The Columbia River

The Columbia River

Rejissyor: U.S. Department of the Interior. 1948, 21:10 minutes Produced by the US Dept. of the Interior Filmed by the Bonneville Power Administration Produced and Written by Stephen B. Kahn Songs by Woody Guthrie Congress had passed the Bonneville Project Act in 1937 to distribute the electricity generated at Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams on the Columbia River. The law said publicly-created utilities had preference, or first choice, on that power; investor-owned utilities could buy any surplus. The law also provided a block of power to new heavy industries that bolstered the region’s contributions during World War II. A new power agency, the Bonneville Power Project, set up an office in Portland to sell the electricity as prescribed. The project was renamed the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) in 1940. In 1938, the BPA had made a motion picture, Hydro, to inform the public about the new electricity and ways to obtain it. The agency’s first public information officer, Stephen B. Kahn (1911-2007), had produced Hydro, and he wanted a second movie to illuminate the advantages of public power. He believed that having a folk singer involved would help give the movie a "common touch," and he wrote a job description for an actor, narrator, and songwriter to work for a year on the project. In early 1941, Kahn contacted Allen Lomax, head of the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress. Lomax and Guthrie were friends, and Lomax recommended him for the job. In late March, BPA representatives went to Los Angeles to meet with Guthrie, who was unemployed at the time. They discussed the project, took pictures, gave him application forms, and left him with the impression that the job might be his, but no promises. Between that visit and Guthrie’s arrival in Portland in early May, Kahn had second thoughts about a year-long appointment, primarily because it would require review by the Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C. He also was concerned about some of Guthrie's politics; the singer had developed a

https://archive.org/details/TheColumbiaRiver · Internet Archive: http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/