Invasion of the Cable Snatchers
In Texas the best way to get rich in cable television is to know just a little about TV and everything about politics.
John Bloom wrote for Texas Monthly, as both a staff writer and a contributor, from 1978 to 2006. He is a successful investigative journalist, actor, and author who was born in Dallas and raised in Little Rock, and he attended Vanderbilt University on a sportswriting scholarship. His nine books include the true-crime classic Evidence of Love (1984), Profoundly Disturbing: The Shocking Movies That Changed History (2003), and Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story (2016). He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award three times and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize by United Press International for his eyewitness coverage of 9/11. Bloom is best known as his alter ego, Joe Bob Briggs, a nationally syndicated “drive-in movie critic” whose wisecracking take on B movies was featured on two long-running late-night television shows, first on the Movie Channel and then on TNT. That tradition continues with his latest series, The Last Drive-In, currently featured on AMC’s Shudder streaming platform. During the course of his hosting career, Briggs has executive produced 20,000 hours of television and has become the leading authority on exploitation and genre films. In 2022, two true-crime articles he cowrote for Texas Monthly were adapted into the HBO series Love and Death.
In Texas the best way to get rich in cable television is to know just a little about TV and everything about politics.
By John Bloom
Urban refugees fleeing high-tech Dallas have created ersatz rural communities in the nearby countryside. This isolated, pastoral life sometimes erupts into adultery and murder.
By Jim Atkinson and John Bloom
Candy Montgomery thought her affair with Allan Gore was over, until she found herself fighting for her life against Allan’s wife.
By Jim Atkinson and John Bloom
And they most definitely conquered. The inside story of how a ragtag bunch of hippies made the wildest Texas movie ever (and spilled no more fake blood than was absolutely necessary).
By John Bloom
From Red River to Rushmore, the 25 best Texas films on DVD.
By John Bloom
And they most definitely conquered. The inside story of how a ragtag bunch of hippies made the wildest Texas movie ever (and spilled no more fake blood than was absolutely necessary).
By John Bloom
Candy Montgomery thought her affair with Allan Gore was over, until she found herself fighting for her life against Allan’s wife.
By Jim Atkinson and John Bloom
Urban refugees fleeing high-tech Dallas have created ersatz rural communities in the nearby countryside. This isolated, pastoral life sometimes erupts into adultery and murder.
By Jim Atkinson and John Bloom
Beyond Greed is the tale of the Hunts’ journey from silver spoon to silver lust. In Sing Me Back Home Merle Haggard takes a quick look at his life (too quick). Billy Clayton has Gavels, Grit & Glory--or so says his biographer.
By John Bloom
Celebrity is Thomas Thompson’s flawed venture into fiction; The Last Texas Hero deserves a twenty-yard penalty; Peeper is to be read only to find out who the real Tom is.
By John Bloom
He’s the man with the Word, and the Word is for you.
By John Bloom
In With No Fear of Failure you’ll learn how you, too, can turn rags into riches. Daddy’s Girl knows Southern discomfort. Petroleum Politics and the Texas Railroad Commission is the history of our own little OPEC.
By John Bloom
All this twenty-year-old University of Houston student wants to do is jump farther and run faster than anyone else ever has.
By John Bloom
Vesta Cawley turned to the city bureaucracy for help with a problem that didn’t matter to any of the other 900,000 residents of Dallas. But it should have mattered more to city hall.
By John Bloom
Onstage, all happy lounge acts are alike; offstage, all unhappy lounge acts are unhappy in their own ways.
By John Bloom
Ranger was the most romantic field in the early oil boom. Now a major company is risking its future to prove that romance still lives.
By John Bloom
Cable TV has Dallas in its coils; acupuncture has its day in court; sex education has parents up in arms.
By John Bloom
Those luck Arabs, with all that oil! The only problem, as a Saudi finance minister points out, is that oil is all they have.
By John Bloom
Reading Big Oil’s annual reports for the truth about profits is a little like drilling for oil in the Baltimore Canyon: you know it’s there, but how deep will you have to go to find it?
