There are lots of Joe O'Connells out there. I think this one is a stand-up comedian who is also sometimes listed as Joey O'Connell. (Not to be confused with my cousin Joey whose daughter Lauren O'Connell was on Survivor!)
Once before I had to alert folks this Joe is not me. IMDB has him in my credits list for Bob Hearts Abishola, one of those formulaic TV series that seem to be from decades ago. This Joe is good friends with the show's star Billy Gardell.
I'm posting this photo so IMDB will get the hint and move him to the correct spot...
Judge's latest film stars Jason Bateman as the owner of a flavor extract company who must deal with clueless employees and a listless marriage.
The look of the factory
was inspired by the former Adam's Extract plant in Austin (the company
is now in Gonzales), but the quirky characters came from Judge's
imagination mixed with his own factory experiences.
“I
worked in a place in Albuquerque that made honor snacks” (cardboard
vending cartons stocked with candy and chips), he said. “A guy came up
to me my first day and looked at me very seriously, like he was going to
lay some wisdom on me, and said (Judge's voice deepens): ‘I started
here too as Manpower, only I did 40 crates a day. I'm full-time now.'”
A version of that odd character who takes his job way too seriously
makes it into the film, which Judge calls “the inverse of Office Space
but still about the working place.”
“I'd
always been the employee,” Judge said from a suite overlooking Lady Bird
Lake at Austin's Four Seasons Hotel, where he was meeting with the
media about the new film, which opens Friday. “When Beavis and Butt-head
happened, I went from never having anyone work for me to having 50 to
90 people at any given time working for me. When that first happens, you
want to be a nice boss. Then you get taken advantage of. You have to
find a balance there.
“I thought it would be fun to see it from the point of view of the guy who runs the place.”
This is reflected in Extract
when Bateman's character runs up against employees endlessly
complaining or — in the case of a character Judge portrays — offering
inane advice presented as wisdom.
Building a following
Judge conceived the story directly after Office Space came out in 1999, but Fox execs thought Idiocracy, which tells of a dumbed-down future where corporations rule, had more commercial potential.
Neither Office Space nor Idiocracy found big-screen audiences. Office Space instead built a following on video, selling 2.3 million copies between 1999 and 2003.
The
video success “was really sweet for me because I had to fight so hard to
get that movie the way I wanted it,” Judge said. “After all those
battles, having it not do well at the box office was kind of hard to
take. I could just hear (studio executives) all going, ‘You see? We told
you so.'”
He co-wrote Idiocracy as his last obligation to Fox. “However many years it took for Idiocracy (which was barely released in 2006) to happen, Office Space just kept growing and growing and making more money.”
In his spare time, Judge rewrote Extract with Bateman (from TV's Arrested Development) in mind to star. Judge and his producing partners on the long-running animated sitcom King of the Hill, John Altschuler and David Krinsky, decided to make Extract with private financing out of major studio clutches. Miramax later signed on for domestic distribution.
Filmed in Los Angeles
Extract
is the first of Judge's three live-action films not shot in the Austin
area, but instead in Los Angeles, a decision he said was purely
financial.
His next project, Brigadier Gerard, could well shoot in Central Texas. He will produce, not direct the movie, which is based on an Arthur Conan Doyle short story.
Judge, who grew up in Albuquerque, has called Austin home since the early '90s.
He said he enjoys
fishing on his land in nearby Elgin and going out to support musician
friends playing in Austin, a city he described as small enough to be
comfortable but with everything he needs, including ample advice from
filmmaking friends Robert Rodriguez and Richard Linklater.
Judge took a circuitous route to a filmmaking career. He has a physics degree from the University of California-San Diego
and worked as an engineer at a string of companies — including one in
San Diego that had him working on electronic systems for F-18 fighter
jets.
He also was a bass player touring with Dallas-based blues artists Anson Funderburgh and Doyle Bramhall. While living in Dallas, he did the first crude animations that resulted in Beavis and Butt-head, characters he doesn't rule out reviving.
“Now with Facebook, I've reconnected with a lot of people I knew in high school,” he said.
“Everybody thinks I
based Butt-head on them, or they're afraid that I did. It wasn't anybody
in particular, but I get that all the time.”
Joe O'Connell is a freelance writer living in Austin.
Writing has become a family affair for prolific East Texas author Joe R. Lansdale.
