Acosta questioned attorneys for both sides to clarify their positions before he made a ruling or sent the case on to a jury trial. 25, in a Portland courtroom far from both Pendleton and Kesey's bucolic Pleasant Hill farm, U.S. They've been sued by Kesey's 71-year-old widow, Faye, and her four adult children for rights to the screenplay.
Nearly 25 years after their visit-and seven years after Kesey's death-Hagen and McMindes (who changed her name sometime after 1992 to Michele Francis and who modeled, in and out of private-investigator garb, for Playboy in 19) are locked in a federal court battle in Portland. Then things got messier than a loose bronco. And nine months later, they had a Kesey script. They called the project Last Go Round.īy January 1984, McMindes and Hagen had what they thought was a deal with Kesey. A tale long familiar to Pendleton natives, it blended racial enlightenment far ahead of its time, Oregon lore and rodeo hijinks. Lee Spain competed together during the 1911 Round-Up. They came to him with the tall-but-true tale of how a Nez Percé Indian named Jackson Sundown, a popular black cowboy named George Fletcher (known in 1911 by a derogatory nickname), and a white Tennessee bronco-buster named Jonathan E.
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He was an Oregon literary legend and countercultural icon who knew how to spin a yarn. Kesey was a natural to tell the Round-Up story. And in the 1960s, he was one of Kesey's Merry Pranksters as well as a co-pilot on the LSD-fueled cross-country odyssey that Tom Wolfe chronicled in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Hagen had been Kesey's fraternity brother at the University of Oregon. 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.All they needed was a screenwriter, and Hagen knew just the guy-Kesey. 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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