MacArthur grad inducted into Texas Film Hall of Fame

 

(I post this in honor of Michael Nesmith who just died. 

As a little kid I collected Monkees bubblegum cards, so it was a thrill to meet and interview Michael Nesmith in 2010 at the Austin Film Hall of Fame ceremonies. Who is that old guy? I thought as the crowd rushed to take his photo on the runway.

I was there specifically to talk to him for both the Dallas Morning News and the San Antonio Express-News, so he sat down with me for a few minutes and told his story of Texas.

The next day I was at the Four Seasons doing another interview. As I left, I saw Nesmith waiting for a cab. I spoke to him again and he handed me a card. Call the number, he said, and come see his new internet project Michael Nesmith's Videoranch3D. It was amazing and he was a very cool guy.

(He's hiding in the back of this shot taken with a crude digital camera.)

By Joe O'Connell 

March 13, 2010 

Publication: San Antonio Express-News (TX) 

Page: 10B 

Word Count: 400

AUSTIN - Bruce McGill couldn't resist. As Tim Matheson held a microphone up for the audience to hear, McGill strummed the William Tell Overture on his neck just as he'd done in 1978's "Animal House." The University of Texas alumnus followed it by flashing a hook 'em Horns sign.

McGill, a MacArthur High School grad, was one of a handful of inductees into the Texas Film Hall of Fame on Thursday night. The Austin Film Society fundraiser kicked off the South by Southwest Film Festival. Also honored were Lukas Haas, Michael Nesmith, the Lockhart-shot film "Waiting for Guffman" and Quentin Tarantino, named an honorary Texan.

McGill, who did his first play in San Antonio at age 11, said his career was dictated by a very practical upbringing and a realization that character actors stay employed.

"I'm a character actor first, last and always," he said. "I tend to fly beneath the radar. (The award) is a great nod to guys like me who enhance the story."

Nesmith, best known as a member of the created-for-television band the Monkees and for winning the first-ever Grammy for a music video, said his days at San Antonio College played a big part in his career.

He came to the college straight out of the Air Force and formed a musical group that was to perform at a college talent show. When he was asked to be the show's master of ceremonies, he feared that would disqualify his act but accepted. He won the college's Talent Award.

"I think about that particular moment as when I learned that sometimes you have to give up your target and let things take you where they're going to," he said.

Nesmith said his efforts these days are focused on the next wave of the Internet, including the creation of 3-D worlds.

"The future is in live programs and virtual environments," he said.

Tarantino recounted coming out of a midnight screening of "Nashville" in Santa Monica in 1993 and meeting fellow moviegoer and Austin director Richard Linklater. That budding friendship led to a benefit Austin premiere of "Pulp Fiction" in 1994 and to a string of all-night QT festivals in Austin where Tarantino screens his personal prints of obscure exploitation films.

Linklater founded the Austin Film Society.

San Antonio native Robert Rodriguez, who worked with Tarantino on "Grindhouse," silently capped the evening by presenting Tarantino with a replica of Rodriguez's signature cowboy hat.

Wes Anderson talks about 'Rushmore'

I interviewed Wes Anderson for an article--if memory serves for the San Antonio Express-News. I recorded it and included the full interview in my '90s zine Lost Armadillos in Heat. 

