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Matt Groening shrieked one
day on the playground at Ainsworth Elementary School. There was no particular
reason; it was just one of those unpremeditated shrieks that come from the
sheer exuberance of being in first grade.
Mrs. Hoover didn't get it.
All right, the teacher scolded. Who blew that whistle? To the great amusement
of the kids, she went crazy searching each one of them for a whistle that
didn't exist.
The memory lingered for Groening,
the Portland native who went on to create - The Simpsons - animated sitcom.
He learned a lot that day about how authority figures stifle creative expression
and how humor soothes the unfairness of the world.
The rest of my life, he reflected
in 1993, has been blowing invisible whistles and making people wonder.
That was only one of many lessons
Groening learned in Portland. He drew heavily on the people and places of
his childhood to create the characters and sensibilities of The Simpsons.
Portland's impact stretches far beyond a few street names.
His wildly popular creation,
now seen in 60 countries, will begin its 14th season this fall with its
292nd episode a mark that Groening never dreamed of. Planning is already
in the works for the 2003-2004 season.
Portland's role as the template
for the show happened quickly, almost as an afterthought. In 1986, in his
first meeting with Fox executives about doing animated TV shorts, Groening
quickly realized that they wanted the rights to characters in Life in Hell,
his comic strip. That wouldn't do, so he stepped into the waiting room and
in 15 minutes sketched out the Simpsons much as we know them today, complete
with characters named after his own family.
There are subtle and not-so-subtle
similarities to Matt Groening's Portland and Bart Simpson's Springfield.
Like Springfield, the Portland of his childhood had a scenic gorge, a nuclear
plant nearby and a polluted river. Like Springfield, there were woods and
parks and mountains and surly teenaged bullies who might beat you up. And
like Springfield, it was a world where a child could find great beauty and
adventure alongside arrogance and hypocrisy.
All this became his fodder. I look at the situation and
try to provide an alternative that would amuse me, Groening told the Tribune.
Would this have entertained me when I was much younger? The Simpsons is
the cartoon show I would have liked to see when I was a kid. It's a more
entertaining version of myself.
Rebel with a Cause
Groening may have been a rebel growing up, but he
rebelled from the West Hills and Portland's most mainstream institutions.
He was a Boy Scout and student body president, and he swam for the Multnomah
Athletic Club.
He went to the Methodist Church, summer camp at Spirit
Lake and two of Portland's finest public schools Ainsworth Elementary and
Lincoln High, shunning the radical Adams High School. He later attended
Evergreen State College, the rebellious outpost in Olympia.
And he's still a rebel today: The Simpsons mercilessly
satirizes its own network, Fox, part of one of the world's largest media
conglomerates.
He attacks the very power structure that nurtured him and
brought him success. He targets pomposity, vanity and sanctimony but with
humor and satire in ways that allow the subjects to laugh at themselves
no matter how pointed the barb.
Matt knows how to get in a point of view without clobbering
you over the head, said a high school friend, Portland photographer Lawrence
Shlim.
Even as a teenager, he found a darkly humorous heart in
the most mainstream cultural icons. Dan Heims, a high school friend, once
saw a big smiley-face poster on the wall of Groening's basement bedroom.
But what's that semicircle you drew between the eyes? Heims asked. Brain
tumor, Groening said.
He's more writer than cartoonist. After college he was
turned down for a reporting job at The Oregonian. He once said his ambition
was to write the great American novel, and Catch 22 was a favorite book.
Riding the Rails
Portland's influence on the show is clear from the first
seconds of its opening titles. The hills behind Springfield Elementary School
look just like Portland's West Hills, the center of Groening's world while
growing up.
The Groening family mom, dad and five kids lived in a barn-red,
Cape Cod house on Northwest Evergreen Terrace, one of those dead-end streets
that wind high through the West Hills. The Simpson family also lives on
Evergreen Terrace.
The woods of Washington Park and Hoyt Arboretum were his
route to school and the setting for childhood adventures.
We lived right between the new zoo and the old zoo, which
is where the Japanese Gardens are now, he said. They closed the old zoo
when I was 4 or 5, but they left the cages, and when I was little we'd sneak
in behind the bars. I actually swam in the green water of the bear pool.
We used to hide in the bushes and sneak on the zoo train
at the station and get on for free. When they were first building the tracks
down to the station, I went with my brother and some buddies, and we pushed
a flatcar up the hill and started riding it down. It picked up speed and
didn't make the loop at the station. Suddenly, everyone was yelling Jump!
Jump! I jumped and rolled along the gravel. Then they were yelling "Cops!"
and I found myself running from the police. I met up with my brother at
the archery range.
He was smart and well-read, and he got good grades when
inspired to do so, said his mother, Margaret Groening. His closest friends
included Eric, Tim and Duncan Smith, the sons of Lendon Smith, renowned
as the children's doctor.
He had an idyllic childhood, his mother said. Every
so often, Matt Groening said, we'd get it into our brains to hike over to
the biggest shopping center in the world (at the time), Lloyd Center. We
had ways of sneaking into the big downtown movie theaters; the Paramount
and the Orpheum were the easy ones. We never could crack the Music Box.
The Broadway was easy, too. We'd hide in the balcony of the Paramount and
watch the ushers punch the curtains looking for kids sneaking in. It was
quite dramatic.
His late father, Homer, was an engaging, multitalented
man. He was a filmmaker by trade but also a cartoonist, writer and ad man
who brought pens and pads of paper home to his children to encourage their
creativity. He taught Matt film-editing skills at a young age.
