The Films of Jon Garcia: 2009–2013

By Eric B. Olsen

In just his first five years of filmmaking, acclaimed Portland independent director Jon Garcia was able to produce four feature films. Eric B. Olsen examines the first four films of Garcias career in order to provide a deeper understanding of works that transcend the limitations of independent filmmaking and to show how they have attained the status of art. Part oral history and part film analysis, the book provides a detailed textual commentary on Tandem Hearts (2010), the directors first film; The Falls (2011) and The Falls: Testament of Love (2013), his most well-known films; and The Hours Till Daylight (2016). The Films of Jon Garcia: 20092013 takes an in-depth look at a writer-director who has earned a reputation as one of the Pacific Northwests premier filmmakers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543444964

Eric B. Olsen

Eric B. Olsen is the author of six works of fiction in three different genres. He has written a medical thriller entitled Death’s Head, as well as the horror novel Dark Imaginings. He is also the author of three mystery novels, Proximal to Murder and Death in the Dentist’s Chair featuring amateur sleuth Steve Raymond, D.D.S., and The Seattle Changes featuring private detective Ray Neslowe. In addition, he is the author of If I Should Wake Before I Die, a collection of short horror fiction. Today Mr. Olsen writes primarily non-fiction, including The Death of Education, an exposé of the public school system in America, The Films of Jon Garcia: 2009-2013, an analysis of the work of the acclaimed Portland independent filmmaker, and a collection of essays entitled The Intellectual American. His most recent book is Ethan Frome: Analysis in Context, a contextual close reading of Edith Wharton’s classic novel. Mr. Olsen lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife. Please visit the author’s web site at https://sites.google.com/site/ericbolsenauthor/home or contact by email at [e-mail].

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All images appear courtesy of LAKE Productions. All images copyright © LAKE Productions.

Rev. date: 10/31/2017

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Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Jon Garcia

Tandem Hearts

The Falls

The Hours Till Daylight

The Falls: Testament of Love

Afterword

Sources

What actually kind of gives that rock star thing a little credence is younger people started looking to filmmaking the way they had looked at starting a band before. Starting a band wasn’t the way you expressed yourself, getting a camera and trying to make a movie, that was the easier way to express yourself.

—Quentin Tarantino (Rodriguez)

on being called the first rock star director

Foreword

U ntil I moved to the Pacific Northwest from Austin, my life had been defined by a series of misfires, lack of motivation, a disoriented interpretation of love and relationships, and a lyrical and musical writing block that I couldn’t seem to shake. At that time I wasn’t a filmmaker; I was a songwriter. When my father passed away in the summer of 2004, it was my wake up call. I had spent the rest of that summer in my hometown of Corpus Christi, knowing that now I had to do something, if not for me, then for my dad, so I left for the Northwest at the end of the year. I realize how cliché it all sounds, but my father’s death changed my outlook on life.

The move allowed me to reimagine how I looked at my work and myself. What was supposed to be a six-month writing session turned into thirteen years in the Northwest and at some point along the way I became a filmmaker. Filmmaking was something I’d always wanted to learn, but it was an art form I didn’t think was a reality for me to get involved in until the technology became more affordable for independent filmmakers around 2009.

During my time in PDX I’ve released two studio albums and made six feature films including a trilogy that has won the hearts of many. Portland has been just as important to my career in the arts as my creative projects themselves. More recently I’ve directed a play for the stage, studied acting at the Gately/Poole Conservatory in Illinois, was nominated for an Emmy for my work on broadcast television, and co-wrote and published a novel. I’m very proud of my creative progress and I’m so touched when I hear from the people whose lives have been impacted by my films. I don’t think I could have done the modest amount of work I have anywhere else than in Portland, Oregon.

I love making films but I’d never thought about how my work as a filmmaker is perceived in the larger world. In fact, many of the methods I use to make my films are not necessarily indicative of what one would learn in film school. Additionally, most people don’t know who I am and haven’t heard of my movies. For that reason I am grateful to Eric Olsen for taking an interest in my work and thankful that he found a depth in it that speaks to him. He is one of the reasons I decide to crawl out of a three-year hiatus (that I didn’t realize I was in) to make The Falls: Covenant of Grace, the final installment of The Falls trilogy, the project for which I am best known for at this time. This new surge of creativity led me to make my next feature, Sex Weather, only a few months after releasing Covenant, then immediately begin Room To Grow, a documentary series about LGBTQ+ teens and their stories.

Independent filmmakers work incredibly hard. We have to because we wear so many hats. We’re more suited to some hats than others and at times we have to wear them all at once. We work non-stop, we don’t sleep, and we sometimes have to live in people’s basements and attics while scraping by with a little production work here and there. Making money in the business is nearly impossible for the independent filmmaker. When we get our distribution deals on films we’ve spent years creating, we might have to accept the worst contract imaginable, if we’re even offered one, but we do it to get our films out into the world. The life of a film artist can be a lonely, un-lucrative one, and in a world where the pool of media that exists seems infinite, it can seem impossible to stand out. Even scarier is that the value of our art seems to be decreasing to the point where it’s only a fraction more than a song. At the end of it all, we may have nothing except the peace of mind of knowing that we did whatever it took to finish our movie, that we did our best in the time frame we had, with the budget (if any) that we had to make it. It’s our obsession and our drive that pushes us through and makes us ignore all of the obstacles there are to finishing our work. We also don’t do it alone. One of the talents of a filmmaker is knowing how to assemble the right crew. It’s ideal to work with the best if you can, but what matters at the independent level is that you can make it through to the end and that there is a creative and safe environment for the cast and crew to work together and create something we couldn’t do alone. If you are lucky, the crew may give you their all and this is when your movie can go from good to great. The environment is much too sensitive for ego and entitlement; that kind of negative energy can ruin a film.

