Ashland is a small town in Southern Oregon. It’s about a four hour drive from Portland and less than thirty minutes from the California border. Mt. Shasta looms in the southern sky but skiers find their way to Mt. Ashland when there’s enough snow.

It is home to the world renown Oregon Shakespeare Festival that has four stages and is one of the largest regional theaters in the country. Talent from around the world come to Ashland to play parts in several plays and musicals done in a rotating repertory. They stop into the restaurants and coffee shops around town without fanfare and many of the local high school students find their first jobs helping out backstage during the summers.

You can’t really buy that kind of creative connection in a small town.

But it’s in Ashland.

There’s also the Ashland Independent Film Festival. You’ve read about that a few times in these posts. It’s been going for more than two decades and has honored local filmmakers like James Ivory, Alex Cox and James Blue. Each April it takes over the Varsity Theatre just down the block from the Ashland Springs Hotel and both the local and out-of-town film lovers turn up. As do the filmmakers. Its social advocacy documentaries have always been the highlight of the schedule but it’s also where locally shot films like Phoenix, Oregon premiered to sold out crowds at the downtown Armory. The local crew of volunteers is just incredible. Friendly, excited and always quick to point out visiting talent and recommend films, because they’ve seen them all. Most recently, local filmmaker Jacy Mairs’ debut feature Trash Baby won Best Narrative Feature at AIFF and the entire cast and crew celebrated long into the (closing) night.

It’s not surprising then that MovieMaker Magazine called Ashland one of the Best Places to Live and Work as a Filmmaker. Not just once or twice, but more than ten years in a row. Film Southern Oregon brings the community together each month for Cameras & Cocktails interspersed with its more sober sibling event on some afternoons: Cameras & Coffee.

Southern Oregon University continues to raise the bar of film production education and training with its Crew Experience program coming out of its Digital Cinema program held within its Digital Media Center. MovieMaker also just named this program one of the Best Film Schools in North America. Many graduates of SOU have come to Portland and Los Angeles and found work, joined the union and made their own films, after coming through the DMC’s hands-on training experience where each student switches crew positions on a fully formed, completed and screened short film.

Each year we see the creative community in Ashland create work that continues to engage and inspire audiences of all kinds. These are projects like Bruce Campbell’s recent film Ernie and Emma. Bruce lives locally and when it came to directing from his own script, he kept it in and around Ashland. “The valley is a big part of the story,” he said. “The beauty of a movie without a huge budget is that we do have huge backdrops in Oregon and they inform where Ernie lives.”

More than ten years ago Wild came into Ashland to film in the exact places that author Cheryl Strayed walked through on the day Jerry Garcia died. The Co-op, the post office, Lithia Park. Scores of hippy-dressed extras sung Grateful Dead songs in mourning as Reese Witherspoon took a break from the PCT.

It also was the setting for Henry Selick and LAIKA’s ground breaking stop-motion feature film Coraline. Although the pink house at the top of the hill isn’t actually there, the connection to the local Shakespeare Festival and the creative ethos of the town is clearly reflected in the film. Selick said, “I began writing my screenplay for ‘Coraline’… at my home in Northern California. Early on, I decided to move the setting from England to the U.S. – there was just one problem. I wanted to keep Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, Coraline’s eccentric neighbors and Shakespearean actors, British. So where, in all of America, would these two unique ladies be living? Then I remembered beautiful Ashland, Oregon, and its famous Shakespeare festival. I’d visited many times over the years, my wife and I had even considered moving there at one point. So I had my new location.”

There are two Oregon Film Trail signs in town that recognize both Coraline and Wild and another one in downtown Klamath Falls, just to the southeast, that recognizes the shooting locations for Phoenix, Oregon.

For those of us with slightly broader tastes there’s local resident Jim Belushi who shot three seasons of Growing Belushi just outside of town at his ranch. There were some grumblings from locals we know about restricted access to a super secret fly fishing spot nearby, but they all figured it out and life resumed.

Just after the pandemic Oregon Film gave a grant to a project that shot on the trails and in the hills nearby called You Go Girl! It was a short film that celebrated Oregon’s outdoors (hence the reason it won an Outdoor Adventure Film Grant done in partnership with Travel Oregon) and told the story of a comedienne that builds a routine out of a journey to scatter the ashes of her mother. It later screened at Sundance and found a broader audience through distribution in New Yorker Magazine.

It’s the home of Joma Films and DoveTV and Maddox Visual.

Ashland also holds a special place personally as it was the first stop on my trip north from LA after I accepted the job of overseeing the work of Oregon Film. With a lot of mud on the tires, two very tired and very large dogs in the back and two kayaks on the roof, we rolled into town and had a coffee with a local producer who had been working there for many years. It was the perfect introduction to Ashland, to Oregon and to the filmmaking talent that calls this state home.

So why now? Why talk about Ashland at this moment in time? Well, in recent weeks we’ve audited one local production that just completed their work, started receiving callsheets for another project that is shooting around town and got a budget from another project that wants to base itself in the town and film another story in this unique and beautiful place. It’s in demand! (Not to mention, we’ve been thinking about all things SoOR after working through our recent post, Weird, that features some insights and accolades about Phoenix, Oregon.)

Ashland is a very special place with a vibrant creative community. And, if you want to bring your next project there, we can also help with added incentives from our “regional” or R-OPIF incentive program.

So now the question is to you: What’s stopping you?

Weird’s a thing. But it’s our thing.

We’re weird like a world class chef who lives in the woods with his truffle pig.

We’re weird like a graphic novelist who opens a bowling alley in southern Oregon with the goal of making the world’s best pizza.

We’re weird like six seasons of a sketch show that hit so close to home that most people it is making fun of can’t stand to watch it.

Yeh. That’s us. Weird like that.

Before Austin and Brooklyn wanted to steal it for their own nefarious purposes, before it became politicized during a contentious campaign a couple of years ago, Portland’s Dante’s nightclub plastered it on the side of its SE Burnside wall - Keep Portland Weird. Music Millenium soon followed suit on the other side of the river.

A town with the world’s largest independent bookstore, the greatest per capita market of strip clubs, a record store specializing exclusively in vinyl and CDs long before that was cool again, and a VHS store with arguably the largest library of titles in the country, had found its calling.

And that’s how it became a thing. Our thing.

This is why Michael Sarnoski and his producer Vanessa Block sought us out for their first feature Pig. Nicholas Cage as you’ve never seen him before. After he left Las Vegas and after he dated a Valley Girl and after he (kidnapped and) raised the Arizona quints, but living in the same neighborhood as all of these, Cage went into the Woods with his Truffle Pig. From there, if you throw in some high-end dining and some outtakes from Fight Club, you are just beginning to see what The Hollywood Reporter praised as “the promise of a generic Cage actioner…[then sneaking] in what proves to be a contemplative, lyrical film about solitude, self-sufficiency and the real value of taste.”

Yeh. It’s weird. But oh-so-good. You should see it.

Then there’s Gary Lundgren. Gary lives in Southern Oregon and has produced many features along side his wife Annie. They’ve used that part of the state as their creative palette for many years - Calvin Marshall, Redwood Highway - and Gary saw something in his own life and in the people around him that brought out a story about a talented graphic artist living in a trailer but seeking connection. He finds that connection through a partnership with a chef, the opening of a local bowling alley and a quest to create the world’s greatest pizza.

All of it was set in the nearby town of Phoenix (and that’s where the film took its title) but it was shot in Klamath Falls after a chance meeting at the Klamath Film Festival. It just so happens that Klamath Falls had a closed bowling alley that was the perfect location. And the rest, as no one really ever says any more, is history.

The film has a cast that indie casting directors would die for - James Le Gros, Lisa Edelstein, Diedrich Bader, Kevin Corrigan and Jesse Borrego. And, after a successful road-trip-event-driven-RV-distribution tour in 2019, it was slated to be released in March 2020.

Yes, that’s right. March 2020. Do you remember March 2020?

Well something weird and wonderful happened with Phoenix, Oregon. Gary and Annie found a way to distribute the film virtually. Not through an established streamer and not through existing theaters but through their own platform that they put together just for the film.

And at the beginning of the COVID pandemic Phoenix, Oregon topped the US Box Office charts. Not for one week. Not even for two. But for three non-consecutive weeks.

We just want to say that again: Locally made, locally distributed Phoenix, Oregon sat on top of the US Box Office for three weeks.

Somewhere in the near future that’s going to be a tough trivia question for groups of people gathered in local bars, for sure. But it’s a worthy and weird achievement for a genuinely funny and moving film shot in southern Oregon.

And perhaps the most notable and most well known displays of public weirdness we’ve managed to produce is Portlandia. Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein’s short skit collection that poked fun at the morals and virtues of an entire city. In the beginning people were mildly amused. They thought to themselves “Oh, I know that chicken” or “Oh, that’s my feminist book store” or “Oh, I had a Dream in the 90s” and then they started to think “Oh…that’s me.”

After that, everything started to change.

In the beginning most people didn’t think anyone would ever see it and then, after eight years and eightieth time they got the question from out-of-towners: “Is it just like the show?” they started to get sick of it. It’s not often that a city gets a popular television series with its name in the title, but people became uncertain that their weirdness was best shared with a worldwide audience. They were happy just being weird on their own here in the upper left corner away from everyone and putting birds on things.

Each of these projects is remarkably itself. Each is rooted and has a specific sensibility in and of this place. They show characters that are inherent to this location without fanfare, bombast or massive visual effects.

And don’t take this as a criticism of franchise filmmaking. Franchise filmmaking serves a real audience and generates a real economy and we have nothing against it. We’d love more of it in Oregon, frankly.

But the thing that Oregon does, the connection that runs from The Pullout King of Portlandia through the underground chef battles of Pig and into the Klamath Falls bowling lanes of Phoenix, Oregon, is make films that could only happen here. These films are strange in the specific way Oregon is strange. These films take the Pacific Northwest’s particular relationship with earnestness and eccentricity and place and food and the natural world and the refusal to be entirely normal about any of it, and put it on a screen.

Weird isn’t just a word.

It’s us.

And we’re going to keep making films about it.

So there.

The top slice is the larger productions. Television series. Studio features. Longer schedules. Higher budgets. Guaranteed outlets. Economic drivers.

The bottom slice is emerging local work. Short films. Seed & Spark campaigns. Grants. New talent. Eclectic stories.

In the middle is the real heart of the sandwich. The mid-level indies. Risk takers. Opportunity generators. Economic contributors.

All three layers are vital and in order to make the best version, all three layers need to be working together. Adding to each other. Taking from each other.

And, wait for it, it needs to all be in balance.

So let’s set aside the allegories for now. That was just a fun way to open. (And it made us hungry.)

As we all know this industry is a bit out of balance. This is true for the development, financing, production and distribution aspects of what we do. Where there was once a clear pipeline there is now self-help. DIY.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

But it does cause some introspection and anxiety for filmmakers as well as film commissions. Finding and keeping a balance is critical not only to the creative process but to the economic developers among us who are seeking to keep talent in our cities and towns just as much as we want to attract talent into our creative workforce.

Here in Oregon we take some pride in the fact that we can play host just as easily to large series from Amazon, challenging features from Netflix, Emmy Award Winning VFX for Hulu, and ground breaking stop motion from LAIKA. While at the same time we also see the impact of those projects on short films and new features being developed at places like Desert Island Studios and through programs like Catalyst’s Script to Screen and PDX Women in Film’s Vision Grant not to mention Portland Event and Film Office’s Amplify Portland and the Post Production Grant and our own Oregon Film Impact Grants.

In addition, we’ve been lucky enough to develop a unique training and placement program called Pathways with our partner Outside the Frame that has given entry-level training and paid placements to scores of people on the sets and in the studios here in Oregon.

For a long time these two “layers” of our ecosystem help sustain a very active mid-level production scene. These included projects like three seasons of “Shrill” and two seasons of “Trinkets” as well as smaller market features from Netflix like “All Together Now” and “Metal Lords.”

But over the last two years that mid-market has shrunk at the edges or disappeared completely. Where there was once a broad production slate for projects budgeted between $5M and $25M, it noticeably declined post-pandemic. Studio output was reduced. Distribution outlets were removed. Budgets were not approved or slashed so excessively that projects just never happened. Production budgets started to fall under $2M or over $30M and, for those few that did find their way into the middle, they chose production locations elsewhere - Eastern Europe, Canada.

This could be a function of many things. Reduced financing. Reduced production slates. Reduced risk tolerance. Reduced investment. Consolidation and mergers. Even things like an uncertain economy, AI and a war.

But, and there’s a catch in our voice as we say this, it seems like those projects are starting to come back. Where we saw a marked decrease in the median and average budget levels for projects both inquiring and filming in Oregon in 2025, those numbers have started to work their way back upwards in 2026. Perhaps with only seven months gone we are being premature in saying this, but the sandwich filling seems to be looking more generous of late.

It’s easy to get lost in the data. Inquiries are up. Budgets are up. Trends seem to be moving up.

But consistency is still lacking. It’s very much a two steps forward, three steps back dance we’re doing. What seems like a sure thing loses its financing before it can start pre-production. Some projects come in, start production only to lose financing during the shoot itself leading to stress on the crew and on the local system in general as we work through lack of payments and broken commitments.

So where is all of this going?

Balance is a good thing. Balance is calming and somewhat predictable. Balance is the steady-state that all systems tend toward. And, yet, balance has been lacking.

