Bonus Scenes 
Bill, Due
After 22 years and 44 movies, Fort Worth’s BILL PAXTON has finally graduated from character actor to leading man and fledgling filmmaker. It’s about time.
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His father, John, was an executive with the family’s wholesale lumber business and a vice president of the Fort Worth Art Museum (now the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth), passing on to his four children a refined appreciation for the arts. “He took us to movies, plays, art exhibitions,” Paxton said, “but his real ambition was to be a movie actor. I went to movies a whole lot from a pretty early age. We’d come out of a theater and my dad would ask, ‘How’d you like the props? How’d you like the lighting?’ He’d always call attention to the artifice of movies when we were little. As a kid, you don’t think about stuff like that, you know what I mean? One of the first movies that affected me was Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, which I saw when I was about ten. The lighting, the whole mood grabbed me. Then I got into Hud and The Hustler. Then my dad turned me on to Buster Keaton. There was something about him. You never saw him working for the audience. He never tried to use sentimentality to evoke emotions from the audience.”
There were two defining moments in young Bill’s path toward a career in the movies. The first was enrolling in Rosemary Burton’s drama class at Arlington Heights High School, along with Jim Flowers, who has a bit part in Traveller and was one of its assistant directors. “I got into her class thinking it would be an easy ride, and God, this woman just challenged my thinking in a way I wanted to get home and be really prepared. She let us do any scene from any play, even if it was morally questionable. She really believed in us exploring artistic freedom.” The second was when John Paxton sent his son to school in England for the summer following his high school graduation, in 1973. It was at Richmond College in Surrey that he discovered he wasn’t the only kid in Fort Worth smitten with the idea of making movies.
“We met on the plane,” said Traveller associate producer Tom Huckabee, who came to Austin with Paxton for the premiere. He’d been making his own super 8 films while a student at Southwest High School before he found himself at Richmond sharing a room with Paxton and his high school classmate Danny Martin, who was an aspiring writer of fiction. At the end of the summer, the three returned to Fort Worth, where Huckabee and Paxton immersed themselves in super 8 escapades. “We’d work on scripts and block out movies together, but Bill always did the stunts,” said Huckabee. “I thought he wasn’t an artist, he was a daredevil. It was an excuse to do dangerous things.”
“We made films because we liked to blow stuff up,” said Paxton, grinning.
Their first collaboration, “Victory at Auschwitz,” was filmed over a six-week period using borrowed Nazi memorabilia from World War II and the Texas and Pacific rail yards by Vickery Boulevard. “We all grew up on World War II movies,” said Paxton. “That’s where I caught the bug. I think we were emulating the great movies we’d seen.” Their magnum opus was The Parable, with Danny Martin as the lead actor. “Bill and Danny loved Eastwood and all those action flicks,” said Huckabee. “So we snuck a camera into the Worth Theater and filmed some of the second Dirty Harry—Magnum Force—because The Parable is about this psychotic man who lives out his Clint Eastwood fantasy with all these dummies that come alive.”
The Parable inspired Paxton to set out for Hollywood in 1974, his father pulling strings to land him a job as a set dresser—finding props to decorate scenes—for Encyclopaedia Britannica educational films. Within a year he found work as a set dresser for Roger Corman, the king of B-movies, and got Danny Martin hired too. Set dressing led to a one-line speaking part in Steve Carver’s gangster moll cult classic Big Bad Mama, starring Angie Dickinson. Meanwhile, he kept making his own movies.
The early going was rough enough to break up a brief first marriage and bring on bouts of depression (Paxton has been married to his second wife, Louise, for ten years). In 1978 he enrolled at New York University, where he took drama courses from the legendary Stella Adler, but dropped out. “After two years I didn’t see any point in a degree, I didn’t see where I’d be filling that in on an application for any kind of job.” He returned to Los Angeles, again working as a set dresser, and began to pick up small acting roles, including a bit part in Night Warning. In his spare time he made a $2,000 video for the Barnes and Barnes novelty song “Fish Heads,” made popular on the nationally syndicated Dr. Demento radio program. Paxton submitted the video to Saturday Night Live, which aired it several times, and it was picked up by MTV. That led to another music video, this time for Martini Ranch, a warped country-disco group he played in that was signed by Sire Records.
By the mid-eighties the acting offers had started rolling in. But Paxton still wanted to make films, not just star in them, and Traveller was his ticket to doing what he wanted most. In addition to worrying about his lines, there were other responsibilities, like watching the bottom line and putting together the soundtrack. “We ran into problems during postproduction that I attribute to our naiveté, especially with the music,” Paxton said. “I didn’t have a score. The score never worked out. I was going to have to put in these library music cues. Then I realized I really didn’t want to use a score. I wanted to use more source music, stuff you hear on the radio driving through the South.” Sire Records’ Seymour Stein, who signed Martini Ranch, saved the day by bringing in some new country acts he was developing to cover some old country standards. The soundtrack, an Asylum release, should garner attention for artists Mandy Barnett, Royal Wade Kimes, and Tina and the B Side, augmented by Lou Ann Barton, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Paxton’s friend Randy Travis, whom he met filming the HBO movie Frank and Jesse, doing “King of the Road.” “It’s one of those cross-promotional things, where a soundtrack can help promote the movie because we can’t buy TV ads or anything like that,” said Paxton. “We get a song like ‘King of the Road’ on the radio, and it’s like building a machine, a Little Train That Could.”
THE SXSW BLITZ SPUTTERED TO AN END on a dreary Sunday. At the second screening of Traveller the day before, the projector had gone on the fritz, causing a half-hour delay. The big Saturday night street concert Paxton emceed was staged in blustery weather, keeping the crowd count under two thousand. It had been a weird week. Premiering his movie was one thing. “Next thing you know, you’re kissing babies and then you’re dressed in a silly outfit for a photo shoot,” he said. “All your life you’re trying to be taken seriously as an artist, and people still want me to be the clown.” He wants to be a leading man, but he knows it’s his goofy charisma that brought him to the dance in the first place.
“I’d love to do more Alan Ladd type of roles, a couple of Gary Cooper parts,” Paxton said. “Clint Eastwood was a role model in that way, because he had some success, then he started doing his own thing, making his own films. I like the idea of being able to help yourself and create opportunities for friends, colleagues, people you want to work with. That sounds a little idealistic, but hey, we started in this field because we were idealistic. We never did this for the money. The glory was in making films.”
And so Bill Paxton has set his course, his desire to run his own show subsidized by his ability to act. “If it’s Chet in Weird Science or Gus in The Dark Backwards, you gotta get off the boat and go all the way,” he said. “You can’t be a wallflower. But it’s nice to pull back and do some interior kind of work too. The subtlety of my performance in One False Move gives me a lot of pleasure, that I was able to play it that laid back, that relaxed, and really pull it off. That gets me excited.
“I am a traveler. I am a confidence man. I get in front of that camera and I make people believe. That’s what a confidence man does,” said Bill Paxton, Hollywood star, sounding more like a kid from Texas who grew up at the movies.
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