The first film Texas Monthly deputy editor Evan Smith ever saw was A Boy Named Charlie Brown. That was in 1969, when he was only three. But Snoopy, Lucy, and the gang must have had a potent effect because film has been a steady and powerful presence in Smith’s life ever since. “I tend to mark significant points of my life with the movies I saw at the time,” says the 32-year-old New York native. “For me, it’s not ‘where was I when JFK was shot?’ but ‘where was I when I saw JFK?’” Understandably, then, Smith has been chomping at the bit to devote an issue of the magazine to his great passion. “No matter what business you’re in, you always look for a way to take the things that interest you in your private life and somehow make them relevant in your professional life. This was a perfect opportunity for that because Texas film got so hot that it got to the point where we couldn’t not do the story.” So besides writing his regular, unbylined column, “Low Talk”, he was the natural choice to edit the film package and pen the introduction (see “Hooray for Hollywood, Texas,”). Finally, in this exasperating life, he finds a little reward: “I live for pop-culture references and obscure knowledge of movies—both great movies and trash. To do an issue like this where I get to exist in a world of these references for a couple of weeks is terrific.”