For better or worse, Portland institutions nurtured his
strong sense of justice and injustice, providing a lifetime of targets teachers,
principals, clergymen and other authority figures.
There were way too many petty rules & about clothes and
hair, he said. He remembers teachers who threw things at students and a
grade-school shop teacher who shocked kids with a generator.
Yeah, he was a smartass, he concedes, but he resisted
the temptation to use the very public platform he gained later in life to
settle old scores.
I had to let a lot of it go, he said.
A Creative Force
The creative atmosphere extended beyond his family. At
Lincoln he was involved with a group of friends who wrote stories, drew
cartoons and made films. Many went on to creative careers of their own,
including: James K. Angell III, a writer and theater instructor at Occidental
College in Southern California; Richard Gehr, a freelance arts writer in
New York; Dan Avshalomov, a New York violist; Shlim; and Heims, the owner
of Terra Nova Nurseries in Portland.
In high school, I was scared and self-conscious and gawky,
he said. Then I realized everyone else felt like that, too, and I lost my
social paralysis. I was not any different from anyone else.
At Lincoln, Groening and friends formed the Komix Appreciation
Club, energized the Film Group and created Teens for Decency, a political
faction with the slogan, "If you're against decency, what are you for?"
They published an underground newspaper called Bilge Rat.
With Angell, he created the cartoon character Ace Noodleman and devised
a Lincoln High board game.
Comics were a big part of his childhood. When he was young,
he'd sit at the Stadium Fred Meyer on West Burnside Street and read comics.
He later frequented hippie record stores such as Longhair Music on Southwest
Park Avenue for underground comics like Zap and the Fabulous Furry Freak
Brothers.
At lunchtime at Lincoln, a half-dozen budding cartoonists
would gather in the library to practice their cartoons, most of them working
in the same style as Groening, Heims recalls, and Groening helped each of
them. It was pretty generous of him to give me that kind of encouragement,
Heims said.
Films they produced, alone and with one another, included
Salmon Street Saga, Drugs: Killers or Dillers? and Lightning Tour of Lincoln,
a 60-second race through the school halls.
Drugs: Killers or Dillers? included a crazed clown with
an eggbeater, an image Groening includes in The Simpsons every so often,
usually in mob scenes fashioned after old monster movies where villagers
carry torches and pitchforks.
Matt throws things in there from time to time for the old
gang, Heims said. It's up to us to spot them.
The group's members created their own social structures
but went one step further by forming an entity that never existed. The Banana
Gang was an imaginary group of greaser thugs they blamed for all sorts of
goofy deeds around the school, such as smearing locker locks with bananas.
One night at a party at the home of the Smith brothers,
Groening and friends dressed like greasers and posed as the Banana Gang.
It was a promo picture, they said, for the Salmon Street Saga film. The
photo wound up in Lincoln's 1971 yearbook.
That was the humor of Lincoln High in the early 70s, said
Bart DeLacy, a member of the class of 1971 who, Groening stresses, was a
friend but not the source of Bart Simpson's name. It wasn't malicious at
all but a complex mix of post-hippie urban angst. It absolutely penetrated
any sense of self-importance created by so-called achievement.
Groening certainly experienced mainstream achievement,
however, getting elected student body president and starring in a school
production of Send Me No Flowers.
He wasn't a slave to convention, and to his credit he never
has been, said David Bailey, Lincoln's journalism teacher now and then.
He created his own convention and played the system to his own end.
Portlander at Heart
Groening settled in Los Angeles in the late
1970s. His Life in Hell comic strip became an underground success that led
to Simpsons short films on Fox's Tracey Ullman Show, which in turn led to
The Simpsons.
For all of his assaults on cultural absurdities and hypocrisies,
Groening is a wealthy and influential insider who parlayed outsider sensibilities
into very mainstream success. He helps command a modest empire of books,
records and DVDs. The Simpsons can be found selling candy bars, T-shirts,
potato chips, toys and other products.
In 1999, his animated show Futurama made its debut. It
was his chance to make a mark on TV away from producer James L. Brooks,
whose support helped bring The Simpsons to life. Futurama survives after
three years but has not seen the success of The Simpsons.
He continues to produce Life in Hell, which he started
in 1980. And he keeps his hand in The Simpsons but from a distance, acting
more as an overseer. His marriage to Deborah Caplan, with whom he worked
on the LA Weekly newspaper from the mid-1980s, ended in 1999 after 13 years.
They have two sons, Homer, 13, and Abe, 11.
Now 48, he remains in touch with many old high school friends
and freely credits several of them with his artistic inspiration. Two or
three times a year he flies to Portland, renting a car and stopping downtown
at Reading Frenzy and CounterMedia to keep up on the alternative press.
Then it's on to Powell's before heading to his mother's house in time for
dinner.
This summer he's been letting his hair grow and not shaving
every day. He threw a Fourth of July party at his Malibu home and showed
guests his old high school films. He's been listening lately to yodeling,
1920s Hawaiian music and Mel Torme.
Yes, he still considers himself an Oregonian. He's been
in California for more than two decades now, and he dwells in television,
that most California of businesses. But he still sees himself as a visitor
who will return once his Southern California adventures conclude. In his
heart, he says, he's still an Oregonian:
I'm just temporarily relocated. I'm moving back. I love
Portland.
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Matt
Groening's Portland