I feel I am at my best when I’m making movies and this is the time when I feel that I have purpose. While in the Northwest I’ve been lucky enough to have met people who cared enough about me and my artistic projects to assist me and help me to complete them. I have been fortunate enough to have shared the company of like-minded souls like Eric Olsen, Lisa Lepine, Rodney Moore, Stephanie Salvey, Marty Beaudet, Christopher Stephens, Nick Ferrucci, Ben Farmer, Jena Bodell, Moriah Barth and the first film crew I ever worked with: Quinn Allan, Jeff Hammond, Johnny Buell, Zach Carter, and Jared Yanez, as well as many more friends who have worked on the projects I completed after the films discussed in this book.

Though I don’t get to see my family in South Texas often, I keep them close. They have been invaluable to all my work: my late father, who took a movie camera with him to Vietnam and was the first filmmaker in the family (the footage he brought back with him still blows me away to this day), my mother, who has always supported my creative work and is the real producer of The Falls, my sister Cyndi who keeps her safe and in good company, and my sister Marisa, who allowed me to cast her youngest children in my film The Hours Till Daylight and who has always been there for me in times of crisis.

To my family in the Northwest and my family in the Southwest, you are the reason I’ve been able to make movies. Thank you and I love you.

Jon Garcia

June 22, 2017

Introduction

My introduction to Jon Garcia came about entirely by accident. It was in the DVD section of my local public library that I discovered his independent film The Falls. To say it changed my life would be overstating things … but not by much. I had been casting about for a suitable subject for a book length work concerning film analysis and film history, and nothing had been inspirational enough to get me started. And initially, it must be said, neither did The Falls.

Looking at the DVD box in the library, it appeared to have something to do with Mormon missionaries and a crisis of faith. I always enjoy a good religion-bashing film, but I was utterly unprepared for Garcia’s movie to be so respectful of the religion in question, and yet in doing so still demonstrate the inability of that religion to answer the questions in the lives of two young men who had honored their families and their church by giving themselves over to this artificial way of life. I thought it was a fantastic story, and when I went online to purchase a copy of my own I was surprised and delighted to discover that Garcia had already made a sequel. I purchased them both and was even more impressed with the continuing story of Garcia’s missionaries as they attempted to move beyond the church and live their lives for themselves. But even then I wasn’t really thinking about a book.

That didn’t happen until I started watching other films that featured the two stars of Garcia’s films, Ben Farmer and Nick Ferrucci. It was then that I began to realize just how many terrific films had been made in Portland in the past decade, and had it not been for accidentally stumbling across The Falls I might never have know about them. They are independent films, to be sure, and certainly suffer from the severe budgeting restrictions that come with young filmmakers struggling to realize their visions. But one thing that can’t be restricted is artistic vision itself, which can be seen in the narrative quality of their work that sets it apart from much of the independent filmmaking happening in the rest of the country.

I immediately began contacting the directors and actors involved in these productions, first to praise them and eventually to ask if they’d be willing to participate in a book-length project on their films. To my astonishment, they all said yes. Of course now that I have met them it’s no surprise at all. All of the individuals I met and interviewed were humble about their work, gracious in accommodating me, and gave me hours of their time to ask as many questions as I wanted. As a group, they are the most remarkable people it has ever been my pleasure to meet.

My initial concept for the book was an ambitious one. I had identified a dozen films by eight different directors and planned to spend the majority of the text dealing with my own analysis of the films, using the interview material to supplement and add dimension to that analysis. But I was greedy. I didn’t just want to know about the films, I wanted to learn everything I could about the directors and actors themselves, their personal lives and the film community in Portland, about the way the screenplays were written, the pre-production process, casting, principal photography, locations, editing, sound design, exhibition and distribution. As a result the first round of interviews, six in one week, was exhausting. When I returned home from Portland I was burned out and didn’t even want to think about having to transcribe the thirty or so hours of material I had recorded. So I didn’t.

It wasn’t until six months later, when I received a friendly email from Jon Garcia asking how the project was coming along, that I even allowed myself to think about it again. One thing became clear at that point: I was going to have to limit the scope of the project, and maybe do just a few films or directors at a time in multiple volumes. And the choice for the first volume in the series was equally clear. Of all the directors I had interviewed, only one had made more than two films, and that was Jon Garcia. In fact, one of the things that became abundantly clear about him throughout my research is that he really is a filmmaker.

For most young writer-directors setting out to make a feature film, finances loom large in terms of their ability to complete a project. For many, they borrow what they can from family, max out their credit cards, and go into debt at any price for their art. For most of them, it breaks them. The list of independent filmmakers who have made one feature film is a long one. The list of projects that have been started and never completed due to lack of funds is, tragically, even longer. Jon Garcia, on the other hand, is one of the most financially savvy independent artists I’ve ever met. Fortunate in one respect, that the tragic death of his father gave him a legacy to begin with, it’s a testament to his character that he didn’t squander it all on one film. In fact, he has been so assiduous with that legacy that it has not only helped him to complete four feature films—with a fifth and a sixth having been completed as of this writing—but two albums of music before that. It’s a degree of success that is not lost on one of his long-time collaborators, actor Quinn Allan. Garcia, he explains, is "probably one of the better examples of a success story of a Portland independent filmmaker.