He's jointly penned fiction with his son Keith, his
daughter Kasey edited the new horror anthology “Impossible Monsters,”
which includes a Lansdale story, and the voice guiding the writer's
latest novel “The Thicket” is his father's.
“It's the way he told stories,” Lansdale said of his father, who was
born in 1909 and was 42 when his son was born. “He had a beautiful
voice. He couldn't read or write, but he was a masterful storyteller.”
“The Thicket” is a western set at the turn of the last century narrated by 16-year-old Jack Parker.
Lansdale said the story came to him with what is the book's first
paragraph: “I didn't suspect the day Grandfather came out and got me and
my sister, Lula, and hauled us off toward the ferry that I'd soon end
up with worse things happening than had already come upon us and that
I'd take up with a gun-shooting dwarf, the son of a slave, and a big
angry hog, let alone find true love and kill someone, but that's exactly
how it was.”
Lansdale doesn't plot his novels and doesn't stick to one genre. He's
known for writing horror, mystery, science fiction, even comic books.
“I always write like the devil's behind me with a whip,” he said.
“I'm going to write because I like it. Then I'm going to write another.”
“The Thicket” has the excitement of Lansdale's pulpier
works, but there's an underlying literary element here that marks the
author as perhaps Texas' finest contemporary writer.
The novel easily draws comparisons to Charles Portis' “True Grit,” given Parker's quest with the help of his mismatched comrades to rescue his sister from bad men.
ut, like a lot of Lansdale's work, Mark Twain lurks.
“Twain is my keystone,” he said. “He reminds me of my people because that's the way they told stories.”
For Lansdale that means a lot of humor, violence and no flinching at tough subjects — particularly racism.
“One of the things I really despise these days in fiction
is political correctness, especially if I'm writing about the past,” he
said. “That's a way of showing you what it was like. People get upset
about certain words used. I don't use those words in my life, but people
did. And for you to think, 'If I just take that word out it'll be OK,'
well, it makes it mean that it never happened, and it did happen. It
disturbed me so much that probably 95 percent of my fiction is affected
by it. I really hate racism because I saw people denied possibilities.”
Lansdale had more Southern gothic in mind a la Flannery O'Connor
than he did Western with “The Thicket.” It's full of crisp and funny
dialogue (“That's the way I talk,” he said) and over-the-top characters
very much in the mold of his father, who could crush an apple in his
hand, bust a belt with his chest and fought at carnivals during the
Great Depression. He also was, at least on the surface, a racist.
“His racist rhetoric was about the worst I'd heard, but
he still treated people the same,” Lansdale said. “My dad was raised in
that environment, so he had that generalization. But when he dealt with
people individually he didn't feel that way. I know a lot of people who
have the right words but not the right actions. He's still my hero in
spite of that flaw. His reality and the way he proceeded with his life
is pretty much how I proceed with mine.”
The outsider is well represented in “The Thicket” by
ex-slave grave digger Eustace, and Shorty, a bounty-hunting dwarf.
Neither is anyone's fool. But there is evil lurking in this finely drawn
work as well.
The San Antonio native's “Nothing to Lose” is a mystery novel set in Beaumont where Sanderson, chair of Lamar University's Department of English
and Modern Languages, has long taught writing. The story collection
“Trashy Behavior” is primarily set in Odessa, where he was a college
instructor for seven years before that.
Sanderson evokes the names of other Texas writers — Tom Pilkington, J. Frank Dobie and Billy Lee Brammer — who saw the state as a borderland with a mindset focused on the “end of things.”
“Within 200 miles in much of any direction you're almost in a
different state,” he said. “The geography changes, the culture even
changes a little.
“Odessa has a Westerness to it, a Southwesterness. People
are laconic and slow-talking. They accept things. In East Texas there's
a sense of irony. Life is tough, and there's a tough, mean God out
there.”
Sanderson's Beaumont is the land of the three P's: pine, petroleum and
Pentecostals, where the claustrophobia of the swampland and the
oppressive heat conspire to push the “Baptists behind gated communities
to avoid sin, while the Pentecostals are not afraid to testify,” he
said.
“There's an old saying that things in West Texas can kill you, but in East Texas they just make you wish you were dead.”
Both books are gritty and real with stories steered by those who are on the margins of society.
In “Nothing to Lose,” Roger Jackson
is a small-time private eye who spends most of his free time at the
Nothing to Lose bar, which is a mangled version of East Texas native Janis Joplin's famous lyric (as written by Kris Kristofferson): “Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.”
