The city of Portland has grown quite a bit since Gus Van Sant shot Drugstore Cowboy there in the late 1980’s (but set it in the early 1970’s) – especially the city’s Pearl District. The rail yards and viaduct have been torn down and replaced with condos, while the old empty warehouses sprouted new apartments. Those once-derelict buildings provide a haven for street kids in My Own Private Idaho, while office tower rooftops are used as a safe place to sleep. Yet as much as Van Sant’s Portland films use the city as a character, the focus is always more on the young social outsiders who struggle there. Idaho includes a few true-to-life monologues from male hustlers about peddling their bodies – a lifestyle whose results are evoked in the haunting image of slumming rich boy Scott Favor driving by former-friend Mike Waters, who lies passed out on the sidewalk. Meanwhile, the kids who attend Elephant‘s “Watt High School” (filmed inside Whitaker High School) live in suburban houses with nice warm beds. And yet, two deranged classmates destroy the protections that should have separated Watt High’s shooting victims from the mortal dangers faced by transient youths living in the city. While that film was a thinly veiled account of Colorado’s Columbine murders, Paranoid Park was inspired by the boarders who flock to Portland’s Burnside Skatepark, beneath Burnside Bridge – a place illegally built by skateboarders, but later accepted by the city fathers. Despite the high school setting, young non-professional actors and the physical transformation of the city itself, the film finds some gritty visual common ground with Drugstore Cowboy within the pivotal (and graphic) nighttime rail yard scene. Of course Van Sant isn’t the only filmmaker to memorably use Portland’s youth landmarks. Burnside Skatepark makes another appearance in The Hunted during a foot chase which glimpses street kids and park transients, and culminates with Benicio Del Toro plunging from the top of Hawthorne Bridge into the Willamette River. The name of this major tributary of the Columbia comes courtesy of French-Canadian trappers who encountered the local Clackamas tribe, and it’s just south of Portland in modern-day Clackamas County where a group of suburban high school students play a prank on a bullying classmate in Mean Creek. When it goes terribly wrong, their sheltered lives don’t prepare them to deal with covering up the results – a problem echoed by the urban protagonist, Alex in Paranoid Park. Meanwhile, the dreary Portland suburb encountered by a young drifter in Wendy and Lucy is like the economically depressed Pearl District of 20 years prior. Here, the city’s industrial evolution is symbolized by a town whose closed timber mill has given way to a largely deserted Walgreens as the place to work. With filmmakers continuing to cast it in the lead, though, Portland’s film career is on the up.