History Lesson 
Film Fatale
Not one, but TWO film festivals were held in Dallas, and the battle scenes weren't all on the screen.
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Carson was a figure of some controversy. For the past two years he had been, along with SMU professor G. William Jones, co-director of the USA Film Festival. This year that festival's board of directors had refused to rehire Carson. Partly this was due to a personality clash with Jones, but there were deeper allegations made on both sides. Some claimed that Carson was ineffective as an organizer and inordinately strange in both his business dealings and his taste in movies. In 1972 certain eyebrows at SMU were set in motion by Carson's selection of the X rated cartoon Fritz the Cat, Paul Morrissey's explicit L'Amour, and People's War, a film of radical political attitudes.
Voices friendlier to Carson credit him with the idea of having a festival for American films. They add that without his energy and contacts in the movie industry, the USA Festival would never have happened. The films he picked, however startling some may have been to patrons of SMU, reflected the breadth of his knowledge of American cinema. For the United States Festival he was working as a "special consultant."
"Kit may have his faults," Robert Alexander said fumbling through his pockets for another cigarette, "but he's the best judge I've ever seen of what's going to be important in the media. The first time I ever heard of Dylan was when Kit brought over that first record and played it for me. I told him I thought it was the worst crap I'd ever heard. Kit said, 'Keep the record around and play it.' After a while I began to see what he was talking about. But Kit understood what that record meant the first..."
He was interrupted by the sudden return of his tiny daughter who ran straight across my new shoes and took refuge behind her father's knees.
"Ya, ya, ya, ya," she said.
"Ya, ya, ya," another feminine voice answered abruptly. "My God, I'm chasing the children again. This thing is already making me an absolute wreck."
The voice was Theresa Alexander's, the girl's mother and manager of the United States Film Festival. She was as thin as her husband and as fashionably dressed, but there was something considerably more tense and erratic about her, especially when compared to her husband's outer calm. On her left shoulder she wore a gold pin with an oval ring enclosing the word "Yes."
Since there were still several minutes left before the next movie began, I asked them about The Moving Image Association. This festival was the Association's first project, they told me. But the real purpose of the Association was to start a film center in Dallas, with equipment and workshop space for filmmakers as well as two small theaters. "But we put on this festival," Theresa said, "because we wanted to show certain people that we could do it. We were incredibly short on time and incredibly short on money and we still did it." Theresa, like Kit Carson, had been fired from SMU, and she was suing the university over her dismissal.
During most of this conversation, the lobby was spotted with small islands of people talking idly and staring secretively at the strangers around them. Slowly, though, they drifted back into the theater and shortly after 1 p.m., the movies started again.
This afternoon's offerings were Idaho Transfer, a science fiction film directed by Peter Fonda, and Sisters, an American International horror flick directed by Brian DePalma. This latter film was a particularly odious number featuring the separation of Siamese twins by cleaver chops. It became, finally, too repellent to watch.
Kit Carson began the discussion after the film by saying that the Hollywood system was still the most pervasive force in American filmmaking. DePalma, a man with flushed cheeks and snapping black eyes, took up this theme immediately. He didn't want to work in Hollywood. Directors like Francis Copolla (The Godfather) and Peter Bogdanovitch (The Last Picture Show) thought they could maintain their integrity while working there. "But I don't think you can get in bed with the devil," DePalma said, "without having some of it rub off."
This statement seemed particularly hollow coming so quickly after a mindless and exploitative film like Sisters. But it sounded even worse after the USA festival, where his film Get to Know Your Rabbit starring Tommy Smothers was shown. DePalma himself refers to the film as Get to Know Your Turkey. Smothers made the film as his first project after his television show was cancelled. It was supposed to be the vehicle that would carry him to the next step of his career. For DePalma making Rabbit meant a new life too. After directing movies with budgets of $40,000 and $100,000, he was suddenly given several million from the Hollywood devil himself.
In the making, though, things went awry. There were arguments about the script, Smothers lost confidence in DePalma, and the overbearing presence of Orson Welles didn't help matters. The film was never released. Smothers' career went into a steady decline and DePalma, who spent the next year learning he was now on the outs in Hollywood, began badmouthing directors who had coped with situations he couldn't.
Both Idaho Transfer and Sisters had impressed me as anti-life—Sisters for its blood and cruelty, Transfer for lines like "This perpetuation nonsense is a fraud." I left the festival's first day with a bad taste in my mouth.
Monday and Tuesday, the second and third days of the festival, were low points in terms of attendance and spirit. In the mornings Minelli's The Pirate and The Band Wagon played to as few as ten people. The shorts and documentaries in the afternoons drew audiences only slightly less miniscule. In the evenings, when the same programs were repeated, more people attended, but not too many more; and by 10 p.m., when Minelli's movie played again, the numbers had diminished considerably. The documentary best received, and for good reason, was Friday Night at the Coliseum by Houston's Geoff Winningham.
It was an embarrassing time for the festival's organizers. They wandered listlessly about the Auditorium Theater's lobby, forcing down cups of vile coffee and looking longingly at the box office window for the line that never formed. The only one who seemed unaffected was Kit Carson. He hurried back and forth between a wall of pay phones and the projection room, always apparently on some important mission. He wore knee-high black boots, blue jeans, and a thick leather jacket. A ring of keys that hung on a chain from his belt rattled with every step. Carson, I had discovered at our first meeting, is as shameless a bummer of cigarettes as I am during the times I "quit." Seeing me opening a pack, he stopped to ask for a smoke. I asked what he felt about the poor attendance.
"Sure I'd like to draw more people," he said, stopping to wonder if I had a match. "But I think what's going on here is important no matter how many people see it. You see, the other festival thinks that the most important movies are being made in Hollywood. We think they're being made"—he shrugged his shoulders—"well, wherever they're being made. They think making films relates to having a movie industry; we think that more and more it relates to having a script and a camera. Also it's important because a lot of people didn't think we could do it at all. SMU tried to keep us from getting films but we got films anyway. They've had their problems, too. They wanted a movie called Let the Good Times Roll. Well, I'm doing a little work for the Cannes Festival. They won't accept any film that has shown at another festival so I snuck the rolling good times out from under SMU and sent it off to Cannes. Hell, SMU wrote Minelli and told him he should not come to Dallas."
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