LAIH: You grew up in Houston where "Rushmore" was filmed. And actually shot it in St. John's, your old school. Was that weird?
ANDERSON: People always want to know if it was weird going back to film there. It wasn't because I spent all this time convincing them to let us shoot there. Also we would go there to think about the script and walk around. By the time we filmed there, I'd spent so much time there recently and got re-aquainted with a lot of people there. So it was really a comfortable place to film. We had a screening just for St. John's people. It was odd because people applauded a thing like a house. And they applaud certain extras with real force.
LAIH: How would you describe this film?
ANDERSON: Somebody told me it was a coming of age story, and I guess it is, but I hate to think of it that way. It sounds like a genre. I wanted a school movie. We had this character. Me and my co-writer Owen
Wilson, we wanted to do a character of a kid who loved the school and founded all of these different clubs and societies, but is also a terrible student and is going to get kicked out.
LAIH: Where did that idea come from?
ANDERSON: Putting on the plays is something I did when I was a kid. We went to similar schools. Owen went to St. Marks in Dallas. Both of us had a sort of deluded thing and thought we were going to go to really
good colleges. But we were both bad students and never stood any chance of getting into any of the places we were applying. We did get rejected by all of them. So that sort of figures into it.
LAIH: What did you learn from "Bottle Rocket" that you brought to this film?
ANDERSON: I felt there was stuff I learned on the other one about how to plan a movie and what to expect--how much you have to be totally focused every day. But on the other movie the cast was just a bunch of
friends. This one we had to put together a cast and I didn't really know anybody in the cast. Except for some small supporting roles, all of the main actors we cast like they cast a regular movie.
LAIH: Where did you dig up Jason Schwartzman?
ANDERSON: We did a big casting search all over the place for a year. It was this total hassle. Finally our casting director in San Francisco met this kid and sent him in to me. I felt like within 30 seconds we had something. He was not like anyone else. He was very compelling. And I just liked him a lot personally. I always hoped I'd get to cast someone I'd be friends with.
LAIH: I know he's Talia Shire's son. What is his film background otherwise?
ANDERSON: His background is high school.
LAIH: Who are your filmmaking inspirations?
ANDERSON: A million movies all rolled together. Louis Malle movies. Mike Nichols and Hal Ashby and the 70s guys.
LAIH: Surely "Harold and Maude" was an influence?
ANDERSON: No question. Just the feeling. I used a Cat Stevens song. That's got to be paying respect on some level.
LAIH: What about the music in the film?
ANDERSON: I used British invasion music from the 60s and 70s. I think that's really hard angry rock music, but it's played by English kids in blazers, like school boys. And I think that combo is something like what this kid is. That was my way of analyzing it afterword. At one point I just wanted to use some Kinks.
LAIH: The tone of "Rushmore" is so different. Can you explain what you were trying to do?
ANDERSON: There's a sort of unreality. You don't see a lot of cars from today. There's not any cultural references really. It's just its own little world. So it almost feels like it's not any one particular time. It's a bit of a fable, maybe? The behavior of the characters, the stuff that's happening in the movie is not quite reality. The plays are unrealistically ambitious.
LAIH: What kind of films do you like to watch?
ANDERSON: I like funny movies. "Murmur of the Heart" by Louis Malle is one. "The Rules of the Game" by Jean Renoir. I like movies where there is real affection for the characters. In those movies I feel like there aren't any really bad guys. I think Renoir says something to the effect that everyone has their reasons. You just have to make an effort to understand them. I guess I'm not too into cynical, cool movies right now. I've just seen so many violent, steely or cool movies and I'd rather stay away from that.
LAIH: Talk about your process as a filmmaker.
ANDERSON: It starts with the way you want the movie to feel, the setting, the kind of feeling of the characters and the way they'll interact, and less the story. Once you're making the movie, you're not affected by that anymore. You're just into the world and have to follow your instincts.
