The daytime TV mainstay Wishbone is now being readied for the big screen. The PBS series about a talking, bibliophile dog who imagined himself as various famous literary characters—which was on the air from 1995 to 1997—will be adapted into a new family film at Universal, with Peter Farrelly producing. Wishbone, of course, is a local star: Episodes were filmed in and around Allen, Plano, and Grapevine, while the show was set in the fictional town of Oakdale, Texas. Meanwhile, the Jack Russell terrier who played him, Soccer, lived right here on a Plano ranch—although he’s not listed as a “notable” on the city’s Wikipedia page, for reasons we can only assume are political. After all, Soccer, who sadly died in 2001, arguably made a far greater cultural impact than, say, Weeds actor Hunter Parrish. No one’s making a Hunter Parrish movie, let’s put it that way.
How might Wishbone be given the “modern reimagination” that Variety promises? Ostensibly the film will be about another dog with a penchant for classic literature, pedantic allusions, and adorable costumes. But beyond that, who knows? Perhaps the film will find Wishbone always intending to take a trip through the Western canon, only to find himself repeatedly distracted by push notification news alerts.
Ethan Hawke Is Nikola Tesla
Austin’s Ethan Hawke has recently embarked on his own, Wishbone-like career of imagining himself as various historical characters: this fall sees the debut of Showtime’s The Good Lord Bird miniseries, with Hawke as famed abolitionist John Brown. And now August 21 brings the debut of Tesla, Michael Almereyda’s biopic that stars Hawke as the scientist and latter-day internet celebrity. The trailer for the hyper-stylized film centers, naturally, on Tesla’s rivalry with Thomas Edison (Kyle MacLachlan, clearly enjoying himself), although it also makes room for romance, mysticism, deliberately anachronistic smartphones, and an awful lot of metaphorical talk about cats.
Jamie Foxx Versus Some Pill-Poppers
“If there was a pill that could give you five minutes of pure power, would you take it?” asks Dallas’s own Jamie Foxx in the trailer for Project Power. For most of the characters in Netflix’s new sci-fi action epic, this seems to be a rhetorical question. Everyone’s eagerly popping these pills, despite them never knowing exactly what power they give you: super strength, invisibility, the ability to seamlessly integrate yourself into classic fairy tales, etc. That leaves it to Foxx, a former soldier—aided by Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a New Orleans cop and a dealer played by Dominique Fishback—to team up and take down a bevy of super-powered criminals, all while seeking out the source of these pharmacological jelly beans. Naturally, that means taking the pills themselves. Project Power drops on the streaming service on August 14, where it will give you at least five minutes of entertainment.
Austin Chef Heads to The Bachelorette
Making it in the restaurant business requires years of paying your dues, working your way up through the ranks, and sweating it out on the sauté line while you hone your craft. But eventually your dedication may be rewarded, and one day you might finally realize your dream of cooking on some dating show while forty other guys stand around trying to undermine you. And now that dream is coming true for Austin chef Page Pressley, a veteran of local luminaries Uchiko, Emmer & Rye, and Foxtail Supper Club, who this week was announced as a contestant on the upcoming season of The Bachelorette, where he’ll attempt to romance Bachelor franchise veteran Clare Crawley. Pressley is part of the replacement cast that was newly recruited after the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the original production, mere hours before filming was to begin in March. This second attempt will find the entire cast quarantined inside a La Quinta resort for the entire shoot, where they’ll be subject to frequent testing and filmed by a crew who are all wearing masks (it’s unclear if contestants will be). Best of luck to Pressley in his quest to catch Crawley’s eye, and hopefully nothing else.
Khalid and Post Malone Share Songwriter of the Year at BMI Awards
It continues to be a big year for Texas musicians dominating awards shows. This week, El Paso’s Khalid and Grapevine singer Post Malone tied for Songwriter of the Year at the 2020 BMI Music Awards. The two frequent collaborators shared those honors for writing approximately every third song that’s on YouTube right now, although splitting the difference meant losing the Song of the Year to Halsey. While the BMI ceremony was one of many forced to go virtual amid the pandemic this year, both Khalid and Post Malone offered their acceptance speeches via video—with Malone notably sporting the hair he shaved off several weeks ago. This whole thing is rigged, man! The entire awards show industry is a lie!
Also, Post Malone Ate Worms
Post Malone experienced another once-in-a-lifetime honor this week, officially becoming so famous that he can make headlines just for eating worms. The singer has reportedly been on “vacation” of late in Salt Lake City, where he was recently spotted at a 7-Eleven buying a late-night snack of seasoned mealworms, a treat the store’s owner described to local news station KUTV as “gross.” He then stuck around to take pictures with every employee, his face in each photo bearing an expression of dawning awareness that fame comes with the terrible price of no longer being able to scarf your BBQ-flavored bugs without the whole world knowing about it.
THIS WEEK IN MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY
While we’re reasonably certain Matthew McConaughey’s relative reclusiveness isn’t worm-related, he has been suspiciously quiet of late. The actor hasn’t even updated his Instagram since his July 4 message imploring others to “wear the damn mask,” and—save for a virtual town hall for the Well Beings campaign for mental health—he’s been unnervingly absent from our screens, suggesting he may have taken wearing his own damn mask to an extreme of total concealment. We can only hope McConaughey is off on his own Wishbone-like adventures right now, imagining himself as Robin Hood or Don Quixote or maybe even Captain Nemo, his paws twitching dreamily against the sides of his bed.