The US box office is way up. Incentives are moving upwards, 35%, 40% in many states. Projects are chasing money regardless of international boundaries. An incentive at the federal level seems to be more of a possibility than ever before. AI is creating actors, films, animation, commercials and scripts. Industry leaders are now saying that they couldn’t do their jobs without AI but that it is “a tool” and not a solution. At the same time creators are rejecting AI on almost every level. Verticals and Microdramas are the new shiny toy that people are talking about and watching, but the data showing its monetary success is lacking. Soundstage construction is up but stage rentals are down. There are fewer productions but more production days.

The big questions - how do I find the money to make my project and how do I bring that project to an audience? - remain somewhat unanswered. Less and less investment and fewer consistent outlets for unique indie product.

So why us? Why Oregon?

The short answer is: because we’re thinking about these things. Because we care. Because we want to see your story made, made well and we want people to see it. This is a place that cares about creativity. Its built into our DNA.

And, to top if off, it’s a cash rebate. Easy to use. Responsive.

This is a long game. And we’ve been making movies here since the turn of the 20th century. We’ve successfully hosted several Eras of filmmaking - the Silents, the Westerns, the Easy Riders and Raging Bulls, the 80s Classics, and the Rebellious Series of the aughts.

It’s a balance, yes, but when it’s out of balance you need support. That’s what we do.

We make a terrific sandwich.

And we’re not just talking about Sasquatch. Yes, this is Squatchville. Bigfootland. Skookumtown. They lurk in the trees and mountains and rivers quietly avoiding the cameras. Since they don’t really care about proper borders we happily share them with Washington. And you’re welcome.

But there are others. Other monsters.

Just have a look at what Oregon offers to the would-be monster.

The moody Oregon Coast where a mummy of a logger that was hacked up in a sawmill accident now haunts a stretch of Highway 101. The Bandage Man.

The barren central Oregon basalt fields that host ravenous creatures outside of Lakeville. Lava Bears.

The St. Johns Bridge with its Gothic towers rising out of the mist over the Willamette. It looks like something a production designer invented in a nightmare.

Pittock Mansion and Forest Park, one of the largest urban forests in America, where the trail skirts along the walls of an abandoned Witch’s Castle (which in reality is a 1930s public restroom).

And, yes, these latter settings are all specifically featured in LAIKA’s upcoming film Wildwood.

That brings us to our point: we love our monsters. Love them so much that they are embedded throughout our filmic history.

It could be argued that this all started in 1979 when Stanley Kubrick wanted to set the tone for The Shining. That loooooong opening credit sequence that starts out skimming over the mountain lakes onto that winding road through the Rockies, then sliding up into that aerial reveal of the Overlook Hotel. Yes, Colorado was the inspiration for Stephen King and it owns a lot of that, but, onscreen, that’s Mt. Hood’s Timberline Lodge.

Later on, Grimm spent six years trying to make our monsters seem normal. They were part of the Portland Police force. They had houses and domestic partners and mortgages. And seemingly profitable stores that just sold spices. And they spent the better part of their workday morphing into creatures that then tracked down their Wesen enemies on Burnside and in Pier Park.

Nowadays people come to Portland specifically to find those locations. There are podcasts and blogs that keep the series alive and well in the hearts and minds of its fans. In the city, neighborhoods got used to finding camera trucks on their streets and actors, stuck mid-morph, on their doorsteps. And, not surpisingly, they loved it.

Three years into Grimm’s run, Dean Devlin’s Electric Entertainment brought The Librarians to Portland.

Electric had been here before. Several seasons of Leverage were shot in Portland. This gave them an insider’s view of how things worked. The depth of the crew. The ease of use. The look and feel of the locations.

And they came back.

The Librarians told the story of an eclectic group that has been brought together to protect magical artifacts stored in an ancient Library hidden beneath the streets of the city (and elegantly played by the Oregon State Capitol in Salem in the first season). The entrance to this magical library was through a door in one of the pedestals of St. John’s Bridge. Remember that old chestnut?

That’s the same bridge featured in the upcoming Wildwood.

Each episode brought its own historically embellished monster or monster-adjacent trying to get one-up on our intrepid Librarians. But they always prevailed.

And our genre tradition runs deeper than just these two shows.

The Goonies was released in 1985 and the still-standing Walsh residence played host to the film’s 40th anniversary last year in Astoria. Admittedly, there weren’t any specific monsters, per se, but Chunk, Sloth and One-Eyed Willy certainly had their quirks.

But, arguably, one of the best Oregon monsters was in The Ring. Who can forget the wet hair, the jerky movements, the VHS tape, the phone call and that water well.

Oh, that water well.

That monster emerged right out of the white noise of the TV screen, dripping water onto the floor. Eeech! So creepy. Yaquina Head light stood in for the Moesko Island light and Astoria was the setting for the sequel when Naomi Watts just had to get out of Seattle (and, I mean, who could blame her?).

Cthulhu was also shot in Astoria which, by this time, had started to really own it’s title as Oregon’s Monster Central (Kindergarten Cop and Free Willy notwithstanding). This was a reimagining of H.P. Lovercraft’s story “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” that played on the brooding overcast skies of Oregon’s North Coast. (Coincidentally, the H.P. Lovecraft Festival still runs every year in Portland just as it has since 1995 celebrating the very underpinning of gothic moodiness.)

On the more grounded and personal monster front, Jeremy Sauliner’s Green Room found a rising punk band paying a gig in Astoria only to be confronted by a sinister Patrick Stewart and a violent gang of neo-Nazis. Perhaps this helps us uncover the origins of Portland’s Antifa roots.

Later, Dave Franco and his wife Allison Bree came to Bandon to produce their thriller The Rental. Once again the ever-changing Oregon Coast added to the foreboding quality that haunted every frame of that film about a group of friends renting a house that…just…isn’t…right.

All of this doesn’t even begin to let us dig into the first Twilight and some of the more enigmatic locally produced monster movies that have come out recently including Bampire, His Monster, To Kill a Wolf, Bad Fish, Half Sisters and Frank and Zed. And many, many others.

There is something specific about Oregon’s relationship to genre that isn’t easy to name.

It is not that Oregon is dark. Other places are dark. And it’s not just moodiness. Every teenager these days is moody.

What Oregon has is a quality of earned strangeness. It has centuries of unexplained creatures roaming the dense woods. It is a comfortable place for monsters to set up shop, put down roots and find a home. They fit in. They belong.

Oregon doesn’t just pretend to be a monster ally.

It has proven it time and time again.

And the monsters have always been here.

We just keep making it easier for them to find good crew.

It isn’t large and it’s not necessarily uncomfortable but it’s a chip.

And we’re fine with it. Really. We’re fine.

Let’s say, for argument’s sake, there’s a project looking for a Pacific Northwest location. The calls are made. The location lookbooks are sent. The scouts fly in. The meetings over drinks are had. And they love it. Love the light. Love the look. Love the people. Love the beer. The list goes on.

And then there’s a silence. It could be for a few days or a few weeks. But it’s very noticeable. After the lookbooks have been, well, looked at. After the scouts fly home. After the beer is drunk.

There’s always a meeting. Somewhere in a room on a lot with a lot of Decision Makers. “Oh, the light.” “Oh, the look.” “Oh, the people.”

And then it’s going to Vancouver, BC.

We get this a lot. We make the trips. We sit in the rooms. We hear the assurances that it’s a triangle, it’s a pyramid, it’s all three things - the crews, the infrastructure and the incentives. And then projects that are set here in Oregon fly further north to Canada. Or, even worse, they head to Malta or Albania without even a wing tip to the story’s location setting.

And if it’s not BC or Eastern Europe, it’s California. We get it. There’s more stages, more equipment, more crew. And there’s that dreaded additional incentive for bringing second season television series back into the state (for the record: we hate that incentive, California, just sayin’).

And Oregon sits in between the West Coast Production Titans of California and British Columbia like a middle child at the dinner table being reached across for condiments. (Well, at least we have company. Please pass the bread, Washington, and, by the way, Train Dreams is so good!)

We live in a moment where money is king. A moment where consolidation is Paramount (see what we did there?). We respect that. We know that our industry would not exist without our southern neighbor. (Although it must be said that some of the earliest silent movie studios were here in Oregon before the invention of sync-sound drove them out of business.)

But it’s fine.

It’s completely fine.

British Columbia has a 28% basic production services tax credit, up to 35% for regional or distant locations, with no cap, no annual limit, and the infrastructure of a province that decided decades ago to become the third-largest film production center in North America and then proceeded to do exactly that.

But it’s in Canada. (And we love Canada, but, you know, you gotta go through customs and immigration going in and coming out, and who knows where that can lead these days?)

And, yes, California has even more. The backlots. The standing sets. Lots of crews. (Maybe too many?) The institutional memory of a century of professional filmmaking packed into a metropolitan area that has been doing nothing else for so long that the industry is essentially a utility.

(Did we mention that additional second season incentive? Boooooo.)

We respect that. We always have. These are real advantages.

Our point is: if you’re a small or moderate or medium sized series or indie, you’re going to get lost in those places. You’re going to have cast stopped at immigration. You’re going to lose crew to higher hourly rates midstream. You’re not going to get your calls returned.

And you probably can’t afford any of those soundstages and backlots anyway.

You want the light, the forests, the coast, the high desert, the mountains, the rivers. And, above everything else, the crews. The talent. People who are used to your budget level, your challenges, your aesthetic. The vendors and the community treating your project as special. Treating your story as something that means something and should be made with care and experience.

Not to mention great food, beer, wine and coffee. (You’re just not gonna get better coffee. Seriously.)

And that’s Oregon.

For a moment, let’s consider ease of use, customer service and speed of payment.

The Oregon Production Investment Fund has been running for more than 20 years as a direct cash rebate, not a tax credit, not a transferable certificate requiring a broker and a four-month timeline and a discount, but actual cash, post-audit, delivered on a known schedule. In an industry where independent producers live and die by what’s accessible in their bank account, this mechanism is worth more than the percentage suggests. It is applied to all people working in Oregon. No secondary market. No broker in the middle.

And regional uplifts that sit on top of that.

We’d put our 4-6 week rebate payout up against any other program, especially California and British Columbia. If you’re a sophisticated film finance mathematician, run that timeline through your finance fees and interest reserve calculations and see what it means in terms of savings. If you’re a producer thinking about cash flow and the often unbudgeted costs of supporting your project in its post-completion phase, stop for a moment and imagine a rebate arriving in your bank account before you reach your first festival.

And we’ll go through your budget, line by line, and give you the most accurate rebate estimate you can get. From anywhere. (And we’re probably the only ones who will do that with any accuracy…and we do it for free.)

Oregon is not saying this to be competitive. Oregon is simply making a factual clarification for the record.

And.

(…as if we have to say more…)

It’s a great place to live. Meaning: it really is a great place to live. Just check out the wine tours, the Gorge, the waterfalls, the Coast, the Painted Hills…Crater Lake.

(Come on, Crater Lake!?! Have you ever…?)

The chip on our shoulder, if we’re being honest about it, comes from a specific and recurring experience.

We try to do things right. We try to be honest and helpful and responsive. Not that others don’t do this, we know they do. But, again for the moment, let’s consider our cash rebate, experienced crew, established vendor network, extraordinary landscape, quality of life, a century of institutional knowledge, a film office that returns calls quickly and with answers.

Oregon has been making the case since 1909 and its state film office has been helping to sell that case (longer than any other) since 1968.

The thing about having a chip on your shoulder is that it is, at its core, just a refusal to accept a misclassification.

Oregon is not a place to shoot your background plates while doubling our state in British Columbia. It is not a discount California. It is not even Hollywood North.

It is a specific place, with a specific film ecosystem, producing specific stories that could not be made anywhere else, and doing it through a program structure that is - in the mechanics of how it reviews budgets, pushes your project to the top of the list and how quickly it actually pays filmmakers - more producer-friendly than the programs in the places that might get the phone calls first.

This is genuinely significant. It is also the kind of thing that happens in a state that has been quietly patient, consistent (and frankly a little annoyed) for several decades and has decided to keep building anyway.

The chip is not going away.

We just choose to think of it as ammunition.

And, to top it off, the journey gives you a bird’s eye view of the Cascades - Crater Lake, Three Sisters and Mt. Hood. In fact, there are many who seek out this quick trip up the west coast rather than spend their time in a car trying to get to locations and studios in Burbank or Malibu or Riverside.

We can introduce you to them.

There are six to eight flights a day on major airlines including Delta and Alaska. The earliest leaves LAX at 6am and the latest heads back to LAX at midnight. So, if you’re one of those producers that decides on Monday morning that you need to be on set in Portland after lunch, that’s entirely possible. In fact, we’d encourage it just so you can see how easy it is for yourself. And then tell your friends.

Portland International Airport (or PDX as it is affectionately known) is one of the most decorated airpots in the country. It has won numerous “Best Airport” awards from places like Condé Nast and Travel & Leisure. And it has just completed a major refurbishment that features live trees on the ground and a forest of lattice work overhead. And there’s the coffee and beer that Oregon is known for beckoning you between the gate and your car.

(Oh, and the carpet…there is this thing about the carpet. Nevermind. Just Google it.)

Getting into the city is simple - twenty minutes in normal traffic. And before you smirk and say “when is traffic ‘normal?’ we’d be quick to point out that this isn’t taking the 405 to the 101 from Santa Monica to NBC/U (cue The Californians), this is taking highways 205 and 84 into town just a few miles away. Traffic is fairly predictable. And when it isn’t “normal” you take Sandy Blvd. and your twenty minute journey becomes thirty.

If you’re up for it, you can take public transportation. (I know, shudder at the thought, but it’s Portland, we have more money saved in our Environmental Fund than we do to run the City each year; but we digress.) The MAX line runs from PDX into town on its own track getting you there in just thirty-five minutes.

