South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, premiered a trio of Portland-set films: Aaron Katz’s mystery Cold Weather, Matt McCormick’s Some Days Are Better Than Others, and Christoph Baaden and Marcie Hume’s documentary Hood to Coast. These films, like those from many Portland directors (James Westby, Warren Pereira, Andy Blubaugh, etc), were made with a lot of talent and almost no money. Much of this talent is nurtured by local organizations like the Northwest Film and Video Festival and the Northwest Film Center.