Sometimes a great notion dvd12/26/2023 ![]() The movie is played in a theater that roars with surround sound, glows an infernal red and is scented with smoke. The highlight is a 15-minute film about the massive wildfires that scorched 350,000 acres of old-growth forest starting in 1933. It's worth the trip, in part for the rugged mountain scenery and also to see the $10.7 million museum, built with private timber dollars in the heart of the Tillamook State Forest to offer the history (and maybe a little propaganda) of state-managed forestry in Oregon. Pull out your paperback of the novel and compare the Siletz to "a vast smile of water with broken and rotting pilings jagged along both gums, foam clinging to the lips." The foggy morning hike is the perfect opener for your day-especially if you spent the night on the Siletz.Ī visit to the Tillamook Forest Center (45500 Wilson River Highway, 50, ) entails a two-hour drive up from Lincoln City deep into the Coast Range. 101 from Lincoln City, and hike a leisurely half mile on the Alder Island Nature Trail, where herds of Roosevelt elk can be seen grazing the banks. But the Siletz River is its closest real-life mirror, and its tidal flows have been restored by the feds. The Wakonda Auga River is a central character in Sometimes a Great Notion-the watery highway that transports rafts of logs to market, drowns a hero and lets the paterfamilias of the Stamper family give the middle finger to union men from beyond the grave. Drop by two of his haunts: Timbers Restaurant & Lounge ( 181 S Main St., Toledo), where legend says Newman used a chainsaw to trim the legs off a pool table, and the Bay Haven Inn ( 608 SW Bay Blvd., Newport)>, where the regulars include a dog with his own stool at the Keno machines. The movie he directed is rarely watched but not bad at all (it's got good logging footage and a helluva death scene for Richard Jaeckel), which is all the more impressive considering that histories and locals agree Newman spent most of the production drunk. They are most thickly distributed between Lincoln City and Newport, which by no coincidence is where Paul Newman decided to film a movie adaptation of Sometimes a Great Notion in 1970.īefore he became a sainted purveyor of organic fig cookies, Newman was a whiskey-swilling heartthrob who pulled into Oregon fresh off Hud and Cool Hand Luke with big plans to translate Kesey's novel to the screen. Highway 101 between Tillamook and Bandon. This is a precise description of at least half a dozen places on U.S. The main street is a stripe of wet asphalt smeared with barroom neon." "There will be a small scatter of boxlike dwellings somewhere near a mill, usually on a river, and a cannery on the docks, needing a new floor. Like an analog Garmin, Oregon's preeminent novelist tells you when you have reached your destination. Towns dependent on what they are able to wrest from the sea in front of them and from the mountains behind, trapped between both." "All up and down the West Coast," Kesey wrote in 1963, "there are little towns much like Wakonda. Yet a sort of roadmap to the home of the fictional Stamper family does exist. You can get lost in the pages, but you won't find directions. These places existed only in the mind of Ken Kesey, who is dead, and in the pages of his logging novel Sometimes a Great Notion, which is long. ![]() I guess we'll never know for sure.(Joe Michael Riedl) By Aaron Mesh Jat 11:06 am PDT He clearly had a different vision for the film I think I know what it was, but. and agreed to talk to me, I was ready to fly down there at the drop of a hat, then he disappeared and I never heard from him again. The real bummer in my research was not talking to Richard Colla. He was dating Jacqueline Bisset at the time. About a year before he died, I reached Michael Sarrazin through his agent, but he declined to be interviewed, saying, "I don't want to be the last person alive talking about 'Sometimes a Great Notion.'" This killed me because I'd heard a lot of stories that he had a couple of Newport girlfriends during the shoot and wanted to ask him about it. They both wanted to retire here, but it didn't work out. They were great sources for the Hollywood angle and absolutely loved Oregon. I did manage to talk to Lee de Broux, the actor who played the theater owner, and John Gay, the screenwriter. By the time I started researching the book in earnest, Newman had died and I never tried to contact anyone in his family. ![]()
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