Watch on Soap2day. In early May of 1941, an unemployed Woody Guthrie and his wife, Mary, packed their three children into a battered Pontiac and left southern California for Portland, Oregon. All he had waiting for him in the Northwest was the job of writing songs for a documentary film about the dams being built on the Columbia River. This film details the thirty day contract Woody had as a temporary worker for the Bonneville Power Administration.