Movies
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 …
Summer 2006
Busting out
One rainy afternoon this spring filmmaker Francine Strickwerda entered the El Diablo coffee shop in Seattle. She ordered a cubano latte and then sat at a table overlooking Queen Anne Avenue. She looked around the busy room. The scene brought back memories of a time, a few years before, when she was working on her first documentary, a film about breasts. “I wrote a lot of grants for Busting Out sitting in this coffee shop,” she said.
Five years in the making, the hour-long movie is, in her words, “a strange mix of pop, politics, and history, and economics, and health, all these things that … » 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 …