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Little Blue Movie | Built for Comfort | The Man with the Plan | So Bad It’s Good
Fashion-Forward Footwear | UO Alumni Calendar | Duck Tales: Clean Fights
Little Blue Movie
Bringing a feature film to life, with the help of a lot of Pez and an MBA
MONTAUK PROJECT FILMSDespite the sign over the movie theater broadcasting that golden word “HOLLYWOOD” into the rainy dark, the scene at the world premiere of Little Blue Pill feels rather far from Tinsel Town glamour. Here at the charmingly threadbare Hollywood Theatre, located in Portland’s namesake Hollywood District, you’re much more likely to find plastic tumblers of microbrew than flutes of champagne. And there’s no red carpet tonight, just a wet sidewalk.
Still, there’s a crowd in the lobby and the smell of popcorn in the air. The film’s writer-director-producer, Aaron Godfred, MBA ’05, stands in front of the packed theater and introduces his first feature-length movie. He concludes by uttering those magic words, “Roll film,” which sends a shiver of excitement through the audience as the lights dim and the opening credits appear.
Little Blue Pill is a comedy about Stephen, a twenty-something aspiring filmmaker who accidentally swallows two erectile dysfunction pills one ill-fated morning, thinking they’re painkillers. The pills quickly have their (ahem) intended effect, and a day of escalating misadventures ensues. To make matters more complicated, the pills in question are from a tainted experimental strain, and so an increasingly desperate Stephen remains in his altered state far beyond the proverbial four hours. Meanwhile, the sinister leaders of Phalitech, the pharmaceutical company that produces the little blue pills, are desperate to capture Stephen before he unleashes a PR nightmare.
It’s not quite Citizen Kane. But neither does it aspire to be. Little Blue Pill is firmly and unapologetically a so-called broad comedy, a genre characterized by plenty of physical humor, ridiculous premises, and broadly defined, yet ultimately relatable, characters. Recent broad comedies like The Hangover and Pineapple Express have raked in the cash at box offices, capturing the adoration of that all-important eighteen-to-thirty-five-year-old male demographic. But most independent filmmakers haven’t tackled the genre, preferring to make dramas, documentaries, and low-budget horror films.
Perhaps tellingly, Godfred wrote his screenplay while he was living and working in the epicenter of the Hollywood machine, during the three years he spent in Beverly Hills employed by what is now William Morris Endeavor, the world’s largest talent agency and the real-life inspiration for the TV show Entourage. As per long company tradition, Godfred started out in the mailroom “with a bunch of people who had dropped out of medical school or passed the bar in two different states,” he says. “Everyone there is overqualified.” Luckily, after just a few weeks, a position opened in the agency’s story department, so Godfred traded up from a mail cart to an endless avalanche of scripts, and source material for yet more scripts.
Among the dozens of magazines that were delivered to the story department, which Godfred’s job required him to mine for screenplay ideas, he noticed a string of articles about celebrities’ misadventures with erectile dysfunction medication. So when a fellow guest at a wedding in Vermont had a yarn to relate about a friend-of-a-friend, an ordinary guy who had been involved in similar shenanigans, the idea that became Little Blue Pill was born.
There’s more than a little tongue-in-cheek commentary in the film about male sexuality, the pharmaceutical industry, and the perils of finding roommates on Craigslist. The characters are enjoyably larger-than-life, as is Phalitech’s headquarters, which features a laboratory that would make any Bond villain proud. But the movie, which Godfred and his crew filmed in Portland during July 2009, is also filled with mementos of real-live Portland— Voodoo Doughnut’s bacon maple bars, Pittock Mansion, the Portland streetcar, and the fact that “you could see Mount Hood over there, if it wasn’t so cloudy.” The White Stag Block even makes a cameo appearance in one shot as our hero rides a bike over the Burnside Bridge.
Godfred chose not only to film the movie in Portland, but to create a very Portland-centric movie, because of his ties to the area and the large numbers of friends, supporters, and collaborators living in and around the city. Although originally from Alaska, where he got his filmmaking start shooting footage of his buddies doing snowboard tricks in the backcountry, Godfred spent his college and graduate school years in Oregon, earning a bachelor’s degree in international business from Linfield College as well as his MBA in general business with a focus in sports marketing from the University. While in graduate school, he took a filmmaking course, and created a documentary about the University during the Vietnam War called Oregon’s War at Home. The film won a Northwest regional Emmy, and Godfred began to think seriously about filmmaking as a career.