He’s enjoyed a little bit of success, probably not financially, but as far as getting his work out there and getting recognition for what he’s done. And then he gets to make more movies. Even if he’s not making money hand over fist for himself, it always leads to another production, which I think for most artists that would be the ideal. (Allan)

One of the things Garcia said about another fellow collaborator, during our many interviews together, was this: You know, I’m really blown away—in a good way—by people who are verging on that professional level but they’re not there yet. A more perfect description of Garcia himself it would be difficult to come up with. He has made some truly exceptional films, along with some more personal ones, that not only demonstrate amply the skills of a professional, but display artistic gifts that few directors in Hollywood possess. This is why I chose him as my first subject for a series of books on independent films and filmmakers in Portland.

It also must be noted that the term independent filmmaking has taken on a very different meaning than it had a couple of decades ago. Today there are permanent arms of the major studios devoted to developing and producing independent films. They may have smaller budgets than their mass market brethren, recouping their expenses through video sales rather than ticket sales, and are even more dependent on overseas markets than the newest super hero action movie or idiotic teen comedy playing at the mall, but make no mistake, they are still Hollywood studio films. True independent features are self-financed, self-written, self-produced, and self-directed, usually all by the same person. Quinn Allan rightfully refers to the process as guerilla filmmaking.

There are a wide variety of things that we would consider independent films, or independently financed films, where people are still getting financial backing from some source. It might not be a studio, so therefore it would be considered independent, but they have lots of money to work with. Whereas a lot of the films, at least that I know of, the ones that I’ve worked on with friends, most of this is coming out of the director’s pocket. And I don’t know a whole lot of people that would just take that jump, that would take that leap of faith and just say, You know what, I believe in what I’m doing. Here’s ten thousand dollars of my own money, my hard-earned money, to make the movie that I want to make. (Allan)

As a result of this kind of dedication one of the things I wanted to do in this book, and all the volumes that hopefully follow, is to help people understand what truly independent filmmaking is like. Writer Scott Alexander, who made his start in Hollywood working on low-budget horror films, talked about using these kinds of experiences in writing the film Ed Wood for Tim Burton.

A lot of this crewing on a low-budget movie was based upon experiences I had working on low-budget slasher movies in the early eighties. I mean, when I got my job I was so excited to be on a 35-millimeter film and was getting fifteen dollars a day for a sixteen-hour day and it was great. And when you work on these kinds of movies, everyone is there because they want to be there because they’re excited about the experience, and for a lot of them it’s their first time, and it really is the joy of moviemaking. And this movie was so low budget that we couldn’t afford a boom mic, so we just had a regular microphone taped to a hockey stick and I would stand on a garbage pail. And I’m looking around me thinking, Wow, I’m in the big time now. (Alexander)

This zeal for making motion pictures is what informs the kind of work that goes on in the Portland film community every day. Most of the people involved in these independent projects aren’t looking for money. They are looking for an artistic outlet that they can’t get anywhere else. And regardless of what winds up on the screen, there has to be a certain grudging praise for artists who are able to realize their visions despite all of the factors working against them. Portland writer-director Justin Koleszar put it this way at the debut of his first feature film: To be honest I really hope that people can, if nothing more, just appreciate that the film was done well. It’s not going to be everyone’s favorite, but I hope that they appreciate the performances of the actors and all the work that went into it, the entire cast and crew (Eikenberry). In the context of the kind of sacrifice that goes into an independent feature in terms of finances, time, and effort, it’s not an unreasonable request, and a sentiment that I’m sure every independent filmmaker shares.

This book itself is also somewhat unique in the way it is written. I have read numerous books on film and the history of cinema over the years and while they deliver a lot of good information and historical background, I find most of them lacking in the way that they approach their material. One type of book is pure history. In this case the author takes the reader through the formation, creation, and exhibition of the films. Quotes by those who participated are used occasionally but the emphasis is on the author’s voice and the way that he or she puts the films into the context of cinematic history or its general historical context. The problem with this approach, at least from the point of view of the reader, is how much of the commentary by the actual participants is left out. Rather than an intimate portrait of a film, in which the author’s job is almost like a film director who puts all of the pieces together, this type of history tells the reader rather than shows them.

Another type of film history goes completely the other direction and gives the reader the interview, the whole interview, and nothing but the interview. And while these kinds of oral histories can be fascinating in the way that they provide insight into specific participants in the filmmaking process, they also give the reader absolutely no historical context. Interviews also tend to be rambling affairs, with subjects breaking off in the middle of points and reminiscing about things that aren’t relevant to the discussion, as well as jumping back and forth in time about different films and different events. Almost worse, however, tend to be books that strive for a middle ground.

The extensive series on films by the British Film Institute is the perfect example of this concept. The BFI Film Classics series takes each film and essentially subjects it to an authorial chop shop. The history of the film is separate from the story told by the film, the production is separate from the analysis, figurative meaning and symbolism are separate from shot selection and lighting, and so on and so on. What most of these books lack is a cohesive narrative in which all of the elements of history, interview and analysis occur simultaneously in the author’s text. This is the kind of book about film that I’ve always wanted to read, so it’s the kind of book I’ve decided to write.