It's a theme that flows through Sanderson's work: The people who are
on the edges of society. He writes in the novel that “we didn't duck
life, as our social and financial betters did, but we were very wary of
it. We knew, eventually, life would just beat us down.”
Sanderson's fictional worlds abound with potential.
“I'm writing about the losers, the ne'er-do-wells, the people who
almost, could of, maybe done it,” he said. “I'm always attracted to
those stories, those people. It's one reason I don't like superheroes. I
don't like people who are all-powerful.”
In “Trashy Behavior,” that includes a prostitute turned
bar owner with a gripping story behind the scar that snakes across her
face. That story and a few others from the book set in the Odessa oil
boom and bust years of the late '70s and early '80s are being reworked
into another novel on the horizon.
In the '60s San Antonio-set story “Bankers,” inspired by his
part-time bank jobs while in high school and later at what was then Southwest Texas State University, Sanderson writes of a teen who is “mostly waiting on my future to find me” but is instead thrust into danger.
“In most of my stories, a character has to confront
something,” he said. The collection's strongest story may well be the
gripping Western “Comancheria,” in which a boy Sanderson describes as
being potentially autistic gets caught among the languages of his
German immigrant family, the Comanches who brutally capture him and the
English-speaking soldiers who save him. Back home in school “not only
did he not trust the Deutsch and American words ... but he distrusted
what the words meant.”
Jim Sanderson
grew up in San Antonio dreaming of escape. Today he's on the short list
of accomplished authors who most effectively evoke the city's essence.
His latest literary mystery, “Dolph's Team,” opens with a
group of middle-aged men drinking beer and telling lies at a South Side
ice house. One of them is murdered in the restroom, and the crew set
out to right the wrong with nothing but a Taser, their reading glasses, a
few beers and a lot of reminiscing about a city constantly evolving.
“There are in fact three San Antonios to me,” said Sanderson, 58, a writing professor at Lamar University
in Beaumont. “The first is the town that I remember. It is a part of
me. It is vivid, even if my memory is faulty — thus, I can remember it
like I want to. The second is the historic San Antonio. I don't mean
just the big incidents of the city, but its growth into what it is
today. The third is the nearly million-population city of today.”
“Dolph's Team,” about a group of aging friends from both sides of the
law investigating the (seemingly) cut-and-dried murder of a friend, is
the fourth Sanderson mystery. He's also an accomplished short story
writer, and many of the characters in the new novel also appear both in
his other mysteries and his most recent story collection “Faded Love.” A
recurring theme is the almosts of life, or, as
writer-turned-bug-exterminator Walter tells the reader: “the importance
of what could have happened.”
“At writers' conferences,” says Sanderson, “we talk about
how the publishing world has changed — or has died. Self-pity and
gallows humor are served at these conferences as desert. So I'm always
reminded that I'm an aging/outsider/loser. But I think that this
disenchantment is a part of growing up. I think that we all feel that
way. I just like to write about characters who really are aging
outsiders who've missed their opportunities.”
His recurring characters give his collective work a view of how lives evolve.
“I'm confirming what I first thought about fiction: It is
the best medium for dealing with time, showing the past and present
working simultaneously,” he said. “So in my stories, no matter how long
they are, I try to show that my characters have a future — in terms of
their hopes, ambitions, loves — and a past, but are stuck in the present
of the story.”
Sanderson cites as a major writing influence the late Three Rivers native James Crumley for his twisting of tried-and-true mystery conventions, and for his sense of place.
San Antonio is indeed a character in “Dolph's Team.” The character Rodney Lee,
a city councilman dreaming of being the city's first black mayor,
epitomizes the ambition of a poor boy from the East Side. Meanwhile,
Dolph, Walter and crew watched Southtown evolve into a trendy spot for
artists. Sanderson's San Antonio clearly evokes his South Side
upbringing.
“There was a mixture of ethnicities, races and income
levels,” he said. “But we were united in feeling that we were outshone
by the North Side. We weren't the cool kids. We didn't have the cool
stuff. We mocked our ethnicities and our backgrounds, but the mocking
was adolescent games. And I think that we came out of that time seeing
those problems as the source of games or humor. Thus we couldn't take
the prejudices that we grew up among seriously.”