LAIH: What about the collaborative writing process?
ANDERSON: We talk for months. While that's going on, one of us will write a scene and hand it to the other, and they'll make marks and hand it back, act out things, add things. As it goes along we write more and
more and we start to figure out if we need a scene. It sort of evolves that way, just the two of us hashing it out.
LAIH: How do you see your style of directing?
ANDERSON: I like on the set for everyone to feel like friends. I like to be very private with the actors. I like for us to rehearse scenes very privately and quietly. That's probably because I feel self-conscious "directing" in front of a group of people. Lots of people who worked on Rushmore worked on "Bottle Rocket," the head of
every department, so there are lots of friends on the set.
LAIH: Do you plan much in advance?
ANDERSON: I like to plan as much as possible. I think the more you can have ideas for things, the more you can really make an effort to find a new way to do a scene. It becomes more dense if you really make an
effort, like you're writing a novel, if you focus on the detail in advance. It's hard to make that stuff happen spontaneously. You've really got to plan it, I think.LAIH: Do you storyboard?
ANDERSON: Yeah, I do it twice, in fact. I storyboard it once and then go back and do it neatly. You find some things you had sketched out when you go back and go, I thought I had this thought out, but it's
sort of half-baked. It's a pain because it takes forever, but you get it all more specific.
LAIH: The narrative arc of "Rushmore" is all over the place, yet that seems to work. How do you explain that?
ANDERSON: The stuff we get excited about are unexpected turns to the story. Also, we'll have ideas and you have to somehow get there.
LAIH: Tell me about Max Fischer. Is he a good guy?
ANDERSON: I think some people feel we made a character who is not always very appealing. But I have just a good feeling about that character. He does some almost unforgivable stuff, but I feel like he's redeemed. I have a personal feeling for the character like it were someone I knew. I hate it when someone says they find him unlikable. We try to push him, but I don't want him to be a bad guy.
LAIH: How did you get Bill Murray interested in the film?
ANDERSON: We just sent him the script. A week later he called and said he wanted to do it. Really all we talked about in your first conversation was this movie "Red Beard" by Kurosawa, that Bill was a big fan of. He had an idea that "Red Beard" had something to do with "Rushmore." I never quite understood what the connection was.
LAIH: What was he like?
ANDERSON: Working with him was really great. He's really funny and he's just such a good guy. He made a real effort to support this movie. It's a small movie. It's the kind of movie, if someone tried to modify it
and make it more palatable or to fit into a certain slot, it would just go to pieces. He was a good defender of the movie. You can settle for things and Murray wasn't interested in us settling for anything. I'm not either and it's good to have somebody like that involved.
LAIH: I love the plays in "Rushmore." Did they pose any problems?
ANDERSON: For the war play, if you don't get it right have to wait an hour and a half while they set up all of these charges again. We had to do the whole scene in one day according to our schedule. There's one shot where this plane flies across the stage bombing it. If we hadn't got that right, it would have been two hours to line up all the charges again. We got lucky and got the shot right. It was a fun day because all of these kids dressed up for Vietnam. It felt like there was a play happening (enthusiasm in voice). When we were filming, It felt like it was an EVENT day.
LAIH: What's next?
ANDERSON: Owen and I are working on this script set in New York. It's about a family there.
LAIH: Tell us again how you got started.
ANDERSON: Owen and I were both at UT. We did a play in a playwriting class that I wrote and that Owen acted in. Before we finished school there we started writing the "Bottle Rocket" script. After that we went to Dallas and made a short version of it. The short was supposed to be a feature but we ran out of money." With "Bottle Rocket," not that many people got to see it in the theater. Most people saw it on video. There wasn't much of an event to the release. I sort of regretted it. So I want to do everything I can to let people know about this movie.