The first thing that becomes apparent in attempting to do this, however, is that it’s difficult. This is probably the reason most authors opt for parting-out the films they write about. But as challenging as it is, the end result is worth the effort. Each film is approached historically, usually beginning with the process of writing the screenplay. This is followed by all of the pre-production processes of finding a crew, casting the picture, rehearsals and principal photography. Most of this section could be considered oral history, told by the participants themselves in large sections of interview. The challenge here is to take everything that is being said in the interviews and treat it separately so that it can be moved to the place in the narrative where it is most effective, like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Sometimes different places in the interview are combined, and sometimes sections of completely different interviews are combined in order to tell certain parts of the story more effectively.

The middle portion of each chapter deals with the film itself. Here I have made an attempt to combine all the elements of film analysis and history with commentary by all of the participants to give the reader the richest possible understanding of the actual film. This is how I first envisioned all of the chapters looking in my initial concept of the book. The idea is to tell the story of the film as it happens, adding specific comments by the participants to give a behind-the-scenes look at locations, techniques, actor’s motivations, etc. I also combined this with my own analysis of the film to create a singular story of the film as it unfolds on the screen, a textual commentary rather than an audio commentary. Once the film reaches its conclusion it’s back to oral history as the participants are left to discuss the post-production process, editing, scoring, and finally the exhibition and distribution of the film. To my knowledge, I haven’t seen any other books on film written in quite this way.

Another aspect of this book that is different from the way most writers analyze film is that I tend to speak about the actors in the film rather than the characters they play. Certainly the fictional conceit of film as an art form has a counterpart in the way that authors analyze literature, which would justify discussing the characters that inhabit the story. But unlike literature, film is also about the stars who bring those characters to life. And in many cases they have lengthy careers of their own and bring that to the screen along with them. Whereas individual readers must imagine characters they read about in novels in a personal way, viewers of film all see the same character on the screen. As a result, if I am discussing the character in the film as distinct from the person who appears on the screen, then I make it a point to use the character’s name. But for the most part, when writing about the actions and motivations of the actors as they move the story forward on the screen, I use the actor’s name.

I am indebted to all the people of the Portland film community who assisted me on this project for so generously giving me their time and energy. Actors Benjamin Farmer, Nick Ferrucci, Quinn Allan, Harold Phillips, Bruce Jennings, and directors Jared Yanez and Justin Koleszar were incredibly generous to sit for lengthy interviews with me. Hannah Barefoot and Sarah Jannett Parish were equally generous via email. But an obvious special thanks must go out to Jon Garcia himself, who made this book possible not only by giving me nearly unfettered access to him, but for making such great films in the first place. He is one of the most kind and generous people I have ever met, and I’m happy to say that in the process of working on this book I can now call him my friend. If just one viewer comes to Jon’s films who has never seen them before, my purpose here will have been accomplished. But it is my hope that many more will see the genius and artistry that they may have missed by categorizing his work as merely independent films.

Eric B. Olsen

October 24, 2016

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Jon Garcia

I went to high school in Portland, Texas,

so I thought maybe it was meant to be.

I n an August 2012 interview with Justin Koleszar the independent director had this to say about the state of feature filmmaking in Portland: I don’t think there’s been a great film yet … especially in comparison to the rest of the arts, whether it be music or writing or whatever. So it’s kind of like I want the film scene to step up (Garcia, Aug. 2012). Six weeks later the answer to his challenge was realized with the premiere of The Falls , by Jon Garcia, one of the most artistically satisfying films, independent or not, to ever come out of the city. With the release of the equally satisfying sequel The Falls: Testament of Love a year later, Garcia solidified his position as arguably the best young director in Portland. Unlike a lot of independent directors working in the city, that success has allowed Garcia to secure financial backing for his future projects, and after the release of his fourth feature, The Hours Till Daylight , he has gone on to produce the third film in The Falls series, The Falls: Covenant of Grace , as well as writing screenplays for several more projects, including Sex Weather , which finished principal photography in early 2017.

From Portland, Texas to Portland, Oregon

Jon Erich Garcia was born on July 18th, 1979 in Corpus Christi, Texas, the youngest child of three. He has two sisters, Marisa and Cyndi. The family were devout Catholics, and Garcia was an alter boy for a short time. While he was growing up his mother, Alma Gloria Garcia, was a junior high English teacher. I never had her in middle school, but I could feel her presence in school, definitely. Everyone knew that she was my mom, and if ever I got in trouble it was amplified times ten. Garcia’s father, Domingo Serio Garcia, Jr.—D.S. to his friends—was a Vietnam War veteran. He held a master’s degree in history but worked for the U.S. Postal Service in Ingleside, Texas. Ingleside was about a half-hour away from where we lived. So he’d wake up and go there every morning. He was at the post office for forty years. He worked in the Corpus Christi post office for about twenty years, and for the last twenty he was at Ingleside.

When Garcia talks about getting into trouble in junior high, it is something that would dog him throughout his public school career. Basically a good kid, his friends were less so, and with them he wound up participating in mischief on a grand scale and doing things he would regret later. His high school career was even more checkered, beginning at Mary Carroll High School in the Corpus Christi school district where he lived. When the opportunity to get a fresh start presented itself, he jumped at the chance.