So, you see, your choices just keep expanding.

There are many who have done this trip and many more who thought they would be doing this trip more often but found themselves staying in town to make sure they were able to eat at Canard or grab a drink at the Multnomah Whisky Library or catch a Thorns or Fire game or even just take a quick trip up to Timberline for lunch and take in all of the sights that The Shining left out. (Just stay out of the hedge maze, please, we can’t be held liable.)

This is how we have quietly built a deep and experienced talent base here in Oregon. It has arguably taken us more than 100 years (in fact, Buster Keaton found out how easy it was to get here in 1926 when he filmed The General on tracks running through Cottage Grove) but we’ve now come to the point where our creative ecosystem has supported five seasons of Grimm, six seasons of Portlandia and three seasons of Shrill.

What’s more, through our incentive programs you can get up to 26.2% cash back on your work here. Once you factor in additional incentives for using locations on 363 miles of public coast or in the vineyards of Southern Oregon on top of no sales tax you are suddenly seeing savings of closer to 30%. This is savings that you can then use on buying more plane tickets, which are, themselves, receiving 25% cash back leading to even more savings.

It’s a never ending savings cycle!

And we haven’t even started to talk about our regional airports in Eugene, Medford and Redmond. And how easy it is to connect to them or even fly directly into them. There’s a whole state that sits quite literally at your (flying) feet if you want it. And what about not having to go through customs, not having to covert your US$ into other wildly fluctuating currencies, not having a restriction on who can work as what on your project and whether or not they will be stopped at the boarder for whatever reason?

It’s a lot to think about, isn’t it?

So let’s make this simple.

The real treat about commuting to Oregon through PDX is the airport’s dedication to Oregon’s place in the history of cinema and storytelling.

In the South Tunnel, on the way to your rental car or Uber, you walk by twenty-one posters that show the length and breadth (quite literally) of filmmaking here in Oregon. Twenty-one posters that celebrate classics like The Goonies and Stand By Me as well as newer releases like the Eastern Oregon shot Break Up Season and the Southern Oregon shot Phoenix, Oregon.

In Concourse B, there’s a 160 foot mural drawn by artist Nick Stokes that playfully outlines more than 110 years of filmmaking in this state. Dozens of Easter Eggs await you, if you can find them, for projects like First Cow to Halloweentown to Drugstore Cowboy.

And in Concourse C there’s the Hollywood Microcinema at PDX. This surround sound, stadium seating screening room shows Oregon Made shorts for those who like to get to the airport early, hang out during connections, or avoid going home altogether (if that’s your thing, we don’t judge).

But it’s our places that really bring people here. The way those places look in our Pacific NW light. That same light that brought Debra Granik here to shoot Leave No Trace. No, you don’t get this light on the flight. But you do start to see it at the airport. It comes through the timber rafters in full force.

But, for full effect, wait until you get outside.

You have to be here in person for the light.

Luckily for you, the first flight leaves at 6am.

We’ll see you soon. With coffee.

Not the director. Not the actor. The people who found the location, dressed the room, designed the light, chose the fabric on the character’s coat. The people who made the world inside the frame look like it was always there, waiting to be discovered, rather than constructed in three weeks on a budget that required fourteen conversations with a line producer.

These people are called department heads. And Oregon has some of the best in the business.

They live here. Sometimes they work here, sometimes they go where the work is, Los Angeles, New York, and they return to Oregon carrying everything they learned: from television stages in Burbank, from Cannes premieres, from Oscar and Emmy ceremonies, from the specific education of building a world for Alexander Payne or Jeremy Saulnier and they bring that home.

There are many, but let’s start with production designer Ryan Warren Smith.

He grew up in Colorado, came to Oregon, and got his start as an on-set dresser working for Gus Van Sant and Sean Penn. Gus, on his own, did more than anyone to establish Portland as a serious production environment before the rebate programs existed. His first job as production designer was Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy, which premiered at Cannes and received two Independent Spirit nominations including Best Feature. He has designed the visual world of Michelle Williams wandering Portland’s streets, of Anton Yelchin and Patrick Stewart locked in a rural Oregon venue in Green Room, of Charlie Plummer working the backstretch at Portland Meadows in Lean on Pete, of Mahershala Ali navigating the Ozarks in True Detective Season 3 for HBO, and of Paul Giamatti and Dominic Sessa in The Holdovers - five Academy Award nominations, one win, Alexander Payne directing.

Schuyler Telleen grew up in Boulder, studied at Western Washington University, trained at the New York Conservatory of Dramatic Arts, worked as a graphic designer on Mad Men, Veep, Parks and Recreation (where he created the Ron Swanson Pyramid of Greatness) and Glee, then found his way to Oregon.

He designed Portlandia. First as art director, then as production designer. Five Emmy nominations. Two Emmy wins. Art Directors Guild Award of Excellence. His signature approach - what he calls “aesthetic litter,” the deliberate scattering of knickknacks and lived-in texture that makes audiences forget they’re watching a constructed environment - found its perfect canvas in Portland.

Then Shrill. Then Trinkets. Then American Vandal Season 2. All in Portland, all using the crew infrastructure that Portlandia built.

He has also worked internationally - New Zealand, Ireland, Spain, Canada - directed Super Bowl halftime specials for Pepsi, designed worldwide campaigns for Siemens, and has handed a live alligator to Jeff Goldblum, which is not a metaphor and requires no further elaboration.

Amanda Needham grew up in the Portland area in circumstances that would have derailed most careers before they started. She started building her industry credentials from scratch at a very young age, with the industriousness of someone who understood from early on that nothing was going to arrive automatically.

Her second film was Some Days Are Better Than Others, which starred Carrie Brownstein. They clicked. When Portlandia began, Brownstein called her for the pilot. The pilot’s episode “Farm” - the chicken with papers, the feminist bookstore, the visit to the farm that will raise your dinner - won Needham her first Emmy. She won a second. And then the show went eight seasons and she dressed every character in it: cult members, punk rockers, insane bike messengers, Japanese club kids, the rotating cast of Portland archetypes that the show assembled with the affection of people who actually live among them.

She also dressed the wardrobe of Wendy and Lucy, Paranoid Park, Green Room, Baskets, Documentary Now, and Shrill. PAM CUT recognized her with a Cinema Unbound Award, describing her career with the phrase: “day by day, stitch by stitch, she reshapes the mold of what’s possible in fashion.”

The pattern is already visible, and we’ve only covered three people.

Portlandia produced Telleen and Needham simultaneously, because the show ran long enough and at high enough quality to develop their craft to Emmy level. Shrill then inherited both of them - Lorne Michaels’ Broadway Video, which had produced Portlandia, hired the same team for the new show because the relationship and the trust already existed.

Production follows talent.

Kevin Fletcher came to film through still photography. He has a BA from Lewis and Clark and an MFA in Photography and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in New York. He describes himself not as a “master of light” - the traditional DP’s self-conception - but as “a conduit of a director’s vision, a conduit of the script, a conduit of the production design and location.” His still photography work, the Avenue of Roses series documenting 82nd Avenue as Portland grew and changed around it, won first place in the LensCulture Street Photography Awards in 2020.

His cinematography work: It’s What’s Inside, Greg Jardin’s debut feature, shot in Portland in eighteen days, premiered in Sundance’s Midnight section in 2024, acquired by Netflix - the largest acquisition deal of that Sundance Film Festival. Outdoor School, Ime Etuk’s autobiographical drama about Black boyhood in 1990s Portland, world-premiered at the American Black Film Festival in Miami and sold out its Portland homecoming at Portland Panorama. A Simple Machine, shot in Portland, by Portland filmmaker Mark Alan Hoffman. Paradise Records, Logic’s self-distributed feature, shot in St. Helens, Oregon.

His commercial reel includes campaigns for Netflix, Nike, Adidas, Audi, Old Spice, and GMC.

Erin Orr is a costume designer who began her career co-producing David Gordon Green’s debut feature George Washington, which received four Independent Spirit Award nominations and the NY Film Critics Circle Award for Best First Film. She designed the costumes for Green’s follow-up All the Real Girls, which premiered at Sundance in 2003. These are two of the most carefully observed American independent films of the early 2000s, both made in North Carolina with the same attention to place and specificity that Oregon’s best work also demonstrates.

She designed the costumes for Leave No Trace. Debra Granik’s film, shot in the Oregon forest, 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, Sundance premiere, Cannes Director’s Fortnight. The specific textures of the characters’ clothing, chosen to communicate a life lived outside conventional systems, in the woods, in the rain, with the deliberate minimalism of people who carry only what they need, are Orr’s work.

Most recently, she designed Twinless, written and directed by James Sweeney and starring Dylan O’Brien, which won the Audience Award at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival and the SXSW award winning feature Wishful Thinking with Lewis Pullman and Maya Hawke.

Adam Reamer holds an architecture degree from Penn State and came to production design through a period of design-build architecture and interiors on the West Coast. He designed Everything Sucks! - Netflix, set in 1996 Boring, Oregon, shot at Gladstone High School in the Portland area - and The OA for Netflix, and Pretty Little Liars: The Perfectionists, which also shot at Gladstone High. He designed Michael Mohan’s The Voyeurs for Amazon Studios, and Insidious: The Red Door, and Immaculate starring Sydney Sweeney, and Summering for Bleeker Street.

The thread through those credits is the Oregon ecosystem at work in ways that extend far beyond the state’s borders. Mohan directed Everything Sucks! in Oregon, where he discovered the strength of the local film community. Reamer designed it. Mohan later made The Voyeurs for Amazon with Reamer as his production designer again. And Immaculate, the horror film produced by and starring Sydney Sweeney - who appeared in Everything Sucks! before she became Sydney Sweeney in the way she is now Sydney Sweeney - was also designed by Reamer.

The Oregon production, years later, is still generating career capital for the people who made it.

This is the Oregon Creative Matrix.

Not a formal network. Not an organization or a program. A web of relationships built over two decades of productions - Portlandia, Wendy and Lucy, Green Room, Shrill, Leave No Trace, Everything Sucks!, Lean on Pete, It’s What’s Inside, Outdoor School, The Holdovers, Rebel Ridge, Twinless - that pulls the same names back into contact with each other on project after project, in Oregon and outside it, with the trust and shorthand that only comes from years of making things together.

Ryan Warren Smith on the set of Wendy and Lucy with Michelle Williams, then on Green Room with Amanda Needham designing the costumes, both of them building the world of a film in rural Oregon. Kevin Fletcher shooting It’s What’s Inside in Portland, the DP and the director building something on an eighteen-day schedule that Netflix buys. Erin Orr in the Oregon forest with Debra Granik, choosing the coat that communicates an entire life. Schuyler Telleen and Amanda Needham moving together from Portlandia to Shrill, because the relationship is already there, the trust is already there, the knowledge of how this city looks and how to make a set feel like a corner of it is already there.

These are Oregon assets. They live here. They work here. They bring to Oregon productions the accumulated expertise of careers that have spanned Cannes and Sundance and the Oscars and HBO and Netflix and Amazon, and they bring to the productions they make elsewhere the Oregon sensibility - the specific way of seeing place, of building a world that feels inhabited rather than constructed - that they developed here.

Schuyler Telleen, asked about Portland after years of working here, said: “For me, Portland is and always will be a very layered environment. We are messy and we are visceral and we are wonderfully true and honest to ourselves. People are the treasure of the city, and having them available as intimate partners for creative endeavors, you really see that on the screen in every frame.”

You see it on the screen.

And that’s the one thing we can always say is true in this particular Matrix.

You need a coastline. Oregon has 363 miles of public coast. Every inch of it, from the sea stacks at Cannon Beach to the ancient sand dunes at Florence to the storm-battered headlands south of Brookings, is a State Park. No private beach access issues. No permit nightmares from a dozen competing jurisdictions. The whole coast. One continuous permitting jurisdiction.

You need mountains. From PDX Airport, you first fly over it and then you’re within an hour of Mount Hood, which has been filmed so many times it has its own entry in the Oregon Film Trail, and still looks like nothing else. And that’s true of our section of the Cascades: Crater Lake, The Three Sisters, Broken Top. And The Wallowas in Eastern Oregon, which look like what the Alps would look like if they had a permit office that actually made it easy on you.

You need urban texture. Portland has it. The Hawthorne Bridge, the Pearl District, the industrial neighborhoods of the Central Eastside, the Victorian streetscapes of the inner neighborhoods, the covered market in the Park Blocks. All of it within twenty minutes of each other on the kind of road grid that doesn’t make your production manager cry.

You need desert. The high desert east of the Cascades. Hart Mountain, the Painted Hills, the Alvord Desert. It literally looks like no other landscape in the United States at this price point. Ochre and rust and volcanic basalt and a sky that goes all the way to the end of things.

You need all of this within a two-hour radius of each other.

Oregon has that.

And, if you’re living in southern California, where else can you fly in, get a full day of locations, production and footage to die for, and then fly back home all in the same day?

Now let’s talk about the money, because as of July 1, 2026, the conversation has changed.

Commercial production now qualifies for both the Oregon Production Investment Fund and the Greenlight Oregon Labor Rebate program. Together, these programs offer up to a 26.2% cash rebate on commercial production work in Oregon; goods and services and labor, below and above the line.

Cash rebate. Not a tax credit. Not a certificate you take to a broker who gives you back 88 cents on the dollar four months later. A check, from the state of Oregon, into your production bank account, after an audit of verified Oregon spending.

Here’s how it works.