His business school training hasn’t gone to waste, however: the abilities to understand financing, to write a solid business plan, and to work effectively with investors are all essential parts of the tremendously broad skill set that being a writer-director-producer requires. Once the screenplay for Little Blue Pill was completed, Godfred found investors willing to put up the $86,000 needed to bring the movie to life. He quit his job at the talent agency and headed north to Portland.
In big-budget Hollywood, almost limitless cash flows allow production teams to realize every nuance of a director’s vision while maintaining all the creature comforts of the celebrity lifestyle. When making an independent film on a shoestring, the rules are a little different. Godfred and his production team rented a floor of a Portland State University dormitory for the monthlong shoot, and borrowed everything from houses to cars to props from friends and family in the area. More than a little creativity and quite a lot of hard work was involved: to create the swarm of little blue pills that appears in the title sequence, prop master Alex Evans individually sanded, primed, and spray-painted hundreds of Pez candies. For that bicycling shot over the Burnside Bridge, instead of using a dedicated dolly truck rigged to accommodate cameras and lights, the filmmakers simply stuck the equipment out the back window of Godfred’s Subaru Outback. When informed of this somewhat unorthodox plan, Godfred remembers with a smile, the Oregon Governor’s Office of Film and Television, which issues permits and oversees filming, replied, “Okay, but keep it under the speed limit.” That accommodating attitude contrasts fairly starkly with the sort of experience filmmakers have in Los Angeles. For another scene, Godfred and his team needed to close down an intersection and redirect traffic. In LA, this would require permit fees of several hundred dollars, as well as hiring four off-duty police officers at $140 per hour each, plus a street monitor from the city. Closing an intersection in the Pearl District required filing for a free permit and hiring one flagger. Oregon’s newly enacted film incentives and the general esprit de corps that the cast and crew experienced in Portland made for a great filmmaking experience, Godfred says, and he’d be happy to do it again someday.
Godfred is currently polishing a new screenplay—this one about unemployment—while promoting and marketing Little Blue Pill. Because independent film festivals traditionally shy away from broad comedies, preferring instead to show the types of films that never get near the neighborhood mall’s cineplex, Little Blue Pill hasn’t been welcomed onto the festival circuit, the avenue by which most independent films find an audience and, if the filmmakers are lucky, mainstream distribution. Fortunately, that grand democratizer called the Internet means that anyone with an iTunes account can watch Little Blue Pill, share it with friends, and build the sort of buzz for the movie that Godfred hopes will win it a spot on Netflix and wider audiences to come. Meanwhile, his efforts continue: independent filmmaking means you’re your own promotions, marketing, and distribution department, too. “Finishing a movie is like the tip of the iceberg,” he says.
Ultimately, Godfred would like to be a part of the Hollywood studio system, directing mainstream blockbuster comedies and action flicks. “It’s going to take time and a little bit of luck to get there,” he says. But with one completed film under his belt, plus an MBA’s worth of business savvy to help him along, the road from the Hollywood Theatre just might lead to the Hollywood sign.
—Mindy Moreland, MS ’08
Web Extra Click here to see Godfred’s UO documentary Oregon’s War at Home.
Built for Comfort
Making the world a cozier place one piece of pillow furniture at a time
Back in the funky ’70s—when shag carpets, waterbeds, and beaded curtains were all the rage—Robb Bokich ’75, MS ’79, needed inexpensive furniture to fit his lanky six-foot-three-inch frame. On a borrowed machine, he taught himself to sew, and after a marathon trial-and-error session, he completed his first fluffy furniture: pillows large enough to lounge on. Soon, friends were paying him to stitch and stuff pillows for their homes. Demand for the pillow furniture grew, so he built a booth and started selling his bright patchwork “hippie furniture” at the Eugene Saturday Market in 1973. Thirty-eight years later—“Who would’ve believed it?” says Bokich—his pillows are comforting customers in twenty-six countries around the globe.