Tobe Hooper’s ‘Midnight Movie’ rewrites the script on film fandom

     

By Joe O’Connell

Austin American-Statesman

Posted Jul 10, 2011 at 12:01 AM

Forget “Slacker” and “El Mariachi.” Underground Austin filmmaking street cred begins and ends with the original “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” the quirky shoestring-budget cinematic blast of cannibalism that set the gold standard for creepiness while keeping gore to a minimum. The 1974 film also begat a cottage industry of remakes, knockoffs and reverberations. Just last year, co-writer Kim Henkel’s “Boneboys” script was being filmed near Austin by Duane Graves and Justin Meeks with its own flesh-eating fiends.

Now it’s “Chainsaw” director and co-writer Tobe Hooper’s turn to take a nibble with the very cinematic novel “Midnight Movie,” co-written with Alan Goldsher. It stars a guy named Tobe Hooper who comes to Austin during the South by Southwest Film Festival to screen the rediscovered sole print of an obscure movie he shot as a teen — well before “Chainsaw” — to a small crowd of film geeks. The catch is a car crash years ago has left Hooper with little memory of the film except he’s “pretty sure there’s some zombie sex involved.”

The film, titled “Destiny Express,” is a squishy, bloody mess, but it just possibly infects the hipster audience with a virus dubbed the Game that transforms some into sex-crazed harlots and others into violent, flesh-munching zombies. Soon Austin is ablaze with what are presumed to be exploding drug labs, and the violence and madness quickly spreads nationwide.

How to stop the spreading gloom? Hooper, part-time Austin Chronicle film reviewer and wannabe rocker Erick Laughlin, University of Texas student and waitress Janine Daltrey and the overly glib über-film geek Dude McGee (whom Hooper tells us — wink, wink — is surely not inspired by Austin’s Internet film guru Harry Knowles) decide the only hope is to quickly track down the original cast of “Destiny Express” — minus its main star, who has gone full-tilt zombie — and remake the film in order to kill off its bad juju.

It’s a fun ride, made all the more so by its links to reality. Hooper did indeed come to SXSW in 2009 to show his earlier, little-seen 1969 film “Eggshells,” which he also co-wrote with Henkel. But he made that film in his 20s, and it’s more groovy psychedelia than bloody horror.

For the myriad “Chainsaw” fanatics, Hooper the semi-fictional character (we can assume speaking for the real-life Hooper) unapologetically addresses his reputation as a cold dictator. “Always have been on the set. I have a vision, and I want to bring it to life.”

Hooper also makes it clear that he takes “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and its mythic legacy quite seriously. “See, ‘Chainsaw’ was a story. It wasn’t ‘The Iliad’ or anything, but it had an arc, a beginning, middle, and end. Yes, it was about shocking the audience, but they wouldn’t have been shocked if it was a random series of attacks and murders, because they wouldn’t have been absorbed into the picture. There would’ve been distance. If there wasn’t anything for the audience to grab on to, they wouldn’t have given a good (expletive) what happened to good ol’ Sally Hardesty.”

Does the novel “Midnight Movie” have something for the reader to latch onto? For the most part, yes, and that something is the engaging voice of Hooper that sings. Told through the viewpoint of a lot of characters mixed with blog posts, Tweets and news articles, the story is most engaging when its main force is on stage. Hooper, the character, comes across as a crusty but kindly curmudgeon who is serious about the art of creation but is also a dedicated loner. He’s funny, wise and in on the zombified joke.

But Hooper vanishes into hibernation during the novel’s midsection when the stylized details of the spread of the infection become a little repetitious. Fortunately he and his posse return for the final showdown. It’s a satisfying blur of zombies, film fandom and the messy business of low-budget filmmaking. Our heroes must recreate the original film’s fake alligator stuffed with roadkill, in a touch quite true to the legend of the late “Chainsaw” art director Bob Burns driving around the countryside collecting decomposing animals to strew about the set.

Oh, and for the record, Hooper does claim to have lost part of his memory after being in a car crash as a teen. “The whole incident was a big blank, and the concept of blankness is flat-out frightening,” Hooper writes in a brief interview included at the end of the novel.

That theme and a sense of jovial nihilism lurk just below the surface of the novel’s blood splatters, zombie sex and film-cool swagger. “The only thing that makes sense is the taste of blood, the taste of suffering, the taste of death. I do not know why I didn’t realize it sooner,” we are told as an aside by an analyst from the Department of Homeland Security who has gone zombie.

Hooper, the filmmaker, author and character, would surely laugh and tell his audience to sit back and enjoy the bloody ride.

Hanging out in a topless bar with 'Varsity Blues'

A report from Joe O'Connell (1998)

A two-day shoot in a topless bar officially ended when "Varsity Blues" director Brian Robbins asked the stunning, almost-naked blonde on stage to repeat her gyrations one last time for the film's cast and crew.