By John Bloom
A lot of farmers and gardeners think Congressman Kika de la Garza is a pest.
By John Bloom
The intrigue behind the building of Houston’s Texas Commerce Tower was almost as monumental as the 75-story structure itself.
By John Bloom
No news is bad news.
By John Bloom and William Broyles
In Texas the best way to get rich in cable television is to know just a little about TV and everything about politics.
By John Bloom
When the cable TV salesman comes calling, you should fully expect your city council to sell you down the river. Not that they mean to do it. It’s simply that history shows most city councils don’t know the first thing about cable. People who can barely figure out the briefs
By John Bloom
The art of romantic osculation barely survived the jaded seventies. Now it’s time to rediscover the private delights and civic benefits of real kissing.
By John Bloom
Whose blonde, curly scalp are the farmers after how do the rich and powerful run? Why, pray tell, does Houston need parks?
By John Bloom
A down-home journalist; the privileged pew; gas for a price.
By John Bloom
Who turned off the melting pot? Vietnamese and Texans fight on the coast.
By John Bloom
South Padre defiled—and you were there; the joy of six hundred maniacal flute players; Dallas’ love-hate affair with Fair Park.
By John Bloom
B-a-a-d government meddling irks Texas goat and sheep raisers; something’s rotten in Rotterdam, and it’s driving up oil prices; and the world’s best gymnasts are coming to Cowtown.
By John Bloom
Were the words of Russian exile Georgi Vins heard over the din of the Southern Baptist Convention?
By John Bloom
Valley politicos block minority TV; Dairy Queens reign in small-town Texas; woman diver yearns for Acapulco cliffs; Houston takes its lumps.
By John Bloom
Suffering the lines at the gas pump; gambling in the magazine business; a dragnet for the Southwest’s sneakiest thief; what’s Dallas’ secret?
By John Bloom
Who is the mayor of Cowtown? Who is that man in the ski mask? Who wants Caddo Lake’s water?
By John Bloom
Playing chicken on the Houston Ship Channel; jousting with 700-year-old knights; will John Hill run for governor again?
By John Bloom
Sherman’s First United Pentecostal Church believes persecution is good for the soul.
By John Bloom
Striking the right chord with the Fort Worth Symphony and the wrong one with Mexico; grounding Wayland Baptist’s Flying Queens.
By John Bloom
Taking it off at the last of the real burlesque joints; holy war on Austin’s Baptists; why Texas’ election system is stuck in the Dark Ages.
By John Bloom
The dark side of doing business in Saudi Arabia; an endangered mountain in El Paso; and big profits with small airplanes.
By John Bloom
The dark side of doing business in Saudi Arabia; an endangered mountain in El Paso; and big profits with small airplanes.
By John Bloom
Fighting the foolproof crime, playing games you can’t win, building an ice cream empire, and raising hell in Baylor.
By John Bloom
Bucking the U.S. Air Force, breeding horses for royalty, and hightailing it out of town before the Corps of Engineers gets you.
By John Bloom
Help! I’m a prisoner on the freeway and can’t get off.
By John Bloom
Welcoming danger with open arms, horse trading over tax relief, picking juries by their faces, and searching after the perfect twirl.
By John Bloom
Lasers have been heralded as the greatest discovery since the computer, but they may be hazardous to your health.
By John Bloom
Plainview puts a lid on deviate sex; billions of animals sleep in a freezer; oil spills are coming and we're not ready.
By John Bloom
Psychiatrists send men to death row; Texas’ loop coasters give up-side-down joyride; Diablos play baseball with Kleenex and kazoos.
By John Bloom
Taking on the Shah of Iran in Beeville; trying to save an eaglet in Waco; juggling sex in Galveston; flipping the switch on nuclear power; and fighting panjic at monstrous DFW Airport.
By John Bloom
Life is a riffle. Cancer is a riddle. Are they all the same riddle?
By John Bloom
Braniff is hopping the Atlantic to London; Pan Am is just hopping mad.
By John Bloom