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.
Austinite Lukas Haas is back on the big screen alongside Winona Ryder, Julia Roberts, and Jack Nicholson. For now, though, he isn’t letting Hollywood go to his head.
After twenty years as the reigning queen of the soaps, the essential truth about Morgan Fairchild remains: She’s not a bitch, but she plays one on TV.
Renée Zellweger’s acting résumé to date is a mixed bag of (mostly) generational posturing. The 26-year-old graduate of the University of Texas at Austin had a nonspeaking role in Dazed and Confused, then took on heftier parts in films like Love and a .45 and Empire Records. But Zellweger, who
Texas writers go Hollywood.
I had my first dancing lesson in Amarillo with Constance Ferguson. Constance had been out in California studying ballet with Theodore Kosloff, one of Pavlova’s partners, but she came back to Amarillo and wanted to open a dancing school. Up on the very top floor of a great old hotel
Snow business comes to Houston.
His recent performances in Pulp Fiction and Get Shorty have been simply divine, but for his most heavenly role yet, John Travolta heads to Texas—his first time back since Urban Cowboy. In Michael, co-written and directed by Nora Ephron, Travolta plays a real live angel, while William Hurt and Andie
As befits the creators of a movie called Bottle Rocket, the careers of Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson have taken off with a bang. The twentysomething filmmakers, who met at the University of Texas, first produced a thirteen-minute black and white short of the same name about three bumbling wannabe
Gauging Barney’s Universal appeal.
Leaving the popular sitcom Wings for his own show on the Fox network seemed like a risky move, but it’s paying off for native Texan Thomas Haden Church—so far.
A loving look back at nine grand old movie houses from the golden age of small-town Texas.
Hollywood’s busiest slacker.
Texan Jerry Hall is a successful model, the mother of three healthy kids, the wife of a rich, sexy, world-famous rock star. She’s also quite refined. Or is she? Eliza Doolittle, meet your match.
How glad-handing Hollywood and hidebound NASA joined forces to make Apollo 13, one of this summer’s hottest movies.