If your commercial production spends more than $1 million in Oregon (and for a large-scale commercial, it will) you need at least 50% Oregon residents as crew and at least three production days in the state. That qualifies you for the full OPIF program: 25% on qualifying goods and services from Oregon vendors, 20% on qualifying Oregon payroll. On top of that, the Greenlight program adds a 6.2% pass-back of the Oregon income tax withholding from your in-state payroll. Combined: 26.2% effective on labor.

If you’re shooting outside the Portland metro area - which, given everything in the location reel above, you very well might be - the Regional OPIF adds another 10% on your total rebate for productions spending 50% or more of their production days outside the city. A campaign shot at the coast or in Eastern Oregon or in Southern Oregon combines into something genuinely unusual: exceptional locations, experienced crew, and an incentive stack that can reach close to 30%.

No sales tax on any of it, because Oregon doesn’t have one. Every equipment rental, every purchase from a grip house, every vendor contract, none of it carries the 7% or 8% that would apply in most of the markets you’re comparing against.

Let’s talk about the crew, because this is where the conversation usually turns for the ADs and line producers in the room.

Oregon’s commercial crew base has been working locally for twenty years, shaped by television productions - Grimm, Portlandia, Shrill, Trinkets, Leverage - that ran long enough to train people properly and employed them consistently enough to keep them here. The result is a grip and electric and camera and art department and costume ecosystem that knows how to work at the level of large-scale production, knows each other, knows the vendors, and is not going to cost you the three days of re-shoots that come from hiring a crew that hasn’t worked together before.

On top of that, everything else you need is here. Cameras, lighting, sound, trucks, VFX and the best food and drink in the country. We’ve been doing this production thing for more than a century and, after a while, you get good at it!

World renown agency Wieden+Kennedy has been making the most celebrated commercial work in American advertising history from Portland since 1982. “Just Do It.” The Man Your Man Could Smell Like. Bo Knows. Dream Crazy. Colin Kaepernick. 23 Emmy nominations and 8 Emmy wins. The entire arc of Nike’s global identity, and a significant portion of the most culturally resonant commercial campaigns of the last four decades, was conceived and produced from a building in the Pearl District.

That matters not just as a point of civic pride but as a statement about the commercial crew ecosystem this city has been building around that work for forty years. The directors, cinematographers, editors, and production talent who have worked in and around W+K campaigns have built careers here. They live here. They work here. The commercial production infrastructure that grew up in the orbit of one of the world’s largest independent agencies, and the Nike campus twenty minutes away in Beaverton, and the Adidas North American headquarters across the river, and the brand production work that flows continuously from both, is your production infrastructure when you land in Oregon.

The commercial work and the film work share the same crew ecosystem, which means the person operating your camera next Tuesday may have last worked on a Nike global campaign shot in the Columbia River Gorge, and is bringing that experience, and that specific knowledge of how Oregon’s landscape performs on a professional monitor, to your shoot.

That cross-pollination is not available everywhere.

There is also the question of what it is like to actually make something here.

Oregon Film reviews budgets in standard industry software: Movie Magic and Showbiz. They will go through your numbers line by line and give you the most accurate rebate estimate available. They pick up the phone. They have been doing this since 2003 and they have seen essentially every production structure and budget scenario that commercial work generates. The process of getting from “we’re thinking about shooting in Oregon” to “we have a signed application and a clear timeline” to “we’re done and we can’t wait to come back” is not a bureaucratic exercise. It is a partnership.

The permit infrastructure is real. The location scout network is real. The Oregon Locations Database covers urban, coastal, agricultural, forest, desert, mountain, and everything between. The film office has relationships with state parks, federal lands, private landowners, and the county offices that control permitting across the most cinematically interesting parts of the state.

If you are reading this and you have a campaign in development - athletic, outdoor, automotive, lifestyle, fashion, food and beverage, technology, anything that benefits from locations that feel genuine rather than constructed - Oregon is the answer you have been looking for.

It has always had the locations.

It has always had the crew.

It has always had a film office that operates at the level of a working production partner rather than a government agency.

As of July 1, 2026, it has the incentive to match.

Cash back.

No broker.

No haircut.

Into your production bank account.

Start with the Commercial Production Intention Form at oregonfilm.org, or call us directly.

Let’s talk about your next commercial.

Contact: tim@oregonfilm.org · 971.254.4021

It doesn’t look like anywhere else. And by that we don’t just mean the bridges, or the light, or the very large trees or that particular quality of green that saturates everything west of the Cascades for nine months of the year. We mean the people. The way the city attracts a certain kind of person. The person who doesn’t quite fit the template, someone who is too earnest or too weird or too large or too queer or too into shoplifting or too convinced that bicycle etiquette is the sole key to personal happiness. Portland treats them not as exceptions but as the norm.

Over time, Hollywood noticed and a pattern emerged.

When television writers and showrunners wanted to make a show about misfits finding each other, about the specifically human experience of being too much or not enough for whatever room you were supposed to be in, they keep reaching for Portland. For Oregon. For a very specific real town outside Portland called Boring, which is the most Oregon place name in Oregon and therefore, perhaps, inevitable.

Here are some examples.

Portlandia started it. Love it or hate it, it put the extremes on a national stage. And, in doing so, it made city’s name a media zeitgeist.

When Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein launched the sketch comedy series on IFC in January 2011, they were not exactly making a pitch for Portland as a production destination. They were making fun of their own people, white liberal progressive artisanal locavore demographic that had made the city what it was, with the specific accuracy that only comes from inside knowledge. The show filmed extensively on location: Powell’s Books, Burnside Skatepark, the “Keep Portland Weird” sign across from Voodoo Doughnuts, Lan Su Chinese Gardens, the Vera Katz Eastbank Esplanade, the Portlandia statue on the Portland Building and, in a featured role, Portland City Hall with a former Mayor playing Kyle MacLachlan’s assistant.

Eight seasons, 2011 to 2018.

What Portlandia did, beyond the economics and the cultural satire, was prove something to the television industry: Portland was not just a place where you could shoot a show, Portland was a place that was a show. The city had a sensibility so specific, so legible, so ready to be pointed at and recognized, that it could carry an entire comedy on its own. The chicken with the proper papers. The feminist bookstore. The bird being put-on-it.

After that, several producers wanted what Portlandia had created: A place where their misfits felt normal. The Dream of the 90s.

Lorne Michaels’ Broadway Video produced Portlandia. This matters for what came next.

In 2019, Lorne Michaels’ Broadway Video executive produced Shrill for Hulu.

Not a coincidence. The relationship between Portland and Broadway Video, built through Portlandia, produced a trust that became repeat business. Aidy Bryant, Saturday Night Live cast member, co-creator and star of the show, pushed for Portland. “Probably my favorite part of making the show is going to Portland every year and using that to build the story around,” she said when the show ended. Lindy West, whose 2016 memoir Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman was the source material and who grew up in Seattle before moving to Los Angeles, told OPB: “Portland’s not exactly Seattle, but it still feels like home to me in a way that the rest of the country doesn’t.”

(And who in Portland would not celebrate Portland not exactly being Seattle? Far from it, it’s what we strive for!)

The show filmed entirely in Portland, across three seasons, from 2018 to 2021. The Willamette River. The Fifty Licks ice cream shop. Portland’s White House bed and breakfast. The nightclub Holocene, converted into a hair salon for the show’s fictional version of it. The show’s Emmy-winning production designers and costume designers were local (Schuyler Telleen and Amanda Needham, both of whom had also worked on Portlandia) both part of the crew ecosystem that two decades of consistent production work had built here.

Shrill is a show about a young woman, a journalist at a Portland alt-weekly, who is perceived as overweight, constantly policed about her body, and who decides, over three seasons of being underestimated and patronized, to become exactly herself. It is a Portland show in the deepest sense: it is about refusing to be smaller than you are. It is about a city that, as the creators kept saying in interview after interview, makes space for people who don’t fit.

The pool episode, a season one set piece filmed at an actual fat pool party in Portland, in a real community space, with real Portland people, became one of the most talked-about sequences in recent television comedy. Because it was real. Because Portland has actual fat pool parties. Because the city that was making the show was also living inside it.

Everything Sucks! arrived on Netflix in February 2018, set in 1996 in Boring, Oregon.

Boring is real. It is an unincorporated community about twenty miles southeast of Portland, named after the pioneer William Harrison Boring, population small, sensibility enormous. The creators, Ben York Jones and Michael Mohan, had originally planned to film in Vancouver and just call it Boring. Then they scouted Oregon, found the local film community, found Boring itself, and changed their minds. “It’s just a beautiful place to set a show,” Mohan said. “The whole goal of the show is to make it as honest as possible, so you might as well just go with that authenticity.”

The show actually filmed in Oregon City and the surrounding area - Gladstone High School serving as Boring High, a school that also hosted American Vandal Season 2 and Trinkets in the same years, becoming a minor landmark of Pacific Northwest teen television - but the spirit of Boring, Oregon permeates every frame. It is a show about the AV club and the drama club and the specific social archaeology of being fourteen in 1996, when you could be weird without the internet yet having an opinion about it. Jahi Winston as the nerdy lead. Peyton Kennedy as the principal’s daughter figuring out her sexuality. A young Sydney Sweeney in an early role, before she became Sydney Sweeney in the way she is now, you know, Sydney Sweeney.

Netflix cancelled it after one season (which remains one of the streamer’s more baffling decisions and which inspired a genuine fan campaign to save it). The show was, its devotees argued correctly, doing something precise and strange and very specific - a teen comedy that earned its sincerity - and it deserved more than ten episodes. It did not get them. The misfit show about misfits got cancelled, which is perhaps appropriately on-brand.

What it left behind: a demonstration that a show set in the actual specific texture of small-town Oregon, in the actual weird specific town of Boring, with the actual weird specific aesthetic of the (dream of the) mid-nineties Pacific Northwest, could land. Could find its audience. Could be the thing its creators intended it to be, even if the platform didn’t quite know what to do with it.

Trinkets ran for two seasons on Netflix, 2019 to 2020, and it is the most straightforwardly Portland of these shows in its geography.

Also shot at Gladstone High School, as well as Oaks Amusement Park, in Milwaukie and Clackamas and downtown Portland and Sellwood, Trinkets used the real neighborhoods, the real streets, the real amusement park that has been operating continuously on the banks of the Willamette since 1905. This is the kind of detail that makes production designers cry with gratitude.

Based on the young adult novel by Kirsten “Kiwi” Smith, who also created the series with Amy Andelson and Emily Meyer, the story was about three teenage girls: a grieving outsider from New Mexico, a academically driven kid from a struggling family, a kleptomaniac from a wealthy one who find each other at a Shoplifters Anonymous meeting and form the kind of friendship that can only happen between people who have no business being friends.

The show ran two seasons, was renewed and then concluded. Both seasons shot in Portland. Both seasons used the Oregon incentive. Both seasons added to the infrastructure of a crew ecosystem that, by this point, had been building for two decades and knew how to make great television in the Pacific Northwest and anywhere else for that matter.

Four shows. One city. Or, more precisely, one state; Boring is not Portland, Gladstone is not Portland, Clackamas is not Portland, but they are all Oregon.

What connects them is not genre exactly. Portlandia is sketch comedy. Shrill is a fictionalized non-fiction half-hour. Everything Sucks! is period teen drama. Trinkets is YA friendship narrative. They have different tones, different networks, different target audiences, different reasons to exist.

What connects them is a place that has decided to just depict itself.

With provable success.

And a crew base that makes that possible.

That can be seen as growth.

But then there’s another number: the average project budget dropped from $3.6 million in 2024 to $1.5 million in 2025. The median fell slightly too, from $575,000 to $475,000.

More projects. Less money per project. The industry getting broader and shallower at the same time.

That’s more of a shift.

The shift has causes, and they are not Oregon-specific.

US studio production has been moving offshore at an accelerating rate: to Budapest and Riga and Malta and London, chasing currency arbitrage and foreign cash rebates and labor costs and state provided benefits that American incentive programs simply cannot match at scale. Streaming platform mergers have reduced the number of executives, projects and buyers working within the market. The consolidation that is happening at Paramount and Warner Bros. and everywhere else means less product being commissioned, fewer deals being made, fewer mid-budget films getting greenlit by people in offices with acquisition authority.

The traditional path through the middle of the market - make a film between $1 million and $8 million, use debt and gap financing and pre-sales, premiere at Sundance or Toronto, sell territories, build a career - is, as Oregon Film’s Executive Director described it in a 2026 panel discussion, now “one in a thousand.” Not gone. Just lessened.

What used to be a reliable set of stepping stones between a first film and a sustainable career is now, largely, submerged. The center has thinned. And if the center disappears, the system stops supporting mid-level careers, mid-level projects, the filmmakers who needed one more film at that budget level to develop the craft and the credits to move up.

Oregon is not insulated from this. No state is.

But luckily we have a system that specifically supports locally made projects as much as it does larger projects coming form outside the state. A balanced program that seeks to retain as much as it recruits.

Here in Oregon we have been lucky enough to have recruited two larger, studio-backed television series into the Portland area over the last two years, and that is an achievement we both celebrate and acknowledge that our current incentive programs were enough to accomplish. Productions in and around Grants Pass, La Grande and Bend have also brought economic spending to other regions of the state. The programs we administer are still supporting nearly 4,000 jobs per year and direct spending of more than $150M annually.

Most states our size have not been able to do this of late.

There is also a positive shift that Oregon is a part of - the empowerment of new talent.

In the space where the middle used to be, something is growing. It does not look like what was there before. It is smaller, more personal, more rooted in place and community and the specific texture of the stories that Oregon filmmakers have been carrying around for years waiting for permission to tell.

