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Posts published in “Day: February 24, 2010”

Packin’ up

February 24, 2010

It was a Peter Courtney moment. Presiding over the Oregon Senate, just after absorbing news from across the Rotunda as the Legislature was preparing to adjourn:

"All right, I'll tell you what's happening," as if announcing social plans on a Saturday night. "The House is coming in at 2:45. They're gonna do some stuff. Then they're going to adjourn and come back in at 4:30. Then they'll do some more stuff." (Courtney's style, some combination of informal and driven, is all his own.) The Senate would return around 5, he said, hopefully with most of the House work complete.

The exact clock times, of course, didn't hold. But both chambers continued processing bills, and you could tell from the visitor's gallery that staffers at least were optimistic of an early-evening adjournment. And no late glitches seemed to be lying in wait.

The latest "experimental" even-year Oregon legislative session does seem nearly over, maybe later today. It has worked; substantial legislation moved through smoothly, and the session seems about to end ahead of deadline (which was February 28).

The major loss, as now appears: The proposed constitutional amendment to allow annual sessions. The House and Senate seem positioned to simply agree to disagree. Ironic, since this session seems to have been a good Exhibit A for the proposal.

Some Leverage

February 24, 2010

We just last night caught up with the most current (streamed) episode of Leverage, the TNT series about a group of con artists, set in the Boston area but shot in Portland. The show is well done on its own merits, but we have fun picking out specific scenes at Portland we know. PGE Park and the city hall were two good recent examples.

It's felt a little like an outlier, in that Vancouver B.C. tends to get a lot more TV and film work; it has been the leading film center on the west coast north of southern California. Among other things, shooting costs there may actually be a little lower than in Portland.

But Portland's clout in the biz is picking up. Leverage is one factor, and another is the area's intensive and cutting-edge digital video industry.

The Oregon House Sustainability and Economic Development Committee held a hearing on all this today, and the indications emerging suggest that more of this business may be coming: Not an explosive increase, but more. People working with Leverage were there, and show creator and runner Dean Devlin, who had planned to appear, delivered a statement.

One conclusion was that Oregon isn't notably attractive on the immediate upfront numbers; other states have juicier governmental giveaways. (Michigan evidently is notorious for this.) But Oregon, and Portland especially, has other good advantages: Widely varied and easily accessible scenery, good infrastructure, a solid base of actors and crew to work with. The various sorts of commercial shooting business, from commercials and corporate videos to full-out entertainment programming, seems to be picking up as word of the advantages picks up. (One motion picture, niche-described as "faith-based horror," was said to be in progress.)

The economic advantages were hyped too hard; no one spoke of it as an economic savior. But Representative Vic Gilliam, who played a bit part on Leverage, recalled Devlin telling him on set that about 140 people were working that day, nearly all Oregonians.

And if you're in Oregon, keep a lookout for $2 bills. On item that emerged at the hearing: Devlin apparently paid out much of the Leverage staff per diems with $2 bills. If you see one in circulation, odds are that's where it came from.