A lot of my friends started transferring to this private school, Incarnate [Word Academy], a Catholic school. I don’t know why we started going, but I convinced my parents to let me go. I had also envisioned myself going there and starting over, playing basketball. But I was only there for a semester, and they basically said, You can’t come back. So my parents said, What are you going to do now? My dad suggested I move to the Ingleside school district where he worked, but we eventually landed on Gregory-Portland, which is about ten minutes away. I ended up moving there with my dad in order to meet the residency requirements for the district. We still had a house in Corpus Christi, but we had an apartment out there so that I could be in the Portland school district. And that’s where I ended up finishing high school.

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His parents handled the temporary separation well. His mother took up yoga and had some time for herself with all of the children out of the house. His father, on the other hand, was anxious for the whole thing to be over. He missed my mom. He even moved out right before I graduated, so I had my own apartment in high school for the last two months of my high school life. I didn’t really take advantage of it, though, because I was always at my girlfriend’s house.

Garcia’s participation in sports came to an abrupt end when he was misdiagnosed with a heart problem that sidelined him indefinitely. It was only later he discovered that there was nothing wrong with his heart after all, but by that time basketball had passed him by. Then, as the maturation process took hold, he began to look more to his future and decided to apply himself academically. I turned into such a geek. I wanted to get into college. It was important to me. After graduating from Gregory-Portland High School in 1998, Garcia headed north to San Antonio to attend Our Lady of the Lake University for his freshman year of college. And from there he transferred to the University of Texas in the state capital of Austin.

I didn’t really have a major at Our Lady of the Lake but I studied psychology at UT. I was a psych major and about to go into the school of communications. Photojournalism was what I wanted to do, but it was going to take me so long to get into the school. I would have had to take another thirty or forty hours, which seemed like a long time to me back then. I remember thinking, I’m already nineteen years old. I’m running out of time, here. [laughs] I was finally at UT, and I worked so hard to get in there, but I had no idea what to do next.

This ambivalence turned out to be short lived, as it was during his time in college that his interests began to turn toward music. I always thought I wanted to be an attorney, but then I wanted to play music. That was my priority, playing music and writing songs. That’s really all I wanted to do at the time. So my career at UT didn’t last very long. In order to finance his foray into music after college, Garcia managed to get a job doing government work for then Attorney General and now Texas Governor, Greg Abbott, in the crime victims and compensation department.

It was interesting because all my friends were done and had already graduated from UT but I was doing the music thing. I had this great job and it paid me really well. I was a civil servant for the office of the attorney general and that was great. But at some point—maybe I’d had the job for six months—I came home one day and thought, This isn’t for me, and I eventually quit. Then I got a job with the secretary of state in elections and I thought, God, I hate this even more than the office of the attorney general. So I quit that job and my parents were very disappointed. They said, What are you gonna do? and I said, I don’t know. [laughs] I wanna rock! But I wasn’t writing music. I wasn’t a good enough musician or a guitarist or a songwriter at that time. I just didn’t get the whole thing.

Though his official schooling might have been at a standstill, Garcia continued to self-educate himself by doing some serious reading. I started reading a ton of books. I read three, four, and five books at a time. There was never a time, however, when he wasn’t thinking about getting back into school. It was just a matter of what course of study to pursue. He was also considering a move overseas to continue his education, and at the same time applying himself to his other goal of playing music. I was just reading all the time. It was focused on psychology. I was thinking I wanted to go to the Jungian Institute in Zurich. When I wasn’t doing that, I was writing music, studying theory … And then dad passed away. The accident that claimed the life of his father in 2004 almost ended as a much greater tragedy.

My mom and my dad, and my sister Cyndi and her husband Al, were all living in the house I grew up in, because Al and Cyndi’s house was under construction. So the house was filled with all of their things, too. The carpenter who was working on [my parent’s] house had taken all the smoke detectors down. And that’s why nobody was alerted until it was too late.

Sometime in the middle of the night his parents, as well as Al and Cyndi, smelled the smoke and it finally woke them up. By then, however, the entire hallway was filled with smoke and it was difficult to breathe or see well. My sister and brother-in-law hurried to my parents’ room because they woke up first. Once my parents were awake, they followed them back to their room since that window should have been easier to escape from. It was Garcia’s childhood room as it turns out, and the four of them went inside and closed the door. They closed the door, but once smoke gets into a room it all starts coming in and the smoke spread to their bedroom, too. After they made it into Cyndi and Al’s room, Al’s trying to break the window but he can’t, and so my dad went back across the hall to their bedroom to find a way out through there. We think he hit his head and fell. In the meantime the other three had finally managed to get out of Garcia’s old room and it took some time to jump out of the window. They all got out of the window, and my mom is out there trying to fathom what’s happening. It was so smoky, if anyone had gone in there I don’t think they would have been able to come back out. That’s why nobody went in after him.

As bad as the tragedy was for he and his family, Garcia had some personal demons to deal with at the same time, lingering regret about what had happened between he and his father just prior to his passing.