Several local productions are now finding their audience through festivals, curated screening and self-distribution. In each of these cases the audience is not the outcome of the film. The audience is the engine. The people who will watch it are part of the financing, the distribution, the marketing, and the word-of-mouth campaign, often before the film is finished.

This is what the shift looks like from the inside.

It is the emergence of a genuinely local film culture. Not a local film culture waiting to be validated by a national buyer. Not a local film culture producing calling cards for careers to be built elsewhere. A local film culture making films for local audiences first, finding that those audiences are real and hungry and willing to show up, and building outward from there.

What sustains this shift, what keeps it from being simply the story of a sector in contraction dressed in optimistic language, is the direct support that has been quietly built underneath it.

Nearly $400,000 flowed through Oregon Film and its partners in a recent twelve-month period into the local creative economy: through a coordinated portfolio of production and post-production grants, through the Pathways training and placement program, and sponsorship of local screenings, festivals, and partner organizations statewide.

The partnership network behind those numbers includes Oregon Film and the Portland Events and Film Office working in direct coordination alongside Outside the Frame, Desert Island Studios, PAM CUT, the Oregon Media Production Association, the Indigenous Creative Stage Workers Alliance, Film Southern Oregon, the Central Oregon Film Office, the Eastern Oregon Film Festival, BendFilm, the Ashland Independent Film Festival and other state agencies like Travel Oregon and Travel Portland.

This is not just a single, four person state agency attempting to build a film industry. It is not just a one-person city-based agency finding there aren’t enough hours in the day to make a difference. It is a distributed system of aligned organizations, each doing the specific work it does best, connected by partnerships that have been built and maintained deliberately over years.

The shift is real. It is not entirely comfortable. It is not the story anyone would have written in advance.

But the films being made here, the ones selling out hometown theaters and screening at SXSW and world-premiering at the American Black Film Festival and touring nationally from a sold out Valentine’s Day debut in Medford, are not provisional films. They are not films waiting to become something else.

They are Oregon films.

Made here.

For here.

And then, from here, for everywhere else.

Not all the time. Not every year. Not on every project. But with a frequency that, when you lay it out in sequence, stops looking like luck and starts looking like something else.

There’s something about this place. Oregon.

Something about the combination of landscape and light and crews and community and a film office that has been building the conditions for exactly this kind of work for sixty years. Something that keeps pulling first-time directors here, keeps giving them what they need, and keeps sending them to Park City and Austin and Woodstock and Mill Valley with films that win things.

So let’s count the darlings.

It starts - for the purposes of this accounting, at least - in Portland in April 2016.

Macon Blair had been here before. He’d co-produced and co-starred in Green Room, which shot around Astoria and Clackamas County in the fall of 2014. During that production he discovered Mississippi Records on North Mississippi Avenue and spent every dollar of his weekly per diem on vinyl.

Then he came back to Portland to direct his first feature: I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, about a nursing assistant who gets burgled and decides, with the help of her strange neighbor, to find the thieves herself. Melanie Lynskey. Elijah Wood. Oregon company filmscience producing. Janet Weiss, the drummer for Sleater-Kinney, as a location scout.

Eighteen days. Shot in Portland.

After the festival screenings, Blair attended the Sundance closing ceremony alone and underdressed, certain he would not be called to the stage.

Then he was. It won the Grand Jury Prize. US Dramatic Competition. 2017 Sundance Film Festival.

A year later, in the spring of 2017, Debra Granik - whose Winter’s Bone had also premiered at Sundance, received four Academy Award nominations and launched a then unknown Jennifer Lawrence into the stratosphere - came to Oregon because she wanted to photograph the forest. “The temperate rainforest is a glorious thing to photograph with its textures, its patterns, its shades, its moisture, its reflections,” she told OPB. She shot Leave No Trace in thirty days. Forest Park. Eagle Fern Park in Clackamas County. A Christmas tree farm in Beaverton. The forests around Estacada. Ben Foster plays a traumatized veteran living off the grid with his teenage daughter. That actor was a young New Zealand actress in her first US feature film named Thomasin McKenzie, also the role that launched her career. Jojo Rabbit and Last Night in Soho and a career that is now, unmistakably, one of the more interesting in contemporary cinema.

And a performance that was found in the Oregon forest.

Leave No Trace premiered at Sundance in January 2018. It holds 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. It played Cannes. Bleecker Street distributed it domestically, Sony internationally.

In November 2022, a first-time director named Greg Jardin made a body-swap horror comedy in an on-the-market mansion in the hills above Portland in eighteen days. It’s What’s Inside premiered in the Midnight section at Sundance in January 2024. The first offer came in within twenty-four hours. The bidding war lasted thirty-six hours. Netflix paid $17 million, the largest acquisition deal of the entire 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

“I can’t believe they spent this,” Jardin said. “I still can’t.”

Three Sundance films. Three distinct directors. Three direct paths from Portland to the most important independent film festival in America, and from there to audiences around the world. Stories told. Careers launched.

But this is where the story gets more interesting than just a few (successful) Sundance movies.

In the summer of 2023, Kyle Hausmann-Stokes came to Oregon to make My Dead Friend Zoe.

Hausmann-Stokes is a US Army combat veteran who enlisted one month before September 11, 2001, served five years, and received a Bronze Star in Iraq. The film he came to make is autobiographical, a dark comedy about a female Afghanistan veteran navigating grief, a dead best friend who appears to her as a ghost, and a fraught relationship with an estranged Vietnam vet grandfather. Sonequa Martin-Green. Natalie Morales. Ed Harris. Morgan Freeman. Travis Kelce as an executive producer, in his film producing debut. A story that could only have been told by someone who had actually been there.

He shot in Portland, Forest Grove, and Molalla. At one point he needed access to a rodeo in Molalla for a key scene. The director of the rodeo was also an Army veteran. He agreed to let the production film: on one condition. Hausmann-Stokes had to agree to receive a prestigious award at the rodeo, which would involve being placed in the back of a pickup truck with fireworks and music playing.

He accepted the terms. The rodeo is in the film.

My Dead Friend Zoe won the Narrative Spotlight Audience Award at SXSW 2024. Then the Grand Jury Prize at the Woodstock Film Festival, alongside the Audience Award and Best Cinematography - three awards from a jury that included, with a neat synchronicity, Debra Granik, whose Leave No Trace had won at Sundance six years earlier in the same forests where this film was also made. Then the Audience Award at Mill Valley. The film holds 95% on Rotten Tomatoes and was released theatrically nationwide in February 2025.

Hausmann-Stokes said that his very first location scout - arriving at Portland International Airport, seeing the Oregon-made movie posters on the walls of the terminal - gave him “pre-confidence that we were going to be okay there.”

In 2025, a first-time director named Graham Parkes shot Wishful Thinking in Portland.

A science-fiction romantic comedy about a couple whose emotional states have supernatural effects on the world around them. Earthquakes, stock markets, entire nations at risk because two people in Portland can’t figure out their relationship. Parkes has said that he wrote the part with his friend in mind. That was Lewis Pullman. Maya Hawke then signed on almost immediately. The final cut was delivered to SXSW days before the festival began.

Wishful Thinking won the Narrative Feature Competition Jury Prize at the 2026 SXSW Film & TV Festival. Sony Pictures Classics acquired it. Reviewers reached for Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy as the closest comparison. The cast includes, in a small role, Julia Morizawa - a Portland-based writer, producer, and actor with twenty years of experience in film and theatre who, in the month after Wishful Thinking screened at SXSW, was sitting in the Alder Ballroom of the Dossier Hotel in Portland as a member of the inaugural The Bridge: From Oregon to Industry cohort, learning how to navigate the industry.

That is the local Oregon Creative matrix working as it always does. Julia having a role in an award winning #OregonMade film and participating in a program to help get her own feature film made during the same Spring season.

And that is what an ecosystem looks like when it is working.

It looks like A Simple Machine.

No Park City. No Austin. A local filmmaker, a local cast, a local story, a local crowd of cyclists recruited from Bike Happy Hour to fill a nighttime scene in the Central Eastside. Based on a Portland novel by a Portland writer. Directed by Mark Alan Hoffman, who lives here, shot by cinematographer Kevin Fletcher, who balanced, as one reviewer noted, both the architectural beauty and the urban decay of the Rose City (and, again as an example of the Oregon Creative matrix at work, was the Director of Photography on It’s What’s Inside). It’s a film so Portland that it posits proper bicycle etiquette as the secret to happiness.

A Simple Machine premiered at the Lighthouse International Film Festival in June 2025. It traveled the festival circuit. It won the prestigious Roxanne T. Mueller Audience Choice Award for Best Narrative Feature Film at the 50th Cleveland International Film Festival.

Six films. Six unique filmmakers. Grand Jury Prizes at Sundance and Woodstock. Audience Awards at SXSW, Cleveland. A 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. A $17 million Netflix deal. A Sony Pictures Classics acquisition. A Narrative Feature Competition Jury Prize at SXSW.

Each of them sent to a festival with a film nobody outside a tight circle had seen yet.

Each of them coming back with something and nothing more to prove.

But.

We’re not surprised.

We’ve been building this for a while.

You wouldn’t immediately pick it out on a map and you certainly wouldn’t see too much of it from the highway if you were driving through. But, if you take the earlier exit heading in from the west, you descend into a place that celebrates and incubates creativity in all of its forms. A place that hosts a well-attended film festival, plays host to a vibrant local music scene and, especially over the last few years, attracted and inspired several filmmakers and film productions.

In fact, MovieMaker Magazine called it “a haven for indie filmmakers with big dreams.”

They weren’t wrong.

The Eastern Oregon Film Festival started in 2009.

Not with a grant or a strategic plan or a feasibility study. With two people, Ian Clark and Mike Surber, who wanted to show contemporary films and progressive experiments in a pop-up space downtown, and who had the idea that an local festival could pull together artists from Portland and Boise and San Francisco and La Grande in the same room for a weekend and that something interesting would happen.

It did.

By its second year the festival had a director, Christopher Jennings, who has held that role ever since. It became a nonprofit in 2011. It added a third day of programming. It added a Filmmaker Residency, a Filmmaker Field Trips program, a Fiscal Sponsorship program for projects in development. It became, quietly and consistently, one of the few film festivals in the country that moved the goalposts from not only screening films but to actually make films happen.

That distinction matters more than it might seem.

In the summer of 2018, a filmmaker from Denver who had been living in Los Angeles since graduating college went to the Oregon-Idaho border to shoot footage about mining. The project became Picture Jasper, a twenty-minute documentary about mining in the Northwest.

It was accepted into the Eastern Oregon Film Festival in October 2019. The filmmaker, H. Nelson Tracey, traveled to La Grande for the first time, screened his film to a standing-room-only audience, and met Christopher Jennings.

He went home. He kept thinking about La Grande.

In October 2020, the pandemic moved the festival online. During a virtual happy hour, Jennings mentioned offhandedly that the festival was thinking about starting a filmmaker residency. Tracey immediately expressed interest. In May 2021, with the help of Oregon Film’s Creative Opportunity Program, the festival officially launched its Eastern Oregon Filmmaker Residency program. Tracey was one of six filmmakers selected. He spent four weeks in La Grande, writing, exploring, developing a project, learning about Oregon and the Oregon film and media rebate programs that would later make the project financeable.

The project became Breakup Season.

A relationship drama shot entirely in La Grande, on Eastern Oregon University’s campus, in local restaurants and bars and apartments and the particular texture of a small college town at the edge of a valley that looks like nowhere else. A debut feature by an LA-based director who had never directed a feature, made in a city of 13,000 people four hours east of Portland, utilizing Oregon’s incentive program and local cast and crew and the network of support that the Eastern Oregon Film Festival had spent twelve years building for exactly this purpose.

Tracey described finding La Grande as finding “the clearest lit path” to making his first feature film, not a compromise, not a fallback, but the place where the combination of landscape, community, institutional support, and financial accessibility converged into something that was, simply, possible.

“I was going to find a way to direct my first feature one way or another,” he wrote. “The potential support I saw available in Oregon presented what appeared to be the clearest lit path, and I was proven right through every stage of development and production on Breakup Season.”

Breakup Season won Best Narrative Picture at the Eastern Oregon Film Festival. It built a social media following in real time alongside its production. It released directly to that audience. It created case study in how to make an indie feature in rural Oregon - development, production, distribution - across three detailed installments on the Oregon Confluence platform. It presented a kind of granular, honest, here-is-what-it-actually-cost document that independent filmmakers in smaller markets rarely produce and almost always need.

And then something happened that is the real story.

H. Nelson Tracey is a co-executive producer on the next film being made in La Grande.

Bad Day for Bigfoot begins filming in the backwoods of Eastern Oregon this June.

Directed by Zach Green, written by Green and Devin O’Rourke, produced by Rafi Jacobs of Static Films and Christopher Jennings - the festival director, now a producer, the man Tracey shook hands with at a standing-room-only screening of a mining documentary in 2019. The film is a genre-bending comedy-thriller in the tradition of Fargo meeting Tremors, set in what the production describes, accurately, as an actual Sasquatch hot spot. A Bigfoot hoax unravels into chaos. Deceptive hoaxers, curious investigators, a mysterious presence truly inhabiting the wilderness.

The Grande Ronde Valley as film location has upgraded from backdrop to character.

The production is making a direct commitment to Eastern Oregon’s economy - lodging at local hotels and vacation rentals, dining at local restaurants and caterers, hardware stores and rental shops and local tradespeople and artists. Background extras are being sought: small-town bar patrons, children ages nine to thirteen for summer camp sequences, people with 80s-friendly wardrobes. The film is creating crew positions and production assistant roles for community members. This is not a production that landed in La Grande and hired exclusively from outside. It is a production that is, to the extent a film can be, of the place.

