Big State, Small Screen
Is Friday Night Lights the best TV show ever made about Texas? Or just the first one (sorry, J.R.! Sorry, Hank!) that’s tried so hard to get the details right?
Is Friday Night Lights the best TV show ever made about Texas? Or just the first one (sorry, J.R.! Sorry, Hank!) that’s tried so hard to get the details right?
Twenty-five years ago, Larry McMurtry published a novel called Lonesome Dove—and Texas hasn’t looked the same since. Listen in as more than thirty writers, critics, producers, and actors, from Peter Bogdonavich and Dave Hickey to Tommy Lee Jones, Robert Duvall, and Anjelica Huston, tell the stories behind the book (and
Barry CorbinGrowing up in Lubbock, I didn’t want to be a real cowboy, because I knew a bunch of them and they didn’t get paid anything and they were hurt all the time. But I wanted to play one in the movies. My favorite early on was Bill Elliott, and
“You have to have action, you have to have humor, and you have to have emotional situations. And you have no time to waste. You have to get it all in there economically.”
Lone Ranger.
An animated personality.
We used to be known for running backs, but all of a sudden, we’re famous for producing some of the country’s best passers, from Drew Brees to Colt McCoy. What turned our high school football programs into quarterback factories?
Texas football heroes Darrell Royal, Doak Walker, Sammy Baugh, and John David Crow are off the field, but they’re still having a ball.
Ty and Koy Detmer were South Texas high school football heroes. Now they’re NFL quarterbacks. They owe it all to their father, a coaching whiz everybody calls Sonny.
Texas high school football may be in decline, but filmmakers still want to play.
Twenty-five years ago, in the wake of integration, he was the football star at my mostly white high school in Wichita Falls. Not much has gone right for him since.
Die-hard fans of America’s Team are debating that very question as we speak—and also wondering if the kid from Wisconsin with the buxom distraction can take them to the Super Bowl any faster than, say, Gary Hogeboom did.
I wish I were in the land of Cotton (Bowl).
How did the University of Texas build the most successful college sports program in history? One visionary coach at a time. One world-class athlete at a time. One state-of-the-art stadium at a time. And with an ambitious, aggressive business model that’s the envy of its rivals everywhere.
A cool, brilliantly blue day in early February found me driving north from Austin on a sort of pilgrimage. I was going to see John Graves, the writer and gentleman farmer, now 73 years old, at his place on four hundred acres of rocky blackland prairie near Glen Rose.My visit
In this excerpt from Means of Ascent, the shy, withdrawn young wife of Lyndon Johnson reveals a presence and command that took everyone by surprise—including her husband.
You can lead a herd to water, but can you make a miniseries faithful to Larry McMurtry’s Texas classic?
The opening scenes of Lonesome Dove take place at the Hat Creek Cattle Company, a small ranch in Lonesome Dove, Texas, just north of the Rio Grande. Hat Creek is operated by two old Texas Rangers, the taciturn Woodrow Call and the talkative Augustus “Gus” McCrae. Among their hands are
Forty years after its publication, Horseman, Pass By is still one of Larry McMurtry's finest novelsand as groundbreaking as J. D. Salinger's masterpiece.
Wring your hands, cut your wrists, do anything, but just listen to how Kinky can sing.
“Kids used to be so excited just to have an opportunity to play. Now I see more of a mentality of entitlement: ‘I’m a tremendous athlete, so you owe me this.”
Rock and Country music met in Austin. That friendship may make the state.
The head of the Texas Film Commission hustles Hollywood movie-makers into putting more of Texas in the can.
A new collection of Keith Carter’s photographs captures the magical mojo of East Texas.
Photographer Keith Carter’s latest pet project reminds me of big Texas dogs I’ve owned—some clownish, some serious, but every one of them great.
Larry L. King is at work on a novel about minor league baseball in Texas in the fifties. Breaking Balls is a fictionalized account of his experiences covering the “miserable 144-game schedule” of the Midland Indians as a $55-a-week reporter for the Midland Reporter-Telegram in 1951. “I went to all
Our selections for some of the best contemporary Texas books.
As Sandra Scofield, Shelby Hearon, and Janet Peery are proving, you don’t have to live in Texas to be a Texas writer.
The moment that members of the tejano band David Lee Garza y Los Musicales saw a poster by San Antonian John Dyer, they knew they had found the photographer for their next album. “We wanted more than just a face on a cover,” says bassist Richard Garza, “and his poster
On March 31, 1995, South Texas came to a standstill as the shocking news spread that the hugely popular Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla Perez had been shot and killed in Corpus Christi. Fifteen years later, the people who knew Selena best recall the life and devastating death of a star
When Selena Quintanilla Perez was killed on March 31, Texas mourned—and around the world, the veneration began.
He’s a little bit country, rock and roll, and everything in between. That’s why Doug Sahm is still going strong.
A match made in heaven and blessed by Hollywood.
It took me half my life to figure out that most of what I thought I knew about J. Frank Dobie was wrong.
Ready for her close-up.
A Texas football magazine that scores.
A pivotal loss in the 1970 Senate race shaped George Bush’s future. An excerpt from a new book on the 1988 presidential campaign.
Dominique de Menil—1908-1997
Dominique de Menil loves beautiful things and interesting people. In forty years of collecting them she has changed Houston.
“And don’t forget to come back next week for the Greensheet Awards. Everybody in Austin can win something if you just stick around long enough in this town. A lot of people dressed up tonight and a lot of people didn’t give a s—t, did they? Nobody’s going to work
Mark: “They’ve mixed a lot of the Western side with the original, but they’re not original. And this right here is the biggest joke I’ve ever heard. She’s doing mudras [hand movements] through the whole thing, but she’s not even doing the mudras right.” Dan: “It’s nonsensical, the way they’re singing.
“The artists that are performing tonight have written compositions or have been influenced by compositions written in Spanish, traditional Mexican music, and what’s called border music, if you will, a marriage of Tex-Mex. And so tonight they are celebrating that acoustically, singing the songs they’ve learned.”— Susan Charney, co-producer of
That was the recipe for this year’s South by Southwest Music and Media Conference. Here’s how it all cooked up.
“Cake is a great band. It’s soulful music. It’s food for the soul.” — Krys Holland, audience member, watching Cake at the Austin Music Hall.“When I say go, turn that s—t all the way up.” — Wayne Coyne, lead singer of the Flaming Lips, having passed out cassette tapes to
“I don’t like confrontation, although it’s alleged that I do. But I learned playing football that confrontation is necessary. You’d better get another sport if you don’t acknowledge and accept and willfully go after confrontation.”
Before chronicling the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference for Texas Monthly, New York illustrator Steve Brodner had never been to Austin—but that actually worked to his advantage. “The idea was to capture the scene as someone who just happened upon it,” he says. “I wasn’t trying to get
It took two decades of shows at honky-tonks filled with frat-boy fans and Aggie admirers, but singer-songwriter Robert Earl Keen has his first major-label record deal.
For all her talent and poise, Beyoncé didn't become the biggest star in the world without help. And she got plenty of it from the people who know her best.
“I’m a personality and a singer—that’s how I make my living—but I’m always a guitar player.”
On November 5, 181,500 people crowded into a former cow pasture north of Fort Worth to watch 43 race cars drive really, really fast for five hundred miles. That day, the Texas Motor Speedway would be, measured by population, one of the largest cities in the state. Welcome to NASCAR,