Sink into a foam chair or loveseat at Robb’s Pillow Furniture (on River Road in Eugene) and you’ll feel the reason for his success: Wrapped in velvety fabric and cushy soft—yet dense enough to cradle your back and shoulders like a cozy embrace—the padding conforms to your body and your movements like silent, shifting sand. Tuck a small pillow behind your neck and place another across your lap for a wrist-rest, and you’re set for hours of comfortable reading, writing, video-viewing,
or laptop work. The secret to his furniture’s supportive loft? “It’s all in the cut of the foam,” Bokich explains.
What began as Bokich’s creative effort to pay college expenses became a career that propelled him far beyond any boundaries he and his family may have imagined. During high school, a horrific car accident had left him with hemiplegia, a nearly total paralysis of the left side of his body caused by brain damage. He credits his parents with making him responsible for his own life and insisting he become independent. “I had a big clunky leg brace and I used a cane, but I limped a mile and a half to school every day,” he says. “I had no mouth control, only garbled speech, and I drooled. Really, I was not a very attractive individual.” With the small insurance settlement from the accident he did what most teen boys would do (bought a car) and what few severely disabled people might have dared: after graduation, he took a twelve-month trip around the world. Alone.
The brain injury, says Bokich, left him with a child-like level of derring-do that served him well during his travels. Landing in the Philippines, he was forced to speak English slowly and clearly so native people could understand him—perhaps the best speech therapy he might have undertaken. He hopped a freighter for southern ports, then navigated his way to Japan to attend the World’s Fair. While in Japan, he broke his leg brace and wrestled with language and financial barriers to have another one made to his specifications. Throughout the trip, he financed side excursions with wise decisions about currency exchange rates, garnering business and math skills that would prove valuable in his future endeavors. By the time he returned to the United States a year later, he felt physically and socially prepared for the challenges of college. After completing two years at Idaho State, he transferred to Oregon in 1973 and started sewing just a few weeks after arriving in Eugene.
Pulling down As and Bs in his full-time UO classes, Bokich juggled homework and business quandaries. With sales of his pillow furniture consistently rising (he’d added a booth at the Oregon Country Fair), he needed an inexpensive source of shredded foam, mountains of it, and to keep costs low he decided to shred the foam himself. He discovered an interesting machine under a tarp in a friend’s barn: a century-old wool carder. Bokich bargained the owner down to $75—half of the original asking price—and began the laborious task of customizing the machine for his use. For more than a year, he tinkered with the contraption between classes and homework, meanwhile stitching and stuffing pillows till the wee hours of the morning. He finally designed a set of bladed teeth that would cut and shape the foam the way he wanted it, providing the air-filled “zero pressure point” loft that he patented in 1984.
After earning his master’s at the University, the pillow business was doing so well that Bokich just kept sewing. Local buyers and UO students from far-flung locations form the largest part of his customer base (Robb’s pillows have been shipped to Afghanistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, and even Iran). But perhaps the most fulfilling use of his pillow furniture came about as a surprise to Bokich. One of his regular customers—an occupational therapist from the Eugene School District—found that the furniture’s body-hugging qualities were especially comforting to her special-needs students. Her testimonial states that Bokich’s basic four-foot-square pillow chair “nearly surrounds a student who sits in it, providing the deep pressure that helps calm the nervous system.” Another special-needs customer says the furniture “somehow finds my most effective center of gravity, allowing me to feign a ladylike stillness as it envelopes and supports me. A must, especially if you happen to be autistic!” In honor of these special customers, Bokich renamed his four-foot-square raindrop chair: It’s now called the “hug” chair, and is still priced at $79 to maintain affordability. Bokich regularly attends national conferences, where he promotes and sells his pillow furniture to therapists and health practitioners.
With only the help of his family (wife Emily Wille and her son Jeff), Bokich’s pillow furniture is still stitched, stuffed, and shipped from his original shop on River Road to customers around the world. A vacuum-packing process condenses the hug chair to a box the size of a carry-on suitcase. Bokich encourages customers to ship his hug chairs to their kids or grandchildren, and watch them as they open the small package and a huge pillow pops out. “The look on their faces—now that’s priceless!” he says.