The Eastern Oregon Film Festival is not just hosting the premiere. It is a co-producer. The festival’s Filmmaker Support Program is one of the funding mechanisms. A Bigfoot Buddy pass - $500, direct community support - gets you an invitation to the Oregon premiere, behind-the-scenes updates, early looks at concept art and footage, and a VIP all-access pass to the 2026 Eastern Oregon Film Festival.

This is what it looks like when a film festival decides that screening films and making films are the same job.

MovieMaker Magazine’s Coolest Festivals list described the Eastern Oregon Film Festival this way, in language that Tracey supplied and that is worth reading whole: “You might not expect a rural mountain town four hours east of Portland to be a haven for indie filmmakers with big dreams, but that’s exactly what you get when you attend the Eastern Oregon Film Festival.”

The programs - Filmmaker Field Trips, Filmmaker Residency, Fiscal Sponsorship - create the infrastructure. Each night of the festival ends with live music from Pacific Northwest musicians, “like the end credits to a day of screenings and filmmaker conversations.” Tracey describes trekking out to La Grande as “entering a haven for indie film” and, in his own case, “a life-changing experience.”

“Few festivals take such an active interest in cultivating future projects by their alumni.”

That line is doing a lot of work. What it describes - the specific difference between a festival that screens films and a festival that generates them - is the difference between an event and an institution. Between a weekend and a career. Between a standing-room-only screening of a short film about mining and, seven years later, a genre feature in pre-production in the same valley, with the festival director as a producer and the filmmaker from that first screening as a co-executive producer.

That is not an accident. That is a model.

The valley hasn’t changed much in those seven years. The Wallowas are still there. The light over the Grande Ronde in the morning is still the light that made Tracey keep thinking about the place after he went home in 2019. The downtown still beacons exploration. Eastern Oregon University is still there, with its theater and its students and its auditorium that can hold a sold-out crowd.

What has changed is the understanding - gathering, slowly, among the people who make films in Oregon and the people who study where films go to get made - that La Grande is not a curiosity, not an experiment, not a scenic fallback for productions that couldn’t afford somewhere else.

It is the destination.

In the past several years they have all, to varying degrees, been losing power. Gen Z just isn’t as interested in corporate managed film franchises. What do they want? This weekend provided a loud and powerful answer.

Something huge is happening to moviegoing right now and I don’t think Hollywood is going to ever be the same.” - Wall Street Journal Entertainment Industry Reporter Ben Fritz posting on LinkedIn

Over Memorial Day weekend, a twenty-year-old named Kane Parsons became the youngest director in history to open a film at number one at the global box office. His film, Backrooms, made $81.5 million in its first three days domestically. $118 million worldwide. A24’s biggest opening ever. The same weekend, Obsession - the debut of twenty-six-year-old YouTuber Curry Barker - became the first film since 1982 to grow its box office in both its second and third weekends, finishing with $104 million domestic. Both films came from directors who built massive online audiences before a studio touched either project. Both films arrived in theaters carried by communities that already existed. Star Wars was third.

This is being described as a disruption. It is not a disruption. It is a confirmation.

Parsons started posting found footage horror videos on YouTube as a teenager in 2022. His audience was not acquired. It was built, video by video, in relationship with people who returned because they trusted him. When Backrooms opened, it was not introducing that audience to Kane Parsons. It was giving Kane Parsons’ audience a new place to gather.

Now, yes, it doesn’t have the same box office numbers but that is roughly the same thing that rap artist Logic did with Paradise Records and what YouTube creator Skweezy Jibbs is doing with Skweezy Jibbs Makes a Movie. It’s what Bruce Campbell is doing with his feature film Ernie and Emma. It’s what H. Nelson Tracey essentially did with Breakup Season, shot in La Grande, when he released his feature to the social following he’d been building since before his first day of production.

The scale is different.

But the model is the same.

Oregon’s filmmakers didn’t wait for a replacement path to appear. Several of them started building a different one. And now that’s breaking the traditional model of indie film releasing.

In 2023, a rapper named Logic who lives in Oregon had an audience of millions. He didn’t pitch a film to a studio. He made Paradise Records and sold it directly to the people who already wanted to see it. No intermediary. No distribution deal. No percentage disappearing into a pipeline of people who had nothing to do with making the film. Just a post on Instagram and a link to buy the film. On BlueRay no less.

Skweezy Jibbs Makes a Movie did the same with his own following of millions. Direct bookings into theaters and a live experience with the character that stumbles through life in a way that makes us laugh and look at ourselves again (somewhat uncomfortably, yes).

H. Nelson Tracey shot a feature called Breakup Season in Eastern Oregon. He grew a social media following in real time alongside his production, then released directly to that audience - the people who had been watching since before the movie existed.

Ernie and Emma premiered in Medford on Valentine’s Day 2026. Bruce Campbell chose his home audience first, then Portland, then, using his own cult celebrity, took it out on a national tour in partnership with Alamo Drafthouse. The order is not accidental. It is the model.

Yes, both Backrooms and Obsession have bigger, more far reaching results. They have garnered the attention of the national media and sent a big, bright warning flare across the bow of the Industry writ large.

But the Oregon examples aren’t experiments. They are a coherent and reproducible strategy: build the community first, then make the film, then bring the community to the theater. The audience is not the outcome. The audience is the engine.

The national film press is now noticing this model.

Oregon’s film ecosystem - one built on localized production rebates for sub-$1 million productions, the Creative Opportunity Program, the Eastern Oregon Filmmakers Residency, the Pathways placement program, The Bridge filmmakers intensive - is not a minor-league version of the real industry waiting for a call-up. It is out front, participating, encouraging, learning, supporting, building and producing filmmakers who are ready to do the very thing that just broke A24’s opening weekend record.

The traditional model asked filmmakers to make something, then find someone to find their audience for them. The model that Oregon’s local filmmakers have been practicing - by circumstance, by necessity, by the simple fact that the traditional machine was not available to them - asks filmmakers to already know their audience before the film is finished.

It turns out that is not a consolation prize for filmmakers without industry access.

It is the competitive advantage.

It gets used to describe things that haven’t changed by people who need them to appear as if they have. We often work in the political arena, and it’s used a great deal in this context in those conversations. Sometimes it gets used as a consolation, as a deferral. We’re making progress. Which often means: not yet, maybe never, but please stop asking.

So when we use the word here, it’s worth being specific about what we mean.

In August 2021, Oregon Film sent a questionnaire to many in the state’s film and media community. And many people answered it, from Portland and Bend and Ashland and La Grande and Pendleton and Warm Springs and Salem and Eugene and St. Helens. Documentary filmmakers and grips and producers and screenwriters and actors and animators and drone operators and community media organizations and festival programmers.

Oregon Film asked them to rank twelve possible improvements to the state’s incentive and grant programs. And then to say more, if they wanted to, in the comments.

People appeared to want to say something, and, possibly more importantly, see change.

More grant opportunities please.

I would like to discuss workforce development sooner than later.

Would love to see a rural exploration.

The top priority, by a meaningful margin: raise the rebate percentages in the Oregon Production Investment Fund (OPIF). In 2021, the program offered 10% on in-state labor and 20% on goods and services. The community’s view was plain. Those numbers weren’t enough for the independent and local market. Raise them.

Second: develop grants and incentives specifically for regional production work in places like Bend and La Grande and Ashland and Eugene making films far from the Portland infrastructure, who needed the program to see them.

Third: physical space. Sound stages, production offices, training facilities, somewhere to work and gather and build.

Fourth: grants specifically for projects, writers, directors, and producers.

Fifth: broader support for small media business growth.

Sixth - ranked sixth, which is not the top but is still on the list - expanding the types of projects that could qualify for OPIF. Commercial production, for instance. Which at the time did not qualify.

This was what people said Oregon needed, in August 2021.

Five years later, here’s what changed.

OPIF now offers 25% on qualifying goods and services from Oregon vendors and 20% on qualifying payroll - up from 20% and 10% respectively. Combined with the Greenlight Oregon Labor Rebate (GOLR), which increased the incentive on production payroll an additional 6.2%, the effective combined labor rebate now reaches 26.2%. For independent productions working in the real economy of 2026, where cash flow is tight and the difference between a financeable project and an unfinanceable one can be a percentage point or two, this matters. The community named it the top priority. It moved.

Commercial production now qualifies. As of July 1, 2026, commercial work can access both OPIF and Greenlight which provides up to a 26.2% cash rebate on production spending in Oregon, below and above the line. For a commercial production sector that had operated outside most of the incentive structure, this was a door that had been closed for years finally opening. The survey respondents ranked it sixth. It was on the list. Five years later, it exists.

There’s also a dedicated “regional” production incentive fund, R-OPIF which adds rebate dollars on to production work outside of the Portland Metro zone. This had led to production spending in places like Bend, Ashland, Oceanside, La Grande, Grants Pass and Astoria. This has created further calling cards for those locations through the national and international release of those projects and recognition of them on the Oregon Film Trail.

And the Creative Opportunity Program was created. Signed into law after the 2021 legislative session, the same session that ran the year the survey was taken. The COP dedicates 2% of OPIF annually to the things the core incentive structure did not reach: project and filmmaker grants, workforce development, training, regional development, strategic partnerships. Roughly $375,000 a year flowing toward the parts of Oregon’s creative community that the rebate minimums leave out.

The Oregon Film Impact Grants. The Tell Your Story Grant. The Outdoor Adventure Film Grant. Our unique Pathways program that trains placements, places them in paid positions on sets and then provides mentorship. Lasting partnerships with the community organizations that survey respondents were already building from inside. Places like Open Signal, NW Documentary, Desert Island Studios, BendFilm, Film Southern Oregon, Lion Speaks, Eastern Oregon Film Festival, Outside the Frame, Catalyst Film Collective. Organizations built by and for filmmakers who understood that the door to the industry is not always at the front of the building, and that finding the side door requires more than talent.

One of the Tell Your Story Grant recipients is Karina Lomelin Ripper, a Mexican-American filmmaker who participated in the 2021 survey. In the years since, she became a Princess Grace Honoraria recipient, a Spark Award winner, a 2026 Latino Film Institute Inclusion Fellow, and a member of the inaugural cohort of The Bridge: From Oregon to Industry. She was in the survey. She is now in the programs the survey helped shape. That is what progress looks like at the scale of a single life and a single career, not a headline, just a through-line, the kind that takes five years to become visible.

But, yes, not all of the goals were met and not all of the requests were fulfilled. Admittedly. And some took longer than others to achieve.

A world-class physical production facility - the sound stages and training spaces the community ranked third - remains an aspiration not a reality. But that doesn’t mean that efforts to fulfill this need have stopped. In fact, it’s far from it. And while we have expanded direct grants to individual filmmakers (like the Oregon Film Impact Grants), the full depth of small business support the survey named hasn’t found as much traction or funding.

Progress is not the same as done. We all know that.

The funding terrain has changed a great deal in the intervening time. Non-profits are struggling. Federal funding has been reduced or pulled entirely. Our own “long” legislative sessions only come every two years.

But here is the specific thing we mean when we use the word in this context.

In August 2021, a large group of people across Oregon took the time to answer a questionnaire about what they felt they needed from the programs we administer. They ranked twelve items which became six top priorities and then kept talking in the comments because they had things to say. Some of the top priorities they named have been addressed in concrete, measurable ways in the five years since. And others have not.

That’s not meant as a boast or a press release, it’s just what happened.

We like to think we listen. This progress report just helps to show that we actually heard what you said.

Audience.

Is there one? Are they reacting? Do they engage? Can you make connections? And…do they like films?

You also hear things like: “world premiere.” You hear “red carpet.” You hear “Sundance” or “Cannes” or “Toronto” said with a kind of reverence that implies these places have cornered something, some essential quality of film culture that can only exist in one mountain town in Utah (which will soon be one mountain town in Colorado), or on the French Riviera, or in the hands of a few hundred carefully credentialed gatekeepers in Ontario.

And maybe that’s true. For those things.

But it isn’t the only way a film culture gets built.

And it isn’t how Oregon did it.

Now we know we’ve written about this before, but we’ve just spent the better part of six weeks walking into sold out cinemas in places like Portland and Ashland and witnessing for ourselves the Power of Audience at Portland Panorama, Ashland Independent Film Festival and the inaugural International Women’s Sports Film Festival. And we’ve recently reviewed a report from Eventive titled “The Resurgence of Film Festivals.”

So it’s worth writing about it again.

Oregon built its film festival ecosystem the same way it builds most things: from the ground up, community by community, audience by audience, usually before anyone had a grand plan for it.

The Northwest Filmmakers’ Festival started in the early 1970s at the Portland Art Museum. Then, in 2001, Ashland. Then, in 2003, Bend. Then, in 2009, a small festival launched in La Grande, a town you’d drive through on your way somewhere else unless someone told you to stop, and it turned out that stopping was the entire point.

The Eastern Oregon Film Festival didn’t compete with Sundance. It didn’t try to. It screened films in a community that otherwise might not have been part of the conversation. It brought filmmakers to a place with live local bands, barrel fires and hatchet throwing and audiences who were genuinely, not performatively, excited to be there.

Which is, it turns out, a fairly good definition of what a film festival is supposed to do.

Here’s what’s interesting about what happened next. More festivals. Everywhere.

Not just more festivals in Portland, though Portland now has enough to fill a calendar from January through December and still leave some without confirmed dates. But more festivals in the places you might not expect.

