Huntsville novel takes readers behind bars

Novelist Trow calls on her Huntsville experience for fiction debut

Joe O’Connell, For the Express-News

Jan. 9, 2016

Lisa Trow was teaching creative writing to Huntsville prison inmates when she noticed the obsession lurking behind some of their work.

The men would pen love poems to female attorneys or medical professionals whom they’d barely met.

“They’d fixate on these women as symbols of hope for the future,” she recalled in a recent interview. “It was all unrequited. It was just a distraction they would indulge in.”

That obsession is at the heart of Trow’s debut novel “Sign of Redemption,” in which accountant Richie Harrison is wrongly accused of armed robbery and finds himself behind bars.

His sign-language skills enable him to interpret a conversation between a deaf inmate and attorney Elizabeth McKenna.

Harrison’s growing obsession with her sparks his prison escape and escalates into violence as he tracks McKenna down in Austin and eventually kidnaps her.

As a reporter covering death row for the Huntsville Item (she also had two stints as the paper’s managing editor), Trow came to the story with first-hand experience.

“A capitol murderer fixated on me,” she said. “I had to ask the warden to ask him to stop writing me. It wasn’t flattering at all. It was gross and creepy.”

Harrison’s obsession is more nuanced and decidedly more human, mainly because Trow decides to have him narrate the tale as a man drifting near the point of no return.

Trow writes in Harrison’s voice: “When I first got sent down, I thought about escaping every day, and every day I thought of the bullet that would pierce my back and exit through my breastbone in a bloody spray. I thought of myself tumbling out of a dead run, my legs buckling, my face hitting the pavement. Maybe I’m just a coward if all it takes to make a coward is a vivid imagination. But I wasn’t here long before I found out what it sounded like when the blood left the body in gurgling rushes.

Behind bars, Harrison realizes that “there was some mysterious force that took over in these tragedies and became both writer and director to a cast of helpless actors.”

“If your narrator is a prisoner, he’s going to be unreliable,” Trow explained. “You could go into prison rational, but the experience of prison would corrupt you. It’s a bizarro world. Everyone assumes you’re worthless and up to no good. You are surrounded by people you have to be afraid of. To survive you have to learn to lie and you must act to protect yourself.”

“Sign of Redemption” was 20 years in the writing, morphing at one point into a Quentin Tarantino-esque screenplay.

It took so long, in part, because most of that time, Trow was a single parent working full time.

But she rejected efforts to buy her story idea and instead tried to teach herself to write a novel. She got stuck, and the partially completed book languished for years.

“Those urges to create don’t go away,” she said. “I felt I was letting the story beat me. Because it was now or never, I started to work again.”

he result is a nuanced, well-crafted tale that brings together both Trow’s journalistic skills of observation and her creative skills honed while earning a master’s degree in writing poetry.

“You have many, many more crayons writing fiction than journalism,” she said. “But there are things to borrow from journalism, like the use of dialogue. Somebody said that if you cross poetry and journalism you create novelists.”

Prison was a natural subject matter for Trow, whose first days as a Sam Houston State University student were marred by the 1974 Carrasco prison siege in which inmates took prison workers hostage. She heard the gunfire from her dorm room.

Meeting poet Grady Hillman and assisting him with his 1983 documