Portland State Magazine Fall 2014

FALL 2014 PORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE 3 Portland State Magazine wants to hear from you. Email your comments to psumag@pdx.edu or send them to Portland State Magazine , Office of University Communications, PO Box 751, Portland OR 97207-0751. We reserve the right to edit for space and clarity. Talkin’ about my generation Thank you for publishing “The Celluloid Generation” [Looking Back, Spring 2014]. I was part of that generation. I started classes in the fall of 1969 and took every film course offered. Tom Taylor’s classes in filmmaking were great. For one class, he gave every student reels of Super 8 film footage of his own children and their friends acting in action shots of old west gunfights and chases. Our task was to edit the film into story form. Every student in our class edited the shots into different stories. What a learning experience! After graduating, I moved to Illinois and enrolled at Columbia College in Chicago and received a master’s in film education. I taught filmmaking and film study at Rolling Meadows High School during the 1970s, using much of my classroom experience learned at Portland State. I retired from teaching in 1997, but I am still using my film appreciation skills learned at PSU teaching noncredit adult education classes at the Center for Learning in Retirement, sponsored by Rock Valley Community College. Ron Johnson ’69 Rockford, Illinois Award-winning documentary I enjoyed reading the salute in your last issue [“Looking Back: The Celluloid Generation,” Spring 2014] to the late- great PSU film studies program, Center for the Moving Image. CMI got its origi- nal boost, as I recall, from having a group of film students covering the activities surrounding the PSU student strike of May 1970, a response to Nixon invading Cambodia and the four students shot dead and eight wounded at Kent State University in Ohio. CMI was able to capture on film more than 200 members of the Portland Police Department attacking an equal number of peaceful demonstrators in front of Smith Center on the Park Blocks, plus the estimated 5,000 who marched in protest to the violence the next morn- ing through the streets of downtown Portland. The CMI students made a documentary by piecing together their coverage and interviews of the student strike and call it The Seventh Day, for which they won a second place award later that year at the DOC NYC Film Festival. Doug Weiskopf ’70 1970 film still relevant today Your spring issue mentioned Portland State’s former film studies program, Center For the Moving Image, in retrospect and their documentary film, The Seventh Day , which was their most important work and is still relevant today as a history of the PSU VietnamWar protests of the late 1960s and early ’70s. The documentary film has been shown continuously over the years in Portland and elsewhere, as well as used often as an educational tool in campus history classes (the film narrator’s British accent gave the feel that The Seventh Day was being covered by a foreign correspondent in a war zone). Chris Lawrenson Another alumni rocker Hey, I loved the article on page 9 of the Spring 2014 Portland State Magazine [“Rockin’ on Broadway”]. Ross Selig- man ’06 indeed rocked the house on Broadway in NYC as the director of “A Night With Janis Joplin!” I saw the show a number of times, because of the other PSU alum in the background on bass— Patrick Harry. Patrick is an alumnus of the music program at PSU as well [2009]. You may want to do a feature story on these guys. It is amazing how it all came together! Sean Harry MIM ’04 Larger picture appreciated I’m glad I cracked the cover of your spring issue when it landed in my mailbox. As a longtime communications professional, I found it impressive throughout, with poignant stories that tie into the university but also look at the much larger picture. It doesn’t just tout the university’s successes; it reaches out to the larger community in smart, fresh ways. The layout is swell, too. Julie Beals ’96, MS ’99 Letters