Astoria. Brookings. Manzanita. Baker City. Enterprise and Joseph. Coos Bay.

Close to fifty active film festivals now operate across the state of Oregon.

Fifty.

McMinnville Short Film Festival. HP Lovecraft Film Festival. QDoc. The Archaeology Channel International Film Festival. Fungi Film Fest, which is exactly what it sounds like and is completely wonderful for being exactly what it sounds like.

Each one serving a community. Each one occupying a niche. Each one making space for something that the market, left to its own devices, would never have made space for.

Now here’s the part where you might expect some numbers.

Fair enough. Numbers.

According to festival ticketing and scheduling platform Eventive, the film festival industry, nationally, globally, has done something in the last five years that most industries would kill for. It didn’t just recover from the pandemic. It surpassed where it was before. Average net revenue per festival organization has gone up 77% since 2021. Average revenue per ticket, which includes passes, merchandise, concessions, donations, the whole ecosystem, has hit its highest point ever. More people are buying tickets. More of those people are filling seats.

And the seat-filling matters. Not just as a metric. As a signal.

When more people are filling more seats and paying more per seat simultaneously, that’s not inflation. That’s not just “post-COVID bounce.” That’s people deciding, consciously, repeatedly, in larger numbers each year, that the experience of watching a film in a room with strangers is worth something that watching it alone on their couch is not.

That’s an audience that has decided it wants to be an audience.

There’s also this: roughly a quarter of all film festival attendance is now virtual.

Not 80%, like it was during the pandemic. Not trending toward zero, like a lot of people assumed it would once theaters reopened. About a quarter. Holding steady. Refusing to go away.

Which tells you something about who film festivals are actually for.

They’re not only for the people who can afford to stay a week in Park City (or Boulder). They’re not only for the people who live within driving distance of a venue. They’re for the person in Coos Bay who wants to watch an environmental documentary on a Friday night. They’re for the person in a rural county who follows the QDoc Film Festival because it’s one of the few places that reflects their life back at them.

Virtual didn’t replace in-person. It found the people in-person couldn’t reach.

That’s not a consolation prize. That’s the whole point.

A filmmaker might screen a short in McMinnville, meet collaborators in Bend, and later premiere a feature in Portland.

That sentence comes from “The Power of Film Festivals,” and it does something that most policy documents don’t do: it describes a career path that actually exists. Not the career path we see celebrated, the one that goes: make film, get into Sundance, get a distribution deal, become known. The career path that happens to real people in real places, moving between real communities, building something that looks less like a ladder and more like a web.

Audience.

The whole thing is connected. Pull one strand and it matters. Add one strand and it matters. The Manzanita Film Festival on the coast isn’t a footnote to Portland Panorama. It’s part of the same structure. The Eagle Cap Film Festival in Enterprise isn’t planning its first year just to be a small version of something bigger somewhere else. It’s doing something that nothing bigger somewhere else is doing. And it’s doing it in Enterprise and Joseph.

There’s a reasonable argument that Oregon’s film festival economy is significantly larger than the numbers currently on record. The most comprehensive study of its economic impact was published in 2017. A lot has happened since 2017. The industry has grown. New festivals have launched. Hybrid models have expanded reach. A filmmaker can now screen their work at a Portland festival and have a virtual ticket buyer in Medford watching the same night.

The 2017 numbers are not wrong. They’re just old.

That matters when you’re making the case, to legislators, to tourism boards, to grant-making bodies, for why film festivals deserve the same institutional attention we give to sports arenas and convention centers and all the other things we’ve decided count as economic engines.

They have an impact. Not just on filmmakers. But on locals. On Travelers. On the audience.

The festival doesn’t create the work itself. It creates the context for the work. The room. The people watching. The conversation after the credits roll. The moment where a filmmaker from La Grande sits across from an audience in Ashland and both of them realize, possibly for the first time, that what they made and what they needed to see are the same thing.

You can’t put a dollar amount on that.

Or rather: you can, and it’s probably larger than whatever number you’re currently using, but the dollar amount is not really the point.

The point is that Oregon, more or less by accident and then very much on purpose, built a film culture that looks like the state it lives in.

Connected. Creative.

Fifty festivals. One ecosystem.

And an audience to watch them.

There’s a filmmaker in Eugene, of Ryukyuan descent, whose work has screened at the Rotterdam Film Festival and LACMA and Indie Memphis, and who was previously a fellow at the Sundance Directing and Screenwriting Labs.

There’s a filmmaker in Portland, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, documentary director, journalist, making a film about the city’s reckoning with its own toppled monuments to westward expansion.

There’s a filmmaker who went through Jordan Peele’s No Drama Initiative. A filmmaker in Ashland whose debut feature premiered at SXSW, won four Best Narrative Feature awards, and is now seeking financing for her second. A filmmaker of Nigerian-American descent who founded a nonprofit to empower filmmakers of color and has two features behind him. A Taiwan-born director with extensive stage experience working alongside a writer and producer with twenty years of film, television, and fiction podcasting experience.

A pair of filmmakers - married, working together - whose first short is premiering this year, their first feature already a Final Draft Big Break quarter finalist. A Mexican-American director who is an AFI Directing Workshop for Women graduate and a winner of the Best U.S. Latina Director at LALIFF. And a filmmaker/actress working on her first feature film which is a love letter to caregivers born of her experience in caring for her mom during her final years.

Twelve people. From Portland and Eugene, from Ashland and Bandon. Already working. Already making things that are real, that have screened, won awards, and changed the people who watched them.

They knew of each other but they were not connected. They knew of the pathways some filmmakers take and they knew of the success stories that some filmmakers have enjoyed but they were not connected to the Industry (capital “I” intended) as much as they needed to be.

The Bridge: From Oregon to Industry was designed to do just that.

Launched in 2026 as a partnership between Oregon Film, the Portland Events and Film Office, Prosper Portland, and Sundance Collab - the global community arm of the Sundance Institute, now reaching members in more than 170 countries - the program brought this first cohort together at the Dossier Hotel in downtown Portland for a weekend intensive in May, which will be followed by individual one-on-one mentorship sessions in the weeks after.

Yes, the program is about connection. But it is also about place. It’s about here. About Oregon. About Portland. It’s about the talent that lives here and the stories they are telling.

And this isn’t a for-profit program. There are no entry or participation fees. Participants and Presenters are together, staying in rooms on the floors above the ballroom where they meet. They come together to discuss, learn, meet and laugh.

After a welcome, some sharing of stories and an informal get together on Friday evening, the sessions run across Saturday and Sunday.

Festival strategy and publicity. Negotiation - an active, performance laden, goal orientated full workshop, not a lecture. An energetic and fun session on scheduling, budgeting, preparing a film for financing. A broad based look at the legal frameworks for independent filmmakers and the agreements and discussions that they should be having at the onset of any creative venture. The success story of a world renown and awards garnering impact campaign and its practical implementation on other issue-themed projects. The role of the producer in a rapidly changing landscape and how to look at projects from multiple angles. A bespoke project-by-project, filmmaker-by-filmmaker review of how to approach grants and labs. An innovative look into new models in financing and revenue - workforce development financing, broadening IP through graphic novels and art museum sales. The “marriage” of producer and director and how to make the most of that relationship. Sales, distribution, and how to approach a career.

That list reads like a curriculum and it is one. But the people delivering it are not faculty in the conventional sense. They are practitioners. Among them are a producer whose documentary won both the Sundance Documentary Audience Award and the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature; a writer/director whose first feature, a neo-Western thriller, won a Spirit Award nomination and worldwide distribution; an entertainment lawyer who built her practice from a solo office on the Universal Backlot into a firm of over twenty attorneys, founded specifically to help independent filmmakers bring their work to life; a distribution producer who founded a company that supports films through release without taking rights; a producer whose films have moved from Sundance to Venice to Cannes to HBO; a former studio executive who has bought and sold independent features on both sides of the table and built one of the nation’s most successful horror franchises; two producers whose collective credits include some of the most quietly essential American films of the past fifteen years, all shot in Oregon.

Some of these experts and innovators live here in Oregon, some of them came in just to share their experience in person and some of them zoomed in from places like New York and Los Angeles.

Between sessions, the connection continued in the form it always takes when it’s working; personally.

During the walkaway lunches on SW Alder Street. In the lobby at the end of the day. At the Friday and Saturday night mixers. At the closing dinner at G Love on Sunday evening. The kind of transmission that doesn’t appear on a schedule but is, often, what people are really there for. The exchange of information that happens when a filmmaker who has just come through the financing session follows up privately with the advisor who delivered it. When two members of the cohort discover they are making films about adjacent subjects or went through the same workshop in different years. When someone realizes, sitting across from a producer who built a twenty-year career without leaving the Pacific Northwest, that leaving is not actually the prerequisite it was implied to be.

That’s what The Bridge was striving to do: prove that you can have these careers here and you can be successful at it.

Two days of sessions on financing structures and distribution models and legal frameworks also produced something less quantifiable: Twelve filmmakers from across the state who came in as individuals leave as something more than that, a creative team. A creative force.

Portland and Oregon already contribute nearly $200 million annually to the state’s economy through film production. Portland’s Mayor announced the program with that number in the frame. It matters. Economic contribution is real and it is the language that legislators and tourism boards and city councils respond to.

But the filmmakers in this cohort are not thinking about the $200 million.

They are thinking about the film set in the cranberry bogs of Bandon that now has a clearer path to financing. The documentary about Portland’s monuments that has a better sense of its distribution options. A second feature that is now a little less abstract as a financial proposition. A feature in development that now has slightly better odds of reaching the audience it was made for.

Connection is not a metaphor here.

It is a legal structure understood. A financing pathway clarified. A negotiation approached with knowledge instead of anxiety. An advisor’s phone number in a pocket. An inspiration. A plan.

It is two filmmakers who didn’t know each other before Friday night who are now, on Sunday evening, talking about the possibility of collaborating.

A community that was already here, now just better connected.

How do we best serve our community?

The site OregonConfluence.com exists as an attempt to answer that question.

It isn’t a marketing page. It’s an old-school blog. It’s a community bulletin board. It’s a running record of how our ecosystem built around production grows and adapts over time.

The history of the site mirrors the evolution of Oregon’s film industry itself.

Each entry functions like a field report. Updates about productions utilizing the state. Explanations of how incentive programs work. Notes on partnerships with local organizations, film festivals, and regional film offices. The tone is simple: here are the events, here are the partners, and here is why it matters.

Over time, the highlights start to accumulate and that directly reflects the growth and adaptation of the industry in Oregon.

One recurring theme is workforce development.

Through partnerships with the Oregon Made Creative Foundation, Outside the Frame, Desert Island Studios and programs like Pathways, the office has helped place dozens of trainees into paid positions on active productions, creating entry points for new crew members entering the industry. Training initiatives and grant programs are supported through the state’s Creative Opportunity Program, which directs a portion of incentive funding into workforce development and creative grants.

The Confluence also documents the industry clusters that have quietly grown inside the state.

Animation is one of the clearest examples. Studios such as LAIKA, ShadowMachine, Bent Image Lab, and HouseSpecial have helped turn Oregon into an internationally recognized hub for stop-motion and commercial animation. At the same time, visual effects companies like Refuge VFX have contributed work to large-scale productions including an Emmy Award for Shōgun.

Another recurring theme is film tourism.

In 2017 Oregon Film created the Oregon Film Trail, a statewide network of more than forty markers identifying filming locations connected to iconic projects. Visitors now travel to towns like Astoria, Brownsville, and Klamath Falls to see where films such as The Goonies, Stand by Me, and Wild were shot, an effort that now generates roughly $151 million annually in film-tourism activity across the state.

And yet another theme is screenings, fundraising events, networking gatherings and community building projects. The list continues, grows and transforms over time.

The site is called “The Confluence” for a reason. A confluence is where multiple streams meet. The metaphor works for an industry built on collaboration, state government, local crews, private studios, independent filmmakers, tourism partners, and regional communities all contributing to the same outcome.

The blog documents that meeting point.

OregonConfluence.com doesn’t claim to be the center of Oregon filmmaking. Instead, it acts as a map of how that filmmaking happens, one production, one event, one screening, one partnership, one program and one person at a time.

We’re biased, but we think Oregon is very unique when it comes to its creative workforce. It’s in the air and in the water. Film production has been a part of Oregon’s culture since the turn of the 20th Century and the “studio system” started here a decade or two later before it discovered the year-round sunshine of southern California.

That history and legacy has created a groundwork that has been build upon for more than a century.

“Make It Here” is a short film produced by Oregon Film in partnership with CineRent West and director Devin Boss that celebrates what makes Oregon such a vibrant, inspiring, and filmmaker-friendly place to produce creative work. It showcases both the people and the places that help bring projects to life, highlighting local talent, crew, landscapes, and the passion that animates Oregon’s creative community.

Rather than being just another “why film here?” pitch, the piece is designed to visually and emotionally convey why filmmakers choose Oregon and why they live here. It emphasizes the strength of the local filmmaking community, where crews, artisans, and storytellers support one another and contribute to a collaborative environment alongside the joy and creative energy of making work in Oregon.

Production here isn’t just practical, it’s personal.

The video’s core message is clear: Oregon is not just a backdrop, it’s a home for creative projects, where talent, locations, and supportive networks make it a place people want to create and “Make it Here.”