I had gotten a tax return and I spent the money on a bike. I just got a new job at the Holiday Inn and I wanted to ride to work in the morning. I had to be there at five-thirty and Town Lake [now known as Lady Bird Lake] is beautiful, and so I just wanted to ride my bike every morning to work to stay in shape. And in our last conversation my father told me, You have to pay me back. You owe me two hundred and fifty dollars that you borrowed from me. And I said, Can’t I just have this bike and I’ll pay you back later? And it turned into a much bigger argument than it should have been. Then he passed away about a month later and we hadn’t talked. A friend of mine told me, There’s no way that last conversation defines your relationship with your father. Of course not, but …

There was also more to Garcia’s life at that time than reading and riding his bike. With no real avenue for his talent other than a desire to learn and a burgeoning interest in music, he indulged in ways that are common to young people who find themselves without a real direction. In a 2006 interview Garcia talked about the galvanizing effect that his father’s death had on him at the time. I was living this lifestyle of just partying and getting by … Once my dad passed away, I decided to get serious, to do the only thing I know how to do, which is to play music. In that same interview he said his move to Portland was directly related to that impulse. I wanted to be on the West Coast but I knew I wasn’t going to make it in a place like L.A. and I didn’t want to go to Seattle because I knew it was crowded there. There was a singer-songwriter in Austin who went to Portland and then all of a sudden people liked him in Austin. Portland seemed to have been good for his playing, so I thought maybe it would happen for me. Plus, I went to high school in Portland, Texas, so I thought maybe it was meant to be (Lewis). But Garcia had been to Portland once before, after winning a basketball tournament while he was still in school. I won two tickets anywhere in the United States through Delta Airlines. I decided to go to the Northwest with a friend from the freshman basketball team. I fell in love with the trees and the mountains while I was there. I knew I’d come back at some point. A little more research into the area solidified his decision.

I’d read this book called Fugitives and Refugees [A Walk in Portland, Oregon] by Chuck Palahnuik, which said the cheapest place to live on either coast is Portland. So, cheapest big city to live in. I don’t know … There were so many little different quirks about Portland that I thought were just hilarious. I didn’t know anybody out here at all. I was talking to people on Craigslist and I flew out to PDX and looked at all these places that I’d been talking to people about. Then I found a place and I ended up moving into that place about a month later. I drove my car up here, [a 2004 Nissan Xterra] the car that’s in every movie [I’ve made].

All of that came together in a matter of six months for Garcia. About his father’s death he says, That’s why I moved to Portland in 2005. It happened June 11th, 2004. and then I moved here on New Year’s Day. I was looking for another apartment in Austin, but I wanted to turn a new leaf and I decided to move here.

From Troublemaker to Music Maker

Garcia was accompanied on the twenty-three hundred mile trip by his sister Cyndi and brother-in-law Al. His mother decided to fly up as well and met them in Portland, which they loved. And from there they also drove up to visit Seattle, and they loved Seattle even more. Seattle’s a spectacle, though. It’s beautiful there. He arrived in Portland on New Year’s day, 2005, with a resolution already in hand, and no excuses left for achieving his dream.

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And here I am. I arrived in Portland on New Year’s Day, and I’m ready to start my creative career. I’m very serious about it. I’m not going to drink, I’m not going to smoke, and I’m very dedicated. I don’t think I wrote a song for a year, year and a half. [laughs] Still, I moved all the way out here … doesn’t mean I was any better of a songwriter. It was eventually a break up that inspired me to start writing. So then I’m finally writing songs, good songs, songs I really like. It took a while, but they’re coming out, and it seems that I have more of a knack for the narrative songs, telling a story. But I only have so many of those in me, and I realize I only write like five or six songs a year. I’m trying to speed that up, but that’s never changed.

Initially he had the desire to begin his music career by joining an established band, Slackjaw, which he eventually joined as a guitarist and singer. At first, though, he was hesitant. I got here, and there were a few weeks where I thought, I don’t know if I want to join Slackjaw just yet. So I started toying around with some other projects. And I ran into a couple of guys named Tom and Marty, and they were looking for a singer. I came in and brought a guitar, and I could play guitar almost as well as [Tom] could. We were just collaborating, just working. And I remember one time I showed up and they had a singer there, and I though, "Who’s this guy? [laughs] He was horrible. But Tom and I became close and I asked him to go with me on my tour.

Slackjaw was formed in 1993 by guitarist and lead singer Eric Schopmeyer, and bassist Robert Bartleson. By the time Garcia joined in 2005, Schopmeyer had already left the group. But Bartleson, as it turned out, was also the owner of Haywire recording studios in Southeast Portland. A full time engineer and booking agent, Bartleson not only gave Garcia his first real job in a band, but would go on to produce and play bass on Garcia’s self-titled debut album. "He’s the first person I met when I came to Portland. We met on Craigslist. He was looking for a guitarist.

Slackjaw had already had kind of a following, and that was cool. The thing of it all was I’m twenty-five and I had joined a band, and I get to tour three times, four times a year. I mean, every time I went on tour I’d have to quit a job, but it was rock ‘n’ roll and that’s all I wanted to do. So I played with them for about three or four years on and off. And I learned how to tour, and so I thought, I can do this, and I started doing my own tours. I came back from that [first] tour, and we had a few more tours with Slackjaw.

Domingo Garica’s legacy to his son included the ability to begin achieving his initial musical ambition. He ended up leaving me a little bit of cash. And it took a couple of years to formulate. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to one day do my first album. While moving to Portland and joining a band had left little time for creativity of his own, during that first year Garcia began honing his own songwriting skills and stockpiling songs for this future project. Some of that activity involved working with ideas he had started before the move. "I began writing a ton of songs, more than I ever had before. Most of the riffs I started in Texas didn’t become songs till I moved to Portland.

