Giant, the movie.

Film & TV

Incisive criticism, features, and news related to Texans on the screen—and behind the camera

Film & TV|
June 30, 1998

Ernest Goes to Texas

Borgnine: The word itself is barrel-chested, glaring, grotesque. And has a name ever been so suggestive of a face? Known for cinematic classics like From Here to Eternity and Marty (for which he won an Academy award in 1955), Ernest Borgnine last worked in Texas in the mid-fifties, when he

Film & TV|
May 31, 1998

Dove Shoot

Ten years after the filming of the miniseries Lonesome Dove, screenwriter Bill Wittliff shares his photographic memories of life on the set.

Film & TV|
April 30, 1998

Outtakes

AIR FORCE WON During the filming of Paramount Pictures’ I Wanted Wings (1941) at San Antonio’s Kelly Field, military aircraft soar overhead during a ground shot. The director angrily orders a general to “get those planes out of the air!”—and is promptly fired.HIGH JINKS Filmed in (and above) four small

Film & TV|
April 30, 1998

Filminism

I thought it would be hard to make movies in this macho state, but we’ve come a long way, baby.

Music|
April 1, 1998

Full Nelson

Ain’t it funny how time slips away? Before you know it, you’ve made two hundred albums, thirty movies, and had one amazing career. What follows is the Compleat Willie: a discography—including every U.S. album release as well as his early 45 rpm singles (before he signed with RCA in

Film & TV|
April 1, 1998

Greg Germann

My dad teaches theater at Southern University in Baton Rouge now, but we lived in Austin for a while when he worked on his master’s degree at the University of Texas. He directed plays on campus and also wrote children’s plays that were performed there and in Houston. When I

Film & TV|
March 1, 1998

Joan Crawford

All her life, Joan Crawford raised other people’s eyebrows as often as she reapplied her own. From the time she arrived in Hollywood, the temperamental Texan provoked hostility and gossip, and her wide-eyed flapper persona soon hardened into that of a sleek, steely sophisticate. But the arrogance accompanied a massive talent;

Film & TV|
March 1, 1998

Jensen Ackles

As a kid, Jensen Ackles used to poke fun at the “mushy” daytime dramas his mother regularly watched, but not anymore. Since last June, the Richardson native has starred on the hit NBC soap opera Days of Our Lives as Eric Brady, a mature-for-his-age teen who keeps his emotions bottled

Film & TV|
March 1, 1998

Robert Benton

We moved to Waxahachie in the early forties, when I was about ten years old. I was a seriously dyslexic child, and no one quite knew what dyslexia was in those days. People just thought I wasn’t too swift. And my way out of it was drawing. It was something

Film & TV|
January 1, 1998

Pulpit Fiction

HE MAY LOVE the smell of napalm in the morning, but Robert Duvall also has a certain affection for Texas. Over the years, some of his best-known films have been made here, including Tender Mercies (1983) and Lonesome Dove (1989). Now the 67-year-old has returned to the state again for

Film & TV|
December 1, 1997

Ara Celi

“When I was little,” Ara Celi says, “I used to watch TV and ask, ‘How do you get on there?’” At 19 the El Paso native set out for Hollywood to answer that question; once there, she quickly learned the three most important words in show business: audition, audition, audition.

Film & TV|
December 1, 1997

Austin, Storied

Just as Austin is the Dallas of the nineties—a booming cultural icon bordering on cliché—Austin Stories may be the Dallas of the nineties. The MTV sitcom, which debuted this fall, is weekly television’s first credible portrayal of Texas and Texans since J.R. got shot. (Walker, Texas Ranger? Kung fu in

Film & TV|
November 1, 1997

Patricia Richardson

I thought that moving to Texas would be the worst thing that ever happened to me, but it saved my life. It happened during my junior year in high school, which was really traumatic. All my life I had never been at the same school for more than two years,

Film & TV|
September 30, 1997

Reneé O’Connor

Their mission is to save the world, not conquer it, but the stars of Xena: Warrior Princess are winning television-ratings battles from San Angelo to Slovakia. The two-year-old syndicated show airs in more than eighty countries, making Lucy Lawless, who plays Xena, the first leather-clad TV lead since the Fonz—and

Film & TV|
August 31, 1997

No Show

Cash-poor PBS stations can’t seem to come up with innovative new ideas, so they ought to resurrect an innovative old one: Newsroom, the best local public- affairs program in Texas history.

Film & TV|
August 31, 1997

Elka

Like sadistic teenagers who introduce fire ants into an otherwise docile ant farm, the producers of MTV’s voyeuristic soap opera The Real World make casting decisions based not on avoiding conflict but on encouraging it. This season’s stereotypes are a jock, a poet, a comely lesbian, a city girl, a

Film & TV|
August 31, 1997

Barbara Barrie

I enrolled at the University of Texas in 1950 during a post-war period that produced many talented individuals. Harvey Schmidt, Tom Jones, Liz Smith, Robert Benton, Pat Hingle, Word Baker, Kathryn Grant (later Mrs. Bing Crosby), and I all graduated with degrees in drama. We did lots of dance concerts

Film & TV|
July 31, 1997

Heeeeeere’s Gary!

After years of laboring in virtual anonymity as Mr. Amy Grant, Texan Gary Chapman has his own talk show on The Nashville Network and is known by a vastly more flattering moniker: the David Letterman of country.

Film & TV|
June 30, 1997

Stick a Rourke in It—It’s Done.

Most nights it’s an ordinary shopping center, but during the months of May and June, Fort Worth’s Town Center Mall became a war zone. That was the principal location where Mickey Rourke, the brawl-prone star of 9 1/2 Weeks and Diner, knocked out the indie feature Recoil. Rourke plays a

Film & TV|
June 30, 1997

F. Murray Abraham

I arrived in El Paso as a small child and grew up within sight of the Rio Grande. Juárez was part of our lives, and it was comfortable and easy to cross the border. My friends and I were part of rat packs: We had jackets, and zip guns were

Film & TV|
May 31, 1997

Jack Valenti

When I got out of high school at three o’clock each day, I went to work giving away movie passes and hanging up posters in barbershops and drugstores for coming attractions at the Iris or the Texan or the Ritz theaters in downtown Houston. Unfortunately, when I graduated I didn’t

Film & TV|
March 1, 1997

Jennifer Love Hewitt

She only turned eighteen on February 21, but Jennifer Love Hewitt’s résumé is beginning to read like that of a show biz veteran: At the moment, she has a starring role on a hit TV series, Fox’s Party of Five, and a self-titled pop album in record stores, and her

Film & TV|
March 1, 1997

Sundance Across Texas

Breezeway, Suburbia, and Words of Our Ancients may have been our only pure-pedigree entries in Park City, but other films boasted Lone Star connections. Most notable was director-screenwriter Morgan J. Freeman’s sweet but hard-hitting teenage street drama Hurricane, which won three awards. As they did for Bottle Rocket, fellow Dallas

Film & TV|
March 1, 1997

Pair of Aces

Last January, when senior editor Gary Cartwright flew to the Hawaiian island of Maui to see Kris Kristofferson, it wasn’t just to interview a movie star and hit songwriter—it was also to visit an old acquaintance (see “A Star Is Reborn”). The two met in 1984 through author Bud

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