This piece emphasizes the local community that conveys a creative culture. This is a place where production feels integrated rather than intrusive. Neighborhoods and historic districts offer a range of urban visuals while coastal bluffs, rolling hills, and open desert expanses remind filmmakers why more than 500 films and TV shows have been shot across Oregon. This has been true for more than a century creating seminal films like Buster Keaton’s “The General” in 1926, “Sometimes a Great Notion” in 1970, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” in 1975, “The Goonies” in 1985 and “Stand By Me” in 1986 with more recent collaborations finding their way to Sundance awards and Emmy nominations including “Twinless,” “I Don’t Feel At Home in This World Anymore,” “It’s What’s Inside” and “Portlandia.”

In short, “Make it Here” isn’t just a video, it’s an argument by example for why Oregon is the best place to shoot and live as a filmmaker.

Watch the full video here.

Over the past year, a remarkable cluster of #OregonMade independent films has moved from production to festival screens, demonstrating with unusual clarity what a functioning regional film ecosystem actually produces. Six projects, A Simple Machine, Ernie and Emma, Outdoor School, Paradise Records, Trash Baby, and Skweezy Jibbs Makes a Movie have collectively played festivals from SXSW in Austin to Tribeca in New York, sold out hometown screenings across Portland and Southern Oregon, and charted unique distribution paths: self-distribution, target marketing, impact campaigns and self-released Blu-rays. Each tells a different story about how #OregonMade films find their way in a transformed industry while together, they tell a single story about what Oregon has built.

Award Winning Trash Baby

Of the six, Trash Baby has arguably the most decorated festival run. Portland shot and a recipient of a Portland Post-Production Grant, the film world-premiered at SXSW 2025 in March at the Alamo Theater in Austin. It’s the directorial debut of Ashland born, Oregon filmmaker Jacy Mairs and the acting debut of Portland high schooler Esther Harrison, who plays Stevie, a 12-year-old navigating poverty, friendship, and the pull of growing up too fast in a trailer park loosely inspired by Mairs’ own childhood.

From Austin, the film came home in spectacular fashion. Trash Baby closed out the inaugural Portland Panorama Film Festival with two sold-out shows at the Hollywood Theatre. The awards followed rapidly. After the script was an Academy Nicholl semi-finalist and screened at SXSW it went on to win both best narrative feature and the audience choice award at Portland Panorama 2025, best narrative feature and best actress at Carmel International Film Festival, best narrative picture at Eastern Oregon Film Festival and Local Sightings Film Festival, and the Industry Choice Award at Dances With Films 2025. It finished its festival run with another sold-out screening in Mair’s hometown at the Ashland Independent Film Festival in April 2026 where it won another “Best Feature” accolade.

After its SXSW premiere, critics compared it favorably to The Florida Project and Beasts of the Southern Wild. It is precisely the kind of festival-proven, authentically regional story that Oregon has always excelled at creating including multiple films from directors like Kelly Reichardt, Macon Blair, Jeremy Saulnier and Gus Van Zant.

Ernie and Emma, A Southern Oregon Homecoming

Perhaps the most personally resonant project in this cohort comes from one of the state’s most iconic film residents. Bruce Campbell, best known for chainsaw-wielding bravado in Evil Dead, genre-bending turns in Bubba Ho-Tep and decades of cult performances, wrote, directed, produced, and stars in Ernie and Emma, a quiet, character-driven road movie that explores grief, memory, humor, and love that lingers after loss.

Campbell plays Ernie Tyler, a small-town pear salesman navigating Southern Oregon after the death of his wife, Emma, who left behind a detailed scavenger hunt, leading Ernie to the gravesite of their son, a cannabis dispensary, a liquor store, and a long-neglected Bigfoot trap in the middle of nowhere. The film’s crew is a reunion of longtime collaborators: cinematographer Kurt Rau (My Name Is Bruce), editor Kaye Davis (Evil Dead II), composer Joseph LoDuca (Evil Dead trilogy), and co-stars Ted Raimi and Sam Raimi’s daughter Emma Raimi.

Campbell and producer Ida Gearon self-funded the project and filmed entirely on location in Southern Oregon, choosing to debut it locally rather than in Los Angeles. The world premiere sold out the historic Holly Theatre in Medford on Valentine’s Day 2026, presented in partnership with the Ashland Independent Film Festival. Campbell described the film as “crawling back into the womb” filming at recognizable local landmarks including the Bigfoot Trap, Upper and Lower Table Rock, the Rogue River, Lithia Park, and the Applegate Lake area.

A sold-out special screening followed in April at Portland’s Hollywood Theatre, with Campbell in attendance for a Q&A. Following its Oregon run, Ernie and Emma will continue on a nationwide tour in the fall, including screenings at Alamo Drafthouse locations with live appearances and conversations. A wider release is planned for later this year.

A Poignant Portland Story: Outdoor School

Directed by Portland’s Ime Etuk, Outdoor School is a drama based on a true story as told by Vin Shambry on the Moth Stage. The film follows the story of a boy raised in the wilds of 1990s Portland who must attend Outdoor School for the first time, after navigating a difficult home life of domestic violence and houselessness. In the end, Vin finally finds a way to just be a child. The film world-premiered at the American Black Film Festival in Miami in June, 2025.

Etuk has described the film as an attempt to bridge worlds rooted in Portland’s Black community and centered on a moment of childhood freedom that resonates far beyond its specific setting. The film’s Portland homecoming at the second annual Portland Panorama in April 2026 sold out well ahead of the screening date, with an encore, also sold out, Portland screening subsequently added. Etuk has spoken about wanting families of all backgrounds to see the film together, and how deeply it connects with Portlanders who have experienced Oregon’s outdoor school tradition firsthand.

Etuk has been working with distribution strategists to make a plan to navigate the current challenges of the film industry with an eye toward a community-first, impact focused theatrical rollout and eventual streaming release.

A Simple Machine, A Beautiful Journey

Filmmaker Mark Hoffman’s debut feature A Simple Machine made its Oregon premiere at the Portland Panorama Film Festival on April 16 at the Hollywood Theatre just after winning the Roxanne T. Mueller Audience Choice Award For Best Narrative Feature Film and a $10,000 prize at the 2026 Cleveland International Film Festival with one CIFF programmer calling it, "A modern, fresh, captivating story of life as it is for today’s young adults."

The film is so Portland that it posits proper bicycle etiquette as the secret to happiness. Based on Evan P. Schneider’s novel, it follows Nick, a twenty-something artist who sets out to pay off his student loan debt by scrimping, saving, and embracing a DIY lifestyle. Cinematographer Kevin Fletcher creates a lush black and white visual palette that balances both the architectural beauty and the more gritty urban landscapes of the Rose City all in support of a unique parable about economic independence and the cost of wanting less in a culture built on more.

The film previously premiered at the Lighthouse International Film Festival before returning home to Portland Panorama, where cast and crew, many of them Portlanders themselves, organized a group bike ride to the Hollywood Theatre for the screening. Southern Oregon born Hoffman was in attendance and joined novelist Schneider for a panel discussion on film adaptation at Urbanite.

Paradise Records, Oregon’s Biggest Indie Splash of 2025

Of the six films, Paradise Records arrived with the most built-in commercial heat. The debut film from multi-platinum, Grammy-nominated musician Logic, who also stars as Cooper, a well-meaning record store owner just trying to keep the lights on, world-premiered at Tribeca 2025 in the Spotlight Narrative section. The film was executive produced and edited by Kevin Smith.

Entirely self-funded and shot in part at St. Helens’ Endlessound Records, critics compared the film to Clerks, Friday After Next, and Empire Records. With an ensemble cast led by Tramayne Hudson and cameos including Kevin Corrigan, Bobby Lee, Ron Perlman and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a hostage negotiator delivering what one reviewer described as “one part TED Talk, one part Nicolas Cage meltdown.”

The film also played to a sold-out crowd at Portland Panorama with Logic hosting a lively and engaging Q&A after the screening. Distribution has taken a deliberately fan-forward path. Marketing directly to Logic’s large social media audience, Paradise Records is now available on Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play, and YouTube for purchase following a special feature-packed Blu-ray release sold directly from Logic’s own platforms.

Skweezy Jibbs Makes a Movie, Reinventing Distribution from the Road

The most unconventional story of the six belongs to Skweezy Jibbs Makes a Movie, a mockumentary from the eponymous YouTube Creator and a producer of Portlandia and Documentary Now! It chronicles Portland TikTok legend Tim Savage’s catastrophically ambitious attempt to make “literally John Wick plus Magic Mike plus Transformers plus Fast and the Furious”, with no money, no experience, and “no filmmaking talent whatsoever.”

The film sold out its November 1, 2025 premiere at the Hollywood Theatre in six hours. Due to popular demand, it expanded to shows in Ashland at the Varsity Theatre, Salem, Seattle, and Vancouver, Washington, with multiple additional shows selling out as well.

Finding a traditional distributor proved challenging; the film was turned down by both Sundance and the Toronto International Film Festival. Skweezy decided the best route was to take it on the road himself, citing the self-distributed Hundreds of Beavers as inspiration. That instinct has been validated. The film is now touring 60-plus U.S. cities in 2026, with Skweezy appearing in person for a live Q&A after every show, a model that has generated an IMDB rating of 9.1 and audience responses describing it as “gut-wrenchingly funny, charismatic, and seriously poignant.” Skweezy has framed the touring model as a direct response to the challenge of getting Gen Z into theaters: “You’ve gotta just be experimental. That’s why I’m doing what I’m doing, going on the road, giving people a real experience.” Streaming distribution is expected to follow once the theatrical tour concludes.

What These Six Films Tell Us

Taken together, these six projects map almost perfectly onto the structural shifts reshaping independent film nationally, and onto what Oregon Film’s investment ecosystem has been designed to support.

Trash Baby is the festival-prize-collecting, distributor-courting drama that defines the prestige indie path. Ernie and Emma is the self-funded passion project from a veteran filmmaker who came home to make something true to his adopted state, and found a regional premiere model that honors both the community and the craft. Outdoor School is the community-rooted story navigating distribution through audience relationships and education. A Simple Machine is the locally-financed debut feature made by and for its city. Paradise Records is the celebrity-adjacent, self-funded entry that went directly to VOD and physical media on its own terms. And Skweezy Jibbs Makes a Movie has written a new distribution playbook in real time.

None of these films followed the same path. None of them needed to. What’s striking is how many of them deliberately chose Oregon, not as a fallback, but as the point. Campbell drew upon his own community in and around Jacksonville. Etuk made the Rose City the underlying theme of his story. Mairs never seriously considered filming Trash Baby anywhere other than Portland. Logic deliberately shot the Bend-set Paradise Records in St. Helens utilizing an iconic local record store. Tim Savage made the city that built and fueled his on-line persona the setting for his feature length version. That variety of approaches, and that shared sense of place, is the whole argument, and it is, in a meaningful way, exactly what Oregon’s deeply connected creative community was built to produce.

Oregon is fundamentally built for regional production. The state supports multiple working hubs across Portland, Central Oregon, Southern Oregon, the Coast, and Eastern Oregon. Each region brings its own contacts, allowing productions to work closer to the places their stories require. Regional film offices like Central Oregon Film Office and Film Southern Oregon, and regional partners like Klamath Film, BendFilm and the Eastern Oregon Film Festival are active partners with real operational impact.

Just as important is the level of community buy-in. In many places, film production is merely tolerated. In Oregon, it is genuinely welcomed. Towns understand both the economic benefits and the cultural value of hosting productions, and that understanding translates into smoother access to locations, more cooperative permitting processes, and meaningful local support through discounts, donations, and in-kind contributions. You can see an specific example of this in the “Case Study” series we recently published on “Break Up Season” shooting in Eastern Oregon.

For independent productions in particular, this goodwill has a measurable effect, lowering costs while increasing production value.

The state’s crew base strikes a rare balance between depth and accessibility. Oregon crews bring experience across features, television, commercials, and independent work, yet the market is not so saturated that productions are competing for every available hand. The result is a workforce known for professionalism without big-market burnout, department heads who understand how to scale with a project, and crews who remain adaptable and resourceful. It’s a labor pool that knows the realities of indie filmmaking and still takes pride in problem-solving.

Oregon’s incentive programs reinforce this ecosystem. The state’s rebates and regional bonuses are designed to support a wide range of productions, not just large-scale projects. For regional and independent filmmakers there are additional “uplifts” built into the incentive programs and that means incentives that return real cash, allow for predictable budgeting and cash flow savings that other states do not offer. These structures make it possible for smaller projects to plan responsibly and for regional production to remain viable over time.

Geography plays a critical role as well. Oregon’s landscapes aren’t simply beautiful; they are narratively versatile. Within a few hours’ drive, filmmakers can move between coastlines, deserts, forests, mountains, farmland, snow, and cities that feel distinct from one another. This range allows stories to dictate locations rather than forcing productions to compromise or cross state lines. For regional production, that flexibility is invaluable.

Underlying all of this is a culture that actively supports original voices. Oregon has a long history of filmmaker-driven work, more than a century in fact, and that legacy continues to shape how projects are received. The state encourages experimentation, supports both first-time and returning filmmakers, and values authenticity over gloss.

The interconnection of the ecosystem further strengthens these advantages. Because the industry here isn’t bloated, relationships carry weight. Regional film offices, nonprofits, festivals, training programs, and state agencies collaborate frequently and informally. That leads to faster problem-solving, shared resources, and clearer long-term pathways for careers and projects alike. Production in Oregon tends to feel cumulative rather than transactional, with each project contributing to the health of the next.

Taken together, these factors explain why regional film production works so consistently in Oregon. The state operates like a creative commons, distributed rather than centralized, cooperative rather than extractive, and designed for sustainability rather than short-term spikes. It is a place where stories can be made where they belong, supported by crews who care, communities that participate, and systems built to help filmmakers succeed.