I was just trying to get enough songs to fit into an album, eight or ten, so I kept on writing more and more. I recorded my first, self-titled album in 2006. I’d met a girl [Lauren McKenzie] in an uptown coffee shop while I was booking my first tour. She was drawing next to me, and I liked her work so we traded numbers. I got to know her and she eventually did the art for both of my albums. That was important for me to have the imagery that would be associated with the work while I’m recording the music. I think having a visual aesthetic for my art was always important to me.

Though the music had been recorded and mixed, there was still the process of manufacturing the discs and printing the artwork, all of which managed to postpone the final release. At the same time, he needed advance copies to take with him on the tour that he had booked. I had to cancel the first week of shows because the album wasn’t finished, he told the Oregonian at the time. It’s a rush job in parts, and there are times when I listen to it and I hear the missing parts that I forgot to record (Schultz).

Garcia also admits that his first album was something of an experiment. "It was kind of strange, because one song would be really folky, and then there would be a metal song. Some of them, they had untitled names until it was time to make the album.

After I wrote all these songs for that first album, I asked my friend Tom to play guitar with me on the three-month tour that I’d booked for myself. I used this website, BYOFL [Book Your Own Fucking Life] to book the shows. I’d have week-long breaks and I was Couchsurfing.com. I was staying with people all over America, and it was a great time. And I never had any problems. Though the tour went smoothly, it didn’t start out that way because the recording process took a lot longer than he had expected. I didn’t get the albums until halfway through the tour, and they were sent to me in Memphis. I lived there about a month, month and a half, staying with new friends or sleeping in my car when I had to. During that time I didn’t have a place to live here [in Portland].

The album, Jon Garcia (2006), received mixed reviews that still had a lot of positive things to say about the music. Writing for the Portland Oregonian, Curt Schultz said of his debut, The CD’s scattershot but never boring, and the tangible feel of a 27 year old artist trying his hand at umpteen different approaches (jazz, folk, rock, whatever) is very much in evidence. While Garcia admits his relentless eclecticism might make his reception as a songwriter problematic, there’s a savvy on display here that belies his relative youth (Schultz). Meanwhile, Scott D. Lewis of the online magazine In Music We Trust, was even prescient enough to associate Garcia’s music with film scoring in his review. As an artist he described Garcia as, crafting songs that are personal and moving and that veer from understated folk to gently forceful and soaring rock. Classy jazz informs such tracks as ‘Heart Shaped Skeleton Keys.’ Other songs, such as ‘Saturday Morning,’ … are stripped-down, narrative folk songs with just a bit of flash and polish. The inclusion of aching strings and touches of flute and even tuba lends the album a cinematic quality that helps it move along like a sonic home movie, which in a sense, it is (Lewis).

During that first tour he also met a girl and the two of them spent all of their time together during the remainder of his time on the road. She wanted to see America with me, see what happens. She was twenty-one and I was twenty-seven, and we were both really drunk on love. She ended up moving with Garcia back to Portland and the two of them rented a place together. It was then that the musician began thinking about doing something more with his life than spending it on the road playing music. It was hard to let go, because I loved it, too, at the same time. I just felt at some point, ‘God, I’m never going to have money, ever, if I keep doing this stuff.’ So I started really thinking about my other interests.

One of those interests was visual design, a natural outgrowth of his interest in photojournalism, and so he enrolled in a graphic arts program at Portland Community College. My dad liked photography. And I didn’t spend too long in the photojournalism world, but some of my pictures ended up in the front of the class, as the best of. I feel like I had an eye for composition. And I feel like I’ve always appreciated art in all forms. The constraints of graphic design, however, were light years away from the creative freedom he’d already experienced since moving to Portland, and ultimately he didn’t want to make the adjustment. What it really was, was something I didn’t like. And that was hard. His disappointment also resulted in a split with his new girlfriend, a breakup that inspired the screenplay for Garcia’s first film project, Tandem Hearts.

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Despite his desire to return to school and complete his bachelor’s degree, Garcia had no intention of giving up music completely. That first tour he had gone out as a solo artist, playing acoustic versions of his songs. And I think going on tour and coming back—I wasn’t a hundred percent on some of those songs that I went around America playing. And it taught me a lot. One of those lessons was about being able to promote himself in a way that was apparently at odds with his true personality. My friend Alicia used to do my P.R. for my music work. And she used to tell me, ‘Jon, you really need that other person. You need to have a persona, someone to be out in front of you. Because you can’t just go from the gut all the time.’ But I don’t really know how to. Nevertheless, after his self-titled album had its official release Garcia booked another solo tour, this time in Great Britain.

In 2007 I did a solo tour in the U.K. The plane ticket wasn’t that expensive, and I went there with a friend. It was just me and my guitar and Mandy. I met my one fan there, [laughs] in the U.K. in Nottingham. And I did do a radio interview on the BBC. I had a song circulating on the BBC, and I can’t believe that they chose that one. It was called Heart Shaped Skeleton Keys. They were playing it in the U.K. on BBC radio and I thought "Why that one?" But that was a really cool experience.

The following year found Garcia in the process of recording more songs for a second album. Again, he was making trips to Haywire studios, with friend Rob Bartleson producing. I’ll probably always record with him. But rather than a single, concerted effort, it was a process that happened over time. "I wrote most of the songs for The Lake in 2008, recording off and on [over the next year] with the changing members of my band. Once again, it was the financial freedom given to Garcia by his father that allowed him to make the album at his own pace. Essentially what my dad had left me was close to fifty thousand dollars. I only ever used it for art. I put it in a CD, and I’d put it away for six months or a year. And then I’d wait until I had a project, and if I didn’t have a project I’d lock it away for more time. And so that’s how I made those two albums."

