From The Oregonian:
The phone rang one day in 1998, and it was the great Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci calling to chat about his movie "Besieged."
Straightaway he asked, "Where am I phoning you?"
"Portland, Oregon," I said.
He responded in a delighted voice: "'My Own Priveeeet Idaho'!"
It was a dear and telling moment. Portlanders like to brag to the world about our beer and produce, our athletic shoes and microchips, our novelists and alt-rock bands, our mass transit and proximity to nature. But when the world -- or at least its cinephiles -- thinks of us, it thinks of Gus Van Sant.
For more than 20 years, the most resonant cultural image of Portland has been the one framed by its most famous living son (son! at age 55!) in such films as "Mala Noche," "Drugstore Cowboy," "Elephant," "Paranoid Park" (which opens Friday at Cinema 21) and, yes, "My Own Private Idaho." Those films have played all over the world, giving such people as Bertolucci, who have never so much as changed planes in Portland, a vivid idea of what Stumptown is like.
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