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Film

Winter 2016

Breaking through

Paul Henning ’98 didn’t set out to be a professional musician. “I swore up and down I wasn’t going to be a music major or study music—but then, look what I did!” he says.

He moved to Los Angeles where he made a lot of phone calls looking for work as a session player, orchestrator, or proofreader of musical scores—and ended up working with John Williams on the music for Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Over the course of 60 years, John Williams has scored over 100 films and taken home five Oscars. All his scores, Henning says, start with Williams at the piano … » More …

Fall 2010

Kevin Tomlinson ’75—Back to the garden

On a road trip with a friend in 1988, Kevin Tomlinson stumbled onto what would be the seed of a great story. At the time, he just knew he had to collect it and save it.

“We were out to see the American West,” says the filmmaker, who graduated from the Murrow School in 1975. “It was a Jack Kerouac, Neil Cassady kind of thing.”

Keeping off the main roads and camping from their car, the pair landed in Tonasket where they came across the local food co-op. When Tomlinson perused the bulletin board to get a flavor of the community, he spied a … » More …

Summer 2010

Cougs behind the camera

Alan Baker was looking for a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Pullman.

Of course Baker (’94 PhD) knew there were no actual Wright-designed houses in the town, but he needed to find a Modernist, spacious home overlooking the Palouse for an ideal movie location. As a location scout last summer for The Big Bang, an Antonio Banderas thriller in production, and other feature films, Baker wandered through Washington identifying, photographing, and securing places for directors to make movies.

The search for the Wright house in Pullman failed. But as we drove around the area, Baker, a … » More …

Fall 2006

The coming of age of teen films

As a teen, Sarah Hentges had Wonder Woman and Princess Leia as her pop culture role models. One flew an invisible plane, and the other lived in another galaxy. Neither offered much of an idea of how a young American woman should be.

As a Washington State University graduate student, Hentges is on the trail of other American teen icons like Natalie Wood’s Deanie, who suffers sexual repression in the 1961 Splendor in the Grass, and Lindsay Lohan’s 2004 Lola, who is  striving to be the center of attention in Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. She has dedicated much of her post-graduate education to … » More …

Spring 2003

Sherman Alexie: “It’s all good”

It may look the same today, but as Sherman Alexie walked down the aisle of the Kenworthy Theater in Moscow, Idaho, he realized his last memory of the place was, well, a little bit hazy.

“I was just recalling with a friend of mine who I went to school at Wazzu with that this is the first time I’ve been in this theater sober,” Alexie said, glancing around the old theater at the Palouse premier of his second movie, The Business of Fancydancing, last September. “And I’ve been sober a long time.”

Eleven years, actually, he says with pride, urging other young tribal members in … » More …

Spring 2004

Happy in Hollywood, actor Larkin Campbell loves what he's doing

It’s a dark drama, set in a desert. The lead character, Zack, runs into some bad guys, and he’s in real trouble. The name of the movie, an independent production, is short and catchy: Nowhere.

But the actor playing Zack, Larkin Campbell, hopes the movie goes somewhere. He not only played the lead, he also produced the flick.

“We’ve sent it out, but it hasn’t been accepted in any of the festivals yet,” he says. “We’ll have to wait and see.”

Among other projects he’s working on is Squatch, an adventure film about two guys chasing the mythical Bigfoot.

Last year he was a co-star … » More …