—Katherine Gries ’05, MA ’09
Website: www.pillowfurniture.com
The Man with the Plan
Tim Clevenger takes the helm at the UO Alumni Association.
On commencement day 2011, more than 1,000 new alumni and their families stopped by the Ford Alumni Center. There, they were greeted by the new “mayor”of UO alumni—Tim Clevenger ’86.
Clevenger, who began as executive director of the UO Alumni Association on May 31, estimates he personally shook hands with more than 100 graduating Ducks—just the first step in fostering what he hopes will become their lifelong connection to the UO.
While it’s expected that the director of the alumni association would champion that connection—that’s the job, after all—there’s seemingly not a drop of artificiality in Clevenger’s green-and-yellow blood. He’s as fervent when talking about his own UO experience as he is when talking about the work itself, his family, or even his plans for the weekend.
Clevenger says the UO was a transformational time for him and for his wife of twenty-five years, Lisa ’87. From tiny Terrebonne, north of Redmond in central Oregon, he was a bootstrap kid who was driven to succeed. He spent his first year at Central Oregon Community College, working and banking money. To save tuition costs at the UO he “worked like mad to finish in two-ish years.” He and Lisa met during his last term. He was a charter member of the Lambda Chi house, and she, a Delta Gamma; they were pinned three weeks after meeting and married eight months later. While she finished her degree in education, Clevenger, who graduated with a degree in journalism focused on advertising (it balanced his love for art and creativity with his passion for business, he says), stayed in Eugene, working at radio station KUGN in its advertising department for a short time before starting his own advertising agency, ClevengerWesting. Six years later, with two partners, he started another agency, SPC, which grew to have offices in Eugene, Bend, and Seattle. After eight years, he left in 2000 to join the Papé Group, a diversified Eugene-based company specializing in capital equipment products and services.
He had reached the ceiling at the Papé Group after spending more than ten years as its vice president of marketing and brand management (“unless Susie Papé [’72] wanted to adopt me, there was really nowhere else to go,” he laughs). He remembers the late Randy Papé ’72 with admiration. “Randy was the type of boss who would say, ‘Why are you coming to me with a problem? Go fix it.’ He empowered people to do what was right.”
Clevenger’s UO connection remained strong: He’s taught advertising courses as an adjunct professor and served on the School of Journalism and Communication’s Advancement Council, on the board of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, and as president of the UOAA. Former executive director Dan Rodriguez’s retirement provided the ideal opportunity for Clevenger to fuse his extensive marketing experience with his love for the UO and to find career advancement in Eugene, where his two children, Delaney, seventeen, and Carson, fourteen, attend Sheldon High School.
His first 100 days on the job have been busy: meeting people on campus, from the deans and development officers of the UO’s schools and colleges to the director of the Museum of Natural and Cultural History; getting to know the UOAA’s staff of twelve; and thinking about ways to connect alumni back with their school. In fifteen minutes, he shares at least that many ideas: mentoring experiences, participating in long-range planning discussions, networking with members of the UO’s twenty-one alumni chapters. Make no mistake, he has a strategic plan. “There are currently about 16,000 members out of just over 200,000 living alumni. That’s a lot of potential and, yes, I would love to see all alumni become members of the UOAA.”
Unlike his predecessor, Clevenger does not play golf, but spends his leisure time running marathons, hiking, and traveling—and being with his family. And of course, attending Duck games.
“Tim has so much energy for the things he is passionate about,” says Lisa Clevenger. “He is such an involved dad, wanting to know and be a part of every little part of what is going on in his kids’ lives.”
She says she and Tim “never really grew out of our Greek days. Our family is filled with a sense of adventure and lots of social activities. We like to have big parties, and Tim always leads the way with the best costume for the event. Our last event was St. Patrick’s Day, and Tim was quite the leprechaun.”
Not surprising for someone whose new job is all about the green (and yellow).
—Zanne Miller, MS ’97
So Bad It’s Good
Duck pens worst line of the year.
Ricardo and Felicity’s affair was doomed from the start. But, like all characters in love stories, they surrendered to their passion blissfully unaware of their hopeless future or that their first kiss would be their last. Their relationship was so perilous, in fact, that their story never even went past an opening line.
