Blue Mountain Eagle
News
Wednesday, February 7, 2018
A9
Eastern Oregon gets starring role in ‘The Last Hot Lick’
By Tim Trainor
EO Media Group
The Oregon summer of
2015 was hot and dry. Eastern
Oregon’s grasses had turned
brown and wilted, forest fires
scorched the state and smoke
filled its skies.
It was also the summer
that director Mahalia Cohen
traipsed around the state film-
ing “The Last Hot Lick.”
The movie follows a
late-career folk singer taking
a second try at stardom while
navigating a seemingly nev-
er-ending tour through ru-
ral and suburban Oregon. A
crucial, defining scene takes
place in Pendleton, and East-
ern Oregon landscapes and
themes figure prominently
throughout. It stars Jamie
Leopold and Jennifer Smeija,
two Portland musicians who
are not trained actors.
The film has premiered
at film festivals in Chicago,
France and earlier this month
at the Northwest Film Center
in Portland. That screening
was sold out, and the film has
thus far been well received by Jamie Leopold and Jennifer Smeija in a scene from “The Last Hot Lick,” which features Eastern Oregon.
audiences and critics alike.
Cohen grew up in Port-
land, and she said she spent
a lot of time in the Colum-
bia Gorge and with family
in Bend and on the coast.
Though she now lives in New
York City, each of her previ-
ous movies have been set in
her home state. She said that
Oregon is just “where her
brain lives.”
But “The Last Hot Lick”
doesn’t take place in the
green, rainy Willamette Val-
ley. Scenes are filmed in
places like Rufus and Was-
co, the Painted Hills and a
Detroit Lake so low that the
characters walk out onto
what is usually lake bottom.
Courtesy photo/Mahalia Cohen
“The look of that land-
Jamie Leopold in a scene from “The Last Hot Lick” at the
scape, that dryness, was
Courtesy photo/NW Film Center
Painted Hills near John Day.
something
that
really Jennifer Smeija in a scene from the film.
worked,” said Cohen.
Two scenes were filmed Street sidewalk. Signage for takes place at the Pendleton logo takes up a majority of ists Alan Feves and Jared
in Pendleton. In the first, the Master Printers and Prodigal Round-Up, which progresses the screen as Leopold sings Pennington. Carl Culham,
main characters buy a hat at Son can be seen clearly in the into a musical performance and strums. Viewers will rec- Round-Up publicity director
the Community Thrift Shop background as they converse. inside the Let ‘Er Buck ognize some Pendleton faces in 2015, is noticeable in a
and empty onto the Court
A second, longer scene Room. The bucking horse in the backing band: guitar- shot of the crowd inside the
Courtesy photo/NW Film Center
Round-Up Grounds. Locals
and rodeo-goers dance in
front of the camera.
Cohen said she filmed the
scenes during slack at the
2015 rodeo.
For Cohen, “The Last
Hot Lick” is “a portrait of
all these different aspects
of Oregon” and its “diverse
landscape and places and
people.” Leopold’s charac-
ter and his songs are at the
heart of it.
“Jamie’s music is really
like small town American
life, and (the film) is kind of
homage to that,” Cohen told
EO Media Group.
It is not yet known if
Pendleton audiences will be
able to see the film. Cohen
is working to find a distrib-
utor, and Culham said he is
working to hopefully screen
the film in conjunction with
some Round-Up events —
but currently nothing is set
in stone.
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