f one wanted to travel to New York through film, there'd be obvious roads to take: The Godfather, for one; Scorsese's Mean Streets and Taxi Driver; Breakfast at Tiffany's comes to mind too; and of course every Woody Allen picture ever made. These are films in which the city plays as big a part as the direction, characters, or plot -- movies whose strong sense of locale can practically transport you right into the middle of the bustling berg. Texas too has an equally rich history of films in which it serves as subject, and the state's expanse -- Texas is bigger, wider, and more open to the sky -- is directly proportionate to the number of tales it embodies, urban and rural, set inland and on the coast, in the rolling hills and desolate desert. We even have our own actors (at least, I like to think of them as belonging to Texas): Sissy Spacek, Harry Dean Stanton, Sam Shepard, Frances McDormand, Matthew McConaughey, James Dean, and Paul Newman among countless others. Heck, Kevin Costner appears all over Texcentric film -- he'd easily replace Kevin Bacon in our own Texas version of the six-degrees-of-separation game.

So what follows is a primer of sorts -- a list to give your Yankee friends, or one we can use to test the Californians as they cross our border by the carload. Watching these films will give you a sense of our beloved state, albeit a pretty romantic one. (For the unromantic vision, tune in to the Mike Judge animated TV series, King of the Hill.) Don't miss the chance to view them on the big screen (frequently resurfacing at the Paramount in Austin, the Inwood and through the Dallas Film Society in Dallas, the River Oaks in Houston, and the Crossroads in San Antonio), but all are available on video.

Introduction

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