Bret Anthony Johnston's
fiction shapes Corpus Christi into a literary character, but he has a
confession: He hates the beach. The sand itches; the salt water clings.
“I never felt the pull that everyone else had,” Johnston
said by phone from New York City, his latest stop on a whirlwind
national tour for “Remember Me Like This,” a deeply human novel that
follows a broken, battered family dealing with the return of a son four
years after his kidnapping in a fictional Corpus Christi suburb.
The beach may get short shrift, but the Sparkling City by the Sea glistens in Johnston's taut prose.
“The longer I'm away from South Texas in general and Corpus Christi
specifically, the more clearly I see potential for stories that can only
happen there,” said Johnston, who was born and raised in the city but
now directs the creative writing program at Harvard University.
Stand on Ocean Drive and look at the water and tourists,
he said. Pivot to the south and you've got soldiers and sailors. Pivot
again and see farmers. One last turn and you see a downtown trying
desperately to reinvent itself.
But most of all it's the weather. The distinct, overpowering heat that
pulls you down. The threat of a distant storm that ever looms.
“I wanted the weather to in some way mirror what the family was going
through,” Johnston said. “They can't escape everything that has
happened to the family in the same way people in Corpus Christi can't
escape the heat.”
The novel drills into the fractures the kidnapping has
created in the family and how they have learned to cope. The mother
volunteers at night to keep watch on an injured dolphin. The father
turns to a lover for distraction. The younger son masters the skateboard
that his brother left behind (and that Johnston in a previous
incarnation rode in a brief professional skateboarding career). When the
missing boy returns, they must cobble together a changed life in the
aftermath of their personal storm.
“You never know when one of these storms is going to hit you,”
Johnston said of the novel's greater metaphor. “When it does, you can
tell a lot about a person by how they handle the storm. Do they put up
plywood on the windows or do they hit the road?”
“That changed my life,” Johnston said. “I left knowing this is what I
want to do — I want to tell stories. That's what I'm still trying to
do.”
He grew up in a household where reading books was the
norm, but had no notion that he could write them. In May, Johnston
returned to Corpus Christi to read in that same author series.
After degrees from Texas A&M-Corpus Christi and Miami University,
Johnston found himself at the famed Iowa Writers Workshop where he
completed stories that would make it into his 2004 debut collection
“Corpus Christi.”
“Remember Me Like This” can trace its seeds to Johnston's
volunteer work decades ago in Corpus Christi with an injured dolphin,
which left him with a mystery. He was told the night shift with the
dolphin was the hardest to fill, yet the shift was always taken. Then
someone brought in a beach ball for the dolphin. Over the years he
pondered who would so strongly desire to work the night shift. Then it
came to him: A mother who had lost her child. The ball belonged to that
child.
“The beach ball was full of her son's breath,” Johnston
said. “She brought it in to save the dolphin since she hadn't saved her
son.”
Six years of writing, frustration, breaks to pen short stories, more writing and rewriting later he had a novel.
“Many people say the book is about being lost; I think it's about
being found,” Johnston said. “We all want to believe the lost will find
their way home.”
While Johnston revels in the creation process, he sees writing as a vocation.
“I find writing incredibly difficult. What makes me come
back is the pleasure of the sentence,” he said. “I don't romanticize
being a writer at all. I think of writing as labor. I don't believe in
muse or inspiration. I believe in going to work. It's the same as if I
worked at the Naval Air Station. I clock in and clock out when the work is done.”
It's not easy being a 21st-century male. The silent, hardworking
breadwinning dad of the past still lurks, but his sons have to find
their way in a new world of open communication and shared
responsibility.
Author Kevin Grauke
examines this change in the 13 stories that make up his tautly written,
thoughtful debut collection, “Shadows of Men,” which recently won the Texas Institute of Letters' Steven Turner Award for best first published book of fiction.
“The definition of masculinity has changed in the last several decades,”
said Grauke, who received a master's degree in creative writing from Texas State University and now teaches at La Salle University
in Philadelphia. “We have households with two incomes, households with
women earning more than men. There's a sharing of domestic duties, of
parenting duties, a flattening of gender roles. That's very good, but it
also creates stress.”
Grauke's men band together to drink beer and lament their low sperm
counts. They grapple for a sense of identity after losing their jobs.
They sometimes live with their mothers.
