As it does each autumn, the Eastern Oregon Film Festival unspooled last month in La Grande. (If, that is, any film festival can be said to unspool in these digital times…) And, as usual, the spunky community located in the largest continental depression in North America rallied to support a wide array of films and filmmakers from the Northwest and beyond. In some ways, this year’s EOFF felt a little downsized from 2023: with a smaller slate of programming and one venue—the hotel at Hot Lake—from last year that went unused for screenings.
But in another sense, this was the most significant moment in the festival’s fifteen-year history. The centerpiece event this year was the homecoming screening of a feature, Breakup Season, that emerged from a residency program established by EOFF and was filmed, and set, entirely in and around La Grande. This was no microbudget, locals-only indie, either (not that there’s anything wrong with that!): the cast includes veterans of shows like “The Walking Dead” and “The Venture Bros.,” and writer-director H. Nelson Tracey’s first feature has a smooth, professional sheen. It’s also, as everyone in the packed screening on Saturday, October 18, was overjoyed to learn, a really nice piece of work.
Tracey has concocted a romcom setup that wouldn’t be out of place in a Hallmark movie, but invested it with genuine emotion and winning humor. Ben (Chandler Riggs) returns to his Oregon hometown for the holidays, and he’s brought along his girlfriend Cassie (Samantha Isler) to meet his family: puttering, train-obsessed dad Kirby (James Urbaniak); warm and welcoming mom Mia (Brook Hogan); social-media-savvy younger sister Liz (Carly Stewart); and acerbic, still-living-at-home older brother Gordon (Jacob Wysocki). On their first night there, Cassie, after a dinner that takes a turn for the worse, breaks up with Kirby and decides to fly back to Chicago.
The hitch: a winter storm has (as it so often does in La Grande) closed I-84 to Portland, relegating Cassie to an awkward week in the company of her now ex-boyfriend and the family to which she’s only just been introduced. Ben, of course, is mortified but also holds out hope that maybe Cassie will change her mind. His parents do their best to alleviate the tension and make the best of a bad situation. And the siblings, each in their own way, find the whole thing quite entertaining. There’s no weak link among the performances, with standout comic relief from Stewart and Wysocki, who imbues his standoffish slacker with a welcome dose of self-awareness and depth.
Breakup Season had its genesis in a program that was the brainchild of EOFF director Christopher Jennings, the one-man dynamo who has played an outsized role in keeping this under-the-radar event above ground. Tracey, who caught the moviemaking bug at a young age, attended the 2019 Eastern Oregon Film Festival with his short documentary Picture Jasper, which he had shot around the Oregon-Idaho border. “I remember taking photos of the town with the mindset that I may never come back here,” he recalls. “Which is just so ironic. I knew it was a special place. It felt lost in time, and it checked a lot of cool boxes for me, but I definitely didn’t leave that trip with the ambitions that would come later.”
The following year, Tracey’s next short, Conspiracy Party, was accepted to the fest, which was held remotely in 2020. While participating in a virtual happy hour with Jennings and about a dozen other filmmakers, the idea of a screenwriting residency in La Grande was broached. “Chris drops this idea,” Tracey says, “and I just lit up. I was, like, ‘Yeah! Do it!’” He followed up within a week of that conversation, asking how he could be involved. “It wasn’t like I just blindly submitted to this residency. I knew that anytime you’re doing something in its inaugural year, you’re part of the process of figuring out what it’s even going to be.”
Thanks to an influx of pandemic funding, the festival was able to afford hosting half a dozen filmmakers for a month in May of 2021. The program was geared towards first-time feature filmmakers who were willing to film in Eastern Oregon, and Tracey used his time in town to familiarize himself not only with the area (as much as possible during COVID), but with the support that Oregon Film provides. “There are not very many states that have the supporting infrastructure for independent film that Oregon can offer,” Tracey says. It all combined to convince him that “of all the different features I had attempted to get off the ground, this was the one where I saw the path was possible.” To commemorate the homecoming screening, Breakup Season was immortalized as a stop on the Oregon Film Trail during a ceremony the next day.
Sponsor
Of the different projects he’d conceived, Tracey decided to move forward with Breakup Season. “I would always have people ask me about my Christmas breakup movie,” says Tracey. “Before it even had a title, the concept seemed to connect to people.” A concept, however, does not a movie make. It also takes the proverbial village, and it takes money. Stephen Mastrocola came on as a producer in May 2022, and that fall Jennings invited Tracey back to La Grande for a live reading of Breakup Season’s screenplay, which served as a creative catalyst, according to Tracey. That gave me a real deadline. If I’m going to read a screenplay out loud in La Grande for a movie set in La Grande, it better not just be a first draft like I wrote at the residency.” Mastrocola, and the production company, Static Films, he co-founded, contributed to the inertia. “Both of us,” says Tracey, “are the type—and Chris Jennings is the same way—who have a mindset where we may not know how we’re going to do all this, but we’re going to throw dates on the calendar and we’re going to march our way to those dates. That mindset was more important than any of the money that came in.”
