New Release (Spring 2012)

Sometimes a Great Movie: Paul Neman, Ken Kesey and the Filming of the Great Oregon Novel

(Part Three of the Newport Trilogy)

Nestucca Spit Press announces the release of Sometimes a Great Movie: Paul Newman, Ken Kesey and the Filming of the Great Oregon Novel, by Matt Love.

In June 1970, the biggest movie star in the world traveled to the Oregon Coast to film an epic novel about a defiant family of loggers written by a home grown counterculture hero. The star was Paul Newman. The author was Ken Kesey. The story was Sometimes a Great Notion and it has a fanatical following in the Pacific Northwest.

What ensued was a wild working vacation between Hollywood and Oregonians involving beer, sex, scotch, loggers, beaches, and perhaps, a spectacularly vandalized pool table. In Sometimes a Great Movie: Paul Newman, Ken Kesey and the Filming of the Great Oregon Novel, author Matt Love documents the legend of that magical summer and presents over a 125 never-before-seen photographs, including many in color.

I first became interested in the story after Ken Kesey died in 2001, when I heard a remarkable tale from an eyewitness who claimed that during the movie shoot, Paul Newman cut the legs off a pool table with a chain saw in a Toledo bar,” said Love. “I wanted to discover if the story was true. In the course of four years, I interviewed close to a hundred people connected to the filming and collected hundreds of incredibly candid photographs. I think I’ve ended up with a truly fun and poignant narrative about a unprecedented earthy collaboration between Hollywood and a place where they went on location to make a movie.

In the third installment of his Newport Trilogy, preceded by Super Sunday in Newport: Notes From My First Year in Town and Love & The Green Lady, Meditations on the Yaquina Bay Bridge: Oregon’s Crown Jewel of Socialism, Love blends reportage, memoir, primary documents, oral history, film criticism, and photographs to produce a unique, entertaining, visually rich work of non fiction. In the book, Love also presents the daring thesis that the filming of Kesey’s literary masterpiece may have helped re-elect Governor Tom McCall, who in his second term (1971-75), led the state to pass a series of progressive governing initiatives that created modern Oregon and one of the most desirable places to live in the country.

Matt Love is the author/editor of eight books about Oregon, including, the best selling Far Out Story of Vortex I, Citadel of the Spirit: Oregon’s Sesquicentennial Anthology, and Gimme Refuge: The Education of a Caretaker. He writes the “One Man’s Beach” column for Oregon Coast Today and the “On Oregon” blog for Powells. In 2009, Love won the Oregon Literary Arts’ Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award for his contributions to Oregon history and literature. He lives in South Beach and teaches English and journalism at Newport High School. He’s currently working on a novel about teaching in a public high school.

For more information about Sometimes a Great Movie: Paul Newman, Ken Kesey and the Filming of the Great Oregon Novel, visit <www.nestuccaspitpress.com> and view a slide show of Notion photographs and exclusive home movie footage shot on the set during filming.

Sometimes a Great Movie: Paul Newman, Ken Kesey and the Filming of the Great Oregon Novel by Matt Love, Nestucca Spit Press, 2012, $30, 175 pages, 125 photographs,  8  1/2" x 8  1/2", paperback, ISBN 978-0-9744364-9-4.

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