Dad sat waiting, along with about 40 other men, while an assistant made his way around the room, talking with everyone, except my dad. And “a Gyppo logger,” my dad told me, “never wants to unionize.”Īfter the initial interview, my father, who was 35 years old at the time, was called by the casting director to come to a second interview at the Salishan Inn. The Stampers are “Gyppo,” or contract loggers. Kesey’s book is set around the Stamper family, a clan of stubborn and prideful loggers, struggling to survive, making a living amidst a determined, resentful town and other logging operations seeking to unionize. Author Ken Kesey’s novel, “Sometimes A Great Notion,” was being adapted to the screen and filmed along the Siletz River and parts of the Central Oregon Coast. It all started in July of 1970, when my dad drove from our small home town of Neotsu, Oregon, located just three miles north of Lincoln City, to Toledo, where, along with about 250 other men and women, he applied for a job as an extra in a movie. ![]() But that particular keepsake takes us to the end of the tale. We found folders stuffed with mementos from the Screen Actor’s Guild, and we even came across an empty bottle of “President’s Choice” Kentucky sippin’ whiskey. We talked for a couple of hours and pored over boxes of aged and faded photographs of the film crew and famous actors. Recently, I sat down with him at his home in Florence Oregon, and I asked him to do some reminiscing about those days he spent working on the film. My family and I have a particular fondness for the story, as my father, Ron Bernard, actually played a part in the movie version. Sometimes a Great Notion (film) (Wikipedia) ![]() With the passing of Ken Kesey, many an Oregonian, along with admirers around the world, have taken to revisiting that famous story “Sometimes A Great Notion.” “ Up as far as Victoria and down as far as Eureka. Towns dependent on what they are able to wrest from the sea in front of them and from the mountains behind, trapped between both.” – Ken Kesey Sometimes A Great Notion and the Summer My Dad Was a Movie StarĪn Interview with Ron Bernard ~ by Denise Bernard Instead, they're clumsy, resentful enemies, and when they try to sabotage a Stamper lumber raft, they only wind up drifting out to sea - and having to be rescued by the Stampers.WordPress Blogs: Articles, Bibliographies, Media All through the film, he avoids making the strikers into heavies and their hatred for the Stampers seem melodramatic. The game develops into a brawl, of course, but in an interesting way instead of going for a hard-action approach to the scene, Newman shoots it in a sort of twilight, bittersweet style. Some of the strikers invite some of the Stampers to a game of touch football. The direction of this scene is superb the reality and the danger of the huge logs are caught in a way that defines the men and their job better than any dialogue could.Īnother scene that reveals Newman's insight as a director takes place at a lumbermen's picnic. The Stamper men seem terribly small as they bring enormous trees crashing to the ground, wrap chains around them, and load them on trucks with big, muscle-bound machines. The best scene in the film takes place during a day of work. Newman shortchanges what you might call the indoor scenes in order to give us the lumber business. The character is left wavering, and we don't fully understand her relationship to her husband. There are a lot of things left fairly unclear, though I'm not quite sure what was on Remick's mind during most of the movie. Sarrazin, Newman's half-brother by Fonda's second wife, comes home to help -and also to mope, to get over a bummer of a year, and to suggest to Newman's wife ( Lee Remick) that maybe she should clear out from the obsessed Stamper clan. But the Stamper family continues to work in defiance of the strike, and despite the fact that Fonda has broken half the bones on his left side in an accident. ![]() The striking timber workers idly hang around the union office. The local merchants (especially the neurotic fellow who runs the movie theater and the dry cleaners) are going broke because money has dried up. The story takes place during a timber strike in the Northwest. He rarely pushes scenes to their obvious conclusions, he avoids melodrama, and by the end of "Sometimes a Great Notion," we somehow come to know the Stamper family better than we expected to. But then Newman starts tunneling under the material, coming up with all sorts of things we didn't quite expect, and along the way he proves himself (as he did with "Rachel, Rachel") as a director of sympathy and a sort of lyrical restraint.
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