The cameras sat idly by as teen heartthrob James van der Beek and Scott Caan (yes, that's James Caan's boy) hooted and clapped along with nameless extras and weary technicians. The scene was so real it could have been in, well, a movie.

And elsewhere around Austin this same broiling summer day other cameras were busy. Directors Robert Rodriguez and Mike Judge were filming "The Faculty" and "Office Space" respectively. As summer burned into fall and fall cooled into winter, these film sets were replaced by ones for Sundance-bound "A Slipping-Down Life," Tom Arnold star vehicle "Just Sue Me," "Texas Funeral" and on and on.

The bottom line is, if you're always wanted to see your face lighting up the big screen, but don't have training, a sparkling smile or an agent, you can still leap into film heaven, Texas extra style and make about $50 for your trouble. The process is simple. Call the Texas Film Commission's production hotline (512-463-7799), send in a photograph and wait by the telephone like an anxious teenager.

Both "Varsity Blues" and "The Faculty" shot all-night crowd scenes in high school football stadiums, so most extra hopefuls didn't have to wait long this past summer for "the call."

But the about 50 extras who showed up at 7 a.m. at the Landing Strip topless bar for the "Varsity Blues" shoot knew their chances were much better for the ultimate payoff--actual, though likely fuzzy, face time on screen.

The trade off is tedium mixed with a heavy dose of sweat. Filming proves a process of hurry up and wait, and when the cameras do roll, the air conditioner is turned off to extinguish unnecessary noise.

Since "Varsity Blues" is an MTV production, many on the crew, including those in extras casting, came straight from "Austin Stories," the network's aborted attempt at a sitcom. Other crew members knew each other from the sets of such other recent films as "The Newton Boys."

In this scene, high school football players go to a topless bar and catch their attractive English teacher moonlighting on stage.

Female extras are dancers and waitresses, while males are assigned seats around the stage as club patrons. The confusion comes in separating reality from make-believe. Many of the women portraying dancers are experienced performers from area strip clubs, one works in the mortgage field.

A menacing bouncer dressed in black with his long hair slicked back suddenly ejects one of the rowdy football players from the stage. Other extras shy away from him when the camera isn't rolling, but this is a carefully planned look for a Dallas actor trying to break into the big time.

At their tables, extras pretend to drink from empty beer bottles as a machine called a Lightning Flash pumps 40,000 watts of strobe light at them and at mirrors that ring the stage. They are told looking at the lights could be dangerous, but find completely avoiding the flashes impossible.

Machines cloud the air with insubstantial, almost odorless smoke meant to represent the output of hundred of cigarettes. Crew members don white masks, but extras are left to tough it out and whoop it up again and again for the dancers on stage.

By mid-afternoon, the heat in the nightclub, which features the cockpit of an airplane "crashing" through the wall into the bar, is unbearable. Between shots the air conditioner comes back on, but barely makes a dent in the smoky blaze. Caan and van der Beek retreat to the only cool area of the building--the restrooms.

Meanwhile, extras spent breaks lolling around the Landing Strip ticket booth, behind which were posted Polaroids of people who have been banned for the topless bar for life. The reasons were sadly scrawled underneath each photo: “exposed self” said one, “went home with a customer,” said a shot of a dancer. I was entranced by a shot of an obviously drunk and angry tree trunk of a man being forcibly posed for a photo with the aid of two beefy men. Underneath, the obvious: “Started fight.”

Back on the set, the same scene is shot again and again from different angles. Late in the day the camera is turned toward a pair of thirtyish men in business suits at a table to the right of the stage. One is taking a day off from his life in real estate but confesses a burning desire to write screenplays. The other is between temporary jobs.

When the assistant director signals the cameras to roll (Robbins, best known as Eric on television's "Head of the Class," watches through a monitor in the next room), the men break into wide grins and clink their bottles together before taking big swigs of imaginary beer. On stage the blonde dancer swings from a pole as the strobe lights flash. For this one moment, they are all stars.

This free-lance article originally appeared in the San Antonio Express-News. All rights retained by the author.