To take advantage of winter snow, production had to be scheduled for February of 2023 or be postponed an entire year. Mastrocola and fellow producer Rafi Jacobs, neither of whom had ever been to La Grande before, came to the live reading. Tracey recalls that on the drive out from Portland, they began to question the remote location. “We’re in Pendleton, and they’re like ‘Why are we going all this way? Are you sure about all this?’” I even started to wonder what I’d been thinking. But then we get to La Grande, and they saw what I was talking about. It’s a special place.”
There were additional hurdles to filming someplace so far off the cinematic beaten path, but Tracey was undeterred. “I was interested in embracing the challenges that came with going to La Grande rather than making this movie in Santa Clarita, California, with a snow machine. It had to be somewhere where it’s really winter, because there’s a winter light you just can’t replicate.” Being shot on location, says Tracey, is also a great way for a film to stand out. “When you don’t have a lot of resources, one thing you can do to make your film interesting is to take people to places they’ve never been before.”
As the cast and crew quickly came together for the February 2023 shoot, one immediate economic benefit for the town came as the Landing Hotel in downtown La Grande was fully rented by the production for the entire month, not typically a popular time for visitors. The production itself seems to have gone smoothly enough, despite a snowstorm that, ironically, prevented travel to the Pendleton airport to film Ben and Cassie’s arrival in Oregon. Quick thinking from a local clued the crew into a closer, smaller, airfield that was forced into action. (And, yes, that’s Jennings as the airport van driver who picks the couple up, a nice in-joke for festivalgoers who see him serving as an auteur chauffeur each October.)
Breakup Season had its world premiere at the Desertscape International Film Festival in St. George, Utah, in March of this year. It travelled the festival circuit over the next several months including stops in Klamath Falls and Port Townsend, Washington. But it seems undeniable that nothing topped the reception is received on October 18. With Tracey, his producers, and every primary cast member except Urbaniak in attendance, you could feel the love in the room. During the celebratory post-film Q&A, numerous shout-outs to locals who had worked on or otherwise aided the production, including the couple whose house served as a main set, were delivered. “There was one local guy who was helping us out, and he warned me not to get my hopes up too high,” says Tracey. “He said that if Elvis came back to life and came to La Grande, people would have a tepid response. I said we’ll just wait and see. He was there that night and admitted he was proved wrong.” Still, he says the turnout was “really special, and more than I could have imagined. Every day I would refresh the ticketing page and the seating chart was getting more and more full until it was down to about a dozen scattered seats left, which all got filled the day of.”
“People came up afterwards and had glowing things to say about the film and the experience. You could feel the love,” he continues. “That’s the first time I’ve ever gotten a standing ovation in my life.”
In the weeks since, Breakup Season had its Los Angeles premiere, screened for a week at La Grande’s Granada Theatre, and is just concluding another weeklong run in Corvallis. Next up is a screening on Monday, December 2, at Portland’s Hollywood Theatre, with Tracey, cast and crew members in attendance. The movie will be available on demand via Apple TV starting on Friday, December 6. “I’m really excited for our Portland screening,” says Tracey, ”because it’ll be our tribute to our crew. La Grande was the town, but it was a Portland-based crew and I’m so grateful to the DP and the production designer and all the other Portland-based professionals who made this.”
Sponsor
With his first feature about to enter his rearview mirror, Tracey has started to turn his attention to upcoming projects. There’s a documentary in the works called The Pantone Guy which should hit festivals in 2025. And there’s always the possibility of a return to the Oregon town he fell in love with. “I don’t want to do my next film in La Grande because I don’t want to get pegged as the La Grande guy right now,” he says. “But I do think Eastern Oregon lends itself to many more stories, and I will return there at some point. And I’m not going to do another Christmas movie, that’s for sure. Don’t want to get stuck in that rut. But I have another screenplay that feels like a natural sophomore project.”
The overall impression from Tracey during our conversation was one of gratitude, not only to his collaborators and the people of La Grande, but Oregon as a whole. “I really have to plug Tim Williams and Jane Ridley at the Oregon Film office,” he says, “because this is not how most states operate. And if you want to make movies in this day and age, when the film industry is really broken, you have to be willing to be creative, not just write a kick-ass screenplay. That’s the baseline. You have to be willing to hunt down these grants and find a town that has a tourism budget and all this other stuff. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle where you have to provide a lot of the pieces.”
(Breakup Season screens on Monday, Dec. 2, at the Hollywood Theatre.)
Marc Mohan moved to Portland from Wisconsin in 1991, and has been exploring and contributing to the city’s film culture almost ever since, as the manager of the landmark independent video store Trilogy, the owner of Portland’s first DVD-only rental spot, Video Vérité; and as a freelance film critic for The Oregonian for nearly twenty years. Once it became apparent that “newspaper film critic” was no longer a sustainable career option, he pursued a new path, enrolling in the Northwestern School of Law at Lewis & Clark College in the fall of 2017 and graduating cum laude in 2020 with a specialization in Intellectual Property. He now splits his time between his practice with Nine Muses Law and his continuing efforts to spread the word about great (and not-so-great) movies, which include a weekly column at Oregon ArtsWatch.