“It's hard to completely disengage from the myth of the
man and what that means,” Grauke said, “especially in Texas, where there
are those other layers of machismo — ranchers, cowboys. Whether you
have those in your personal family history, it's there in the culture.”
The stories are set in a Texas that reflects Grauke's childhood in
Garland. Arguably the collection's strongest piece is “The New Father,”
in which a stay-at-home dad roams his North Texas subdivision
fantasizing that behind each closed door a mother both admires and lusts
after him. He walks streets named for Texas heroes such as Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie,
but his world would prove alien to those icons. Then a real-life mom
recklessly speeds past his baby carriage and isn't pleased when he calls
her on it. He later plots a clumsy form of revenge, but the minor guilt
twists like a knife inside of him.
“He wants to do something that asserts the role he
relinquished when he wasn't paying attention,” Grauke said. “He has a
desire to be heroic, but there's an impotence that goes along with it.”
In “With the Snow,” a haunting story that channels Richard Ford,
a young man caught up in a world of drugs and desperation attempts to
save a girl who may or may not be in a drug coma, but he instead leaves
her behind.
“There's a continuing notion of wanting to fulfill that mythic
masculinity, that heroism,” Grauke said, “but the opportunities to do
that are limited. He almost does the heroic, but those rescuing moments
are rare. Yet we still desire them.”
Grauke leaned on an older story of masculinity in the suburbs — John Cheever's “The Housebreakers of Shady Hill” — for inspiration when he settled on the theme for his work.
“It seemed to bring the stories together to be something a little larger than they were on their own,” he said.
The author left his native Texas a decade ago, but it
clearly has not left him. He's at work on a collection of linked stories
set in small-town West Texas, the home of his parents.
“I think of the difference between them and some coddled students,” said Leche, who now teaches at Austin Community College. “They were so appreciative to have teachers there.”
Leche spent a year teaching in Afghanistan for the University of Maryland,
which has offered college classes in the field for American soldiers
since the Vietnam War. Halfway through the experience she had a light
bulb moment when one student said, “I wish people knew what it's really
like to be a soldier.”
Thus was born “Outside the Wire: American Soldiers' Voices from
Afghanistan,” a book of essays by soldiers and their loved ones who aim
to walk us through the experience from recruitment to horror to honor.
“It struck me that I could help these students to be heard, give them
a chance to connect with the public in a visceral way about what goes
on: the good and bad, the funny and sad,” Leche said. “For a lot of
Americans, the military is an abstraction. Soldiers realize that.”
In other words, we may honor our soldiers, but do we truly understand them and their experiences?
Sgt. First Class Michael Bramlett writes of “The Great Voice,” the public address system that emits a monotone phrase: “The aerial gunnery range is now hot.”
“Do any of us really know what the hell this means?” Bramlett says in
an essay titled “B-Hut Blues.” He knows loud booms will follow while he
looks up with reverence at the 3-by-5-foot American flag on the wall
near photos of his wife and children. Yet his national pride is mixed
with sorrow. He soon learns a mortar hit a couple of B-huts away. He
tries to sleep, but cannot.
“It's beautiful and terrible to wear that uniform,” said
Leche, who when her husband's job took them to Germany in the 1990s
first volunteered to teach in war-torn Bosnia and knew she had found her
calling. “They gain a life — the military is a life — but they risk
losing their lives.”
They also face the losses involved with not being there, like in Sgt. Christopher Williams' piece “My Great Sadness,” which tells of discovering over the phone that his wife had died in her sleep so many miles away.
Perhaps most powerful is Specialist Andrew Stock
of Austin's piece, “The Hate,” a poetic meditation on the moment when a
soldier must pull the trigger. “The tragedy of war is the realization
that it would be all too easy to exterminate everything,” Stock writes.
An anonymous soldier illustrates this in “They Were Just Kids” with
the moment waving children refuse to get out of the way of the Humvee
she is in. The driver doesn't dare stop for fear it's a Taliban trap. “We roll through,” the soldier writes. “Not even a glance back.”
Leche terms it the “humble ambiguity of being human
yourself but having to forget that the enemy is human in order to kill
them. Some soldiers say they want to kill all those (enemies), but what
they really mean is I don't want to be killed by (them).”
I'm a writer, documentary filmmaker and photographer. My novel Evacuation Plan is about life/death in a residential hospice and is inspired by time spent observing an actual hospice. This is my older blog. See more about me at joeoconnell.com
