SOUTHWEST OREGON FILM HISTORY

Oregon’s relationship with motion pictures stretches back to the silent-film era, and Southern Oregon soon became part of that history. Filmmakers discovered what visitors already knew: within a relatively small region, the landscape could provide wild rivers, historic towns, dense forests, rugged mountains and one of the most dramatic coastlines in America. Today, hundreds of film and television projects have been shot across Oregon, establishing a screen history that spans well over a century.

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Southwest Oregon has played its own remarkable part. The Rogue River and Grants Pass helped provide locations for John Wayne and Katharine Hepburn’s Rooster Cogburn, while Steven Spielberg’s 1941 brought Hollywood to Gold Beach. Later productions returned to the region for The River Wild, Fire in the Sky, Redwood Highway, Night Moves, Wild, The Rental, and the Adam Driver science-fiction adventure 65. The official Oregon filmography records productions throughout Grants Pass, the Rogue River, Medford, Ashland, Jacksonville, Roseburg, Coos Bay, Gold Beach and other communities along the Southern Oregon coast.

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That history makes WEASKU part of a much older tradition. Long before our story returns cameras to the banks of the Rogue, filmmakers were drawn here by the same qualities that attracted Clark Gable and Carole Lombard generations ago: extraordinary scenery, isolation, authenticity and a landscape that seems almost designed for the motion-picture screen. WEASKU is not simply a story set in Southern Oregon—it is the next chapter in Southern Oregon’s long relationship with Hollywood.