Writer Molly Ringle ’96 created the couple as the focus of her grand prize-winning sentence in San Jose State’s 2010 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Since 1983 the contest has called on writers to lower their standards and write their best opening sentences to really bad novels.
“It’s supposed to be bad,” Ringle explains of her dreadful creation.
Ringle has published three novels since graduating from the Robert D. Clark Honors College with a degree in anthropology and says her fictional stories often come from real life. The inspiration for Ricardo and Felicity did as well, coming to her while nursing her son Toby. From there it took a turn for the worse.
“He looked like this avid little animal,” she says. “I thought an animal with a water bottle would be a good metaphor for something—maybe for something eating. It would be really awful if you put it in romance.” And Ringle did just that:
“For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss—a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.”
The story ends here. It wasn’t meant to turn into a novel, Ringle says. The point of entering the contest was not to further her career as an author, and though the $250 cash prize was an added bonus, winning was never about money—“It’s about glory.”
—Adeline Bash
UO Alumni Calendar
Go to uoalumni.com/events for detailed information
June 9
UO Advocate Day at the state capitol
Salem
August 27
Northern California
freshman sendoff
San Ramon, California
August 28
UO Alumni Day with
Eugene Emeralds
PK Park
Southern California
freshman sendoff
Location TBA
September 3
Docs and Ducks LSU
tailgate party fundraiser
Chambers Media Center, Eugene
Official Oregon Tailgate party UO vs. LSU
Arlington, Texas
San Diego freshman sendoff
Location TBA
September 24
Official Oregon Tailgate party UO vs. Arizona
Tucson, Arizona
Football watch party
White Stag Block, Portland
October 22
Official Oregon Tailgate party UO vs. Colorado
Boulder, Colorado
Football watch party
White Stag Block, Portland
October 28
Class of 1961 fifty-year class reunion
Eugene
November 5
Official Oregon Tailgate party UO vs. Washington
Seattle, Washington
Football watch party
White Stag Block, Portland
November 12
Official Oregon Tailgate party UO vs. Stanford
Stanford, California
Football watch party
White Stag Block, Portland
Evan Schultz ’10 straps a respirator over his face, selects a permanent fine-point Sharpie pen, and attacks a new pair of white Vans with a flurry of strokes. Welcome to “Art Kicks.”
Schultz, twenty-two, is the owner and founder of Art Kicks, a custom shoe-art business that started in Eugene.
The first inklings of Art Kicks came in March 2009. Schultz was near broke when a friend suggested he use his illustration skills to draw on shoes for money.
Schultz’s first customers were friends and the art was free. “It was great because it generated buzz and simultaneously created content” for his website, Schultz says. In just two weeks, he was able to begin charging for personalized kicks. Soon, his clientele spread from the UO campus to the greater Eugene community and beyond.
After creating forty pairs, Schultz saw the opportunity to expand his business. He teamed up with Cam Giblin ’11, a freelance illustrator and fellow advertising major. Each artist specializes in a different style. Giblin’s shoes echo the vibe of his splashy watercolor illustrations, while Schultz creates shoes saturated with intense color and emblazoned graphic-novel-type images.
It takes between six and twenty hours to complete a pair of Art Kicks. Clients contact Schultz with an idea that he turns into sketches. After receiving approval, Schultz lightly pencils the design on the Vans. Next, he carefully adds color with one of his 600 markers. He waits for each colored section to dry, then outlines, shades, and crosshatches with thin black lines. Sometimes he lets colors bleed, producing a painting-like effect. Schultz finishes with two coats of water-repellent.
A pair of Art Kicks goes for $200. And while Schultz finds himself increasingly busy—working days at a large advertising agency in San Francisco—he still finds time for creating masterpieces on canvas. Shoe canvas, that is.
—Edwin Ouellette ’11
Clean Fights
The night my husband, Willem, died I stayed up weeping and ironing his shirts, in the room that had been his office, a room where we occasionally made love and the room where he finally died. As I sobbed, my tears fell, moistening the cloth. The funeral home had come for his body, and my four-year-old son, Jake, was finally asleep.