In the meantime Garcia made the decision to assemble a four-piece band to perform his songs, but also cannily looked around for some way to fund a tour without taking on the financial responsibility himself. "That’s when I toured [as a supporting act] with a band called the Charmparticles. I really loved that group. When I first heard their music I was blown away, and so I contacted them, and it turned out they were on a record label and the guy really liked us, so they invited us on tour.

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We actually flew and met up in Nashville—something about Tennessee, I don’t know. And then we did an East Coast tour and came back. That was a blast, going around and playing with [another headlining] band—that was something different. There were nights where people just loved us. They’d say, "Who are you guys? and we’d say, We’re from Portland." And Portland was starting to become this cool, hip place at the time. But the album—I hadn’t released my second album [The Lake] yet. The tour was just kind of a random deal. I was still recording the album.

Now that he had a full group, instead of just playing solo, Garcia needed a name for them but ended up disliking what he eventually came up with: Jon Garcia and the Best Laid Plans. I really hated that band name. I liked the band, it’s just the band name wasn’t great. The trip would also be memorable for another experience that is emblematic of independent artists and producers in the music business. So we went on tour and the guy asked me—he wanted to sign me to his record label. I thought, ‘Cool, my first record deal.’ It was about to happen and then the label tanked, while we were on tour. [laughs] While we’re on tour, the thing tanks: ‘I can’t pay for your tour anymore.’ But he was a nice guy. And that was a fun tour.

2009 would bring even more changes when Garcia graduated from film school. As soon as he finished his degree at Portland State University he went right into production on his first feature film, Tandem Hearts. "A lot happens between the first and second album:

Some months later I went back to school. I’m still twenty-seven. I graduated at twenty-nine—I was about to be thirty. I started to assemble a crew for Tandem Hearts immediately after I graduated, and I still had the band. There were just crazy times in my life when I still had the band, and a relationship, and a movie. And there was a lot of overlap there. That time period’s kind of hairy. Tandem Hearts hadn’t come out, but I was enjoying this newfound expression as a filmmaker. Not many people were doing it here. And so it was a new side of myself I was experimenting with.

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After easing out of playing music with a full band, Garcia continued playing around town in another group under his name, a duo in which he was joined by harpist Raelyn Olson. In a radio interview from 2010, the songwriter had this to say about his evolution out of music. I started playing with a five-piece band about five years ago, then as I started making films and getting busier with video I had less time to keep a band together. I started playing solo two years ago, then I met Raelyn Olson, who is a fantastic harp player and we now are a duo (Kavalchek). Not only would Olson work with Garcia on The Lake album, but the two of them played together on the soundtrack for The Falls. By 2010 Garcia was a full-fledged filmmaker and by the time the songs for his second album were mastered and released, his career as a performing musician was winding down. "About a month or two before I’m about to make The Falls the album comes out, and it doesn’t really get much [notice] here, but it gets a few things overseas. My last performance was at the Alberta Street Pub before I moved to Seattle in the fall of 2011."

The irony in Garcia’s decision to leave music comes from the fact that the reviews for the new album were mostly positive. John Davy of the roots music magazine No Depression had this to say: "Whereas the first album fell back too often on a young man’s tendency to make a loud noise on his guitar, The Lake is much more focused and consistently interesting. There’s some truly beautiful sounds here … What comes out over and again with increased familiarity, however, is the care with which this production has been put together … The Lake is all about the development that can be wrought from a song idea and is chock full of great moments … I’m really quite gobsmacked by the riches contained here. It’s an album to listen to properly and to relish" (Davy). But perhaps the most gushing praise came from overseas, via Will Bray of the Americana-UK, who declared the album simply brilliant … In all honesty this is a record of pure magic, a sudden trip down a rabbit hole to the progressive seventies with a whisper of fairytale. It is almost impossible to pick a highlight or particular big track from this album, it is one of those rarities that works best in its entirety that flows gently and poetically throughout (Bray).

From Music Maker to Filmmaker

The transition from music to movies wasn’t quite as jarring as it might seem, and education was a big part of it. Garcia had already made an attempt to go back to school once, and so the idea was already in his mind. Basically 2002 through 2007, for that five-year period, I was writing songs. But I definitely wanted to go back to school because I’ve always felt like I needed to get my degree. And I started thinking about what I wanted to major in and, honestly, there’s part of me that thought film is something I can major in and still have a music career once I delved into what the classes actually were.

But the original idea had actually come from his father. My father was experimenting. He had just retired and he started to buy all these screenplay books. And that’s what he wanted to do with his time; he wanted to write screenplays. He had really good ideas, but I don’t know if he ever wrote anything. I don’t think he did. I remember him saying to me one time, Well, you can become a screenwriter like me, and he hadn’t written anything yet. [laughs] And so that’s when I started to think about at least writing screenplays. But it wouldn’t be until later, after his father’s death, that the idea would become a concrete one, and again it had to with his father’s legacy.

My dad was getting into screenwriting before he died, and my mom had all of these books of his that she’d pulled out of the fire. They were covered in ash and soot and smelled like it—they