Incisive criticism, features, and news related to Texans on the screen—and behind the camera
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
Signs of intelligent life in Dallas.
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
The newest bilingual TV star.
Growing up in Longview and Texas City, John Lee Hancock dreamed of a life in the movies. Today, he’s one of L.A.’s hottest screenwriters.
“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.
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,
Thanks to his penchant for classic literature, Wishbone is the new top dog in kids’ entertainment.
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
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.
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
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
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.
Why everyone’s dazed and confused about Richard Linklater’s age.
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
A couple of indie film producers.
Like it says on her newly acquired bumper sticker, movie mogul Lynda Obst is “Texan By Choice.” But while you can take the girl out of Hollywood …
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
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
Who gave Debbie Reynolds her name, and what did she have to learn to do before starring in Singin’ in the Rain?
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
An Austin filmmaker hopes to be the next Sundance kid.
Why a great horror movie starring Matthew McConaughey and Renée Zellweger could get buried.
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
A year after Kris Kristofferson’s standout role in Lone Star, Hollywood is still marveling over his comeback. He is too. by Gary Cartwright
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
All she did was walk into the bar, sit down, and smile. But I knew right away why, even at age fifty, Farrah Fawcett is still an angel.
Mike Judge plays King of the Hill .
Drawn by the success of The Simpsons and Beavis and Butt-head, three of Texas’ top cartoonists are going Hollywood. Houston’s Michael Fry, for instance, has sold the television rights to two of his comic strips—Committed and When I Was Short—to production companies in Toronto and Los Angeles, respectively, and both
summary: What’s the best hotel in Texas? (Hint: It’s not the Mansion on Turtle Creek).
Why Texas’ best-known homeless writer is back on the streets.
I went to the University of Texas at Austin to play baseball. In high school I wanted to be a pro baseball player, and I never really thought about movies outside of taking dates to them and stuff like that. And when I tried to walk on to the UT
Texas A&M is churning out a new crop of students who aren't farmers or vets. They're the computer aces of the Visualization Lab, and they're Hollywood's new masters of special effects.
The Texas film industry’s labor pain.
When she works in Texas, Berlin-born Nastassja Kinski brings a link to her native Europe. When she made Paris, Texas in 1984, her comrade was German director Wim Wenders; this time, it was Italian director Antonio Tibaldi. In August and September Kinski was in Austin shooting Little Boy Blue, the
Waco, Houston, Dallas, Austin, London, New York, Hollywood: Peri Gilpin was all over the map before finding stardom on NBC�s hit sitcom Frasier.
Austin’s most independent-minded director.
The naked truth about Matthew McConaughey.
Scripting success.
A Spielberg-backed cyberguide comes to Texas.
He shone in Lone Star; now he’s thrilling ’em in A Time to Kill. How talent and timing made native Texan Matthew McConaughey Hollywood’s hottest leading man.
THERE IS AN OBLIGATORY SCENE in every movie about the border between Texas and Mexico: A man draws a line in the dirt with his boot. The line means something different in each movie, and yet, there it is, a narrow little rut in the ground that the characters gesture
Those whispers about Melissa Etheridge are true: She will play Port Arthur–born Janis Joplin in a forthcoming feature film. Director Mark Rocco (Murder in the First) has secured the rights to Myra Friedman’s 1973 Joplin bio, Buried Alive, and the rights to Joplin’s songs, and he’s talking to Etheridge’s label,
Mr. Peppermint doffs his skimmer in a fond if bittersweet farewell to all the kids he entertained on TV for so many years.
Ann Richards gets ready for prime time.
I REMEMBER ONE SUMMER when there were snakes galore on Lake LBJ near Kingsland. We have five kids in our family, and we’d all go swimming in the lake, but when we’d see something in the water—and couldn’t tell if it was a turtle or a water moccasin—we’d jump out.
Molly Ivins and Bob Wade on TV.
Cesar Alejandro’s low-budget action movies aren’t exactly number one with a bullet, but the El Paso director is sure he’ll be hot in Hollywood—some day.
In 1980 I was doing defense contract work overseas for the government, but I was getting kind of tired of it, so I decided to move back to Austin and begin acting again. To pay the bills I did temp work and drove a cab for Roy’s Taxi, but then
The big-screen bungling of Rosellen Brown’s Before and After.