Ironing has always comforted me. As a young child, I used to watch my mother sprinkle water from a Coke bottle with a special rubber stopper to dampen the clothes. As a treat she would let me iron handkerchiefs. A month before Willem’s death, while he was having brain surgery I fled home to do a load of laundry. I had been cleaning throughout his illness, and in many ways, although it did not save him, it is what allowed me to survive. I’ve often thought, in the years since his death, of opening a Mourners’ Cleaning Service. I know I am not the only woman who cleans as she sobs in the night.
During the long months when Willem was ill, cleaning was just about the only thing I could focus on, besides taking care of my son. Willem was from Holland, land of the clean people, and when he was well he cleaned as much as I do now. When Willem forgot the word for “paper clip,” I knew he was sick. When I came home from teaching one night and there were dirty dishes still in the sink, I knew he was seriously ill.
Willem, the son of a Mennonite minister, was an academic. He researched his dissertation so thoroughly that we called him Dr. Footnote. He became an archivist and would bring order to collections of photographs of displaced people in camps after World War II.
The day after Willem died, I threw away his old slippers, preferring to remember him by his marathon running shoes. But when Jake saw the slippers now dripping in egg yolk in the garbage, he yanked them out and said, in all his four-year-old wisdom, “Don’t throw away anything of daddy’s, ever.”
My son does the opposite of cleaning. He is a pack rat. When I take clothes out of the dryer, Jake’s child pockets are full of dried-up ticket stubs and baseball cards. When I remember to check his pockets before I put them in the washing machine, I salvage coins and leaves and broken crayons. His room resembles his pockets. My son is a collector and an athlete and he watches WWE wrestling on TV.
“Mom, there are three main kinds of wrestling, Raw, Smack Down, and ECW,” my now ten-year-old son explained patiently.
Last night I was in the kitchen, wiping an already clean counter, listening to NPR on the kitchen radio as Jake was sprawled on the couch, watching his heroes.
“Each kind of wrestling has different wrestlers,” continued Jake. “Raw has Umaga, Kane, and Triple H. Smack Down has The Great Kali—he’s 7’2”—Mark Henry, and Bobby Lashly. The ECW has Big Show (that’s a man), Kurt Angle, and Sabu.”
Last night I washed the dishes and listened to Mozart’s Flute Concerto no. 2 in D Major, a piece my husband used to love. I do not have a dishwasher. I moved into my apartment twenty-five years ago, as a single woman, never knowing I would marry ten years later or that my marriage would telescope and I would be a widow there at forty-six. When my husband moved in, we used to wash the dishes together, he with his Mennonite methodical style by my side. Actually, I washed and he dried. We had been given three kinds of kitchen towels from Dutch relatives for our marriage—one set for dishes, one set for silverware, and one set for pots and pans. Now I wash and dry dishes alone, trying to order my world and to soothe my messy soul.
At 9:15 last night I decided to make a bold move. I put down my sponge and left my station in the kitchen of eternal cleaning. I joined Jake on the couch and watched Friday night wrestling with him. I had my first dose of watching frightening men crash chairs on one another’s greased bodies, fighting and fighting, good over evil, not dying of cancer, fighting until they were exhausted.
I reached out for Jake’s hand and he let me hold it just for a moment before he pulled away. “Just because I see this stuff, doesn’t mean I’m going to do it,” he said quietly, staring at the screen. “Somebody always wins. And just because you love classical music, doesn’t mean you do that, either.”
A woman raising a boy to be a man is not an uncommon occurrence in America today. Whether we’re single mothers by choice and have never shared the task, or by death or divorce and we’re stumbling through life a bit stunned, it doesn’t matter.
And then last night, at ten o’clock, when WWE wrestling was over, my son made an unexpected move. He got up from the couch. He went into the kitchen, grabbed the mop, filled a bucket of water, and began to mop the floor, mopping with frenzy, a fierce mopping to save his soul. We are all wrestling. We are all cleaning. We are doing the best we can.
Patty Dann is the author of the novels Mermaids, which was made into a movie starring Cher and Winona Ryder, and Sweet and Crazy and two memoirs: The Baby Boat: A Memoir of Adoption and The Goldfish Went on Vacation: A Memoir of Loss (and Learning to Tell the Truth about It). She lives in New York City. This essay was previously published in the anthology Dirt: The Quirks, Habits, and Passions of Keeping House (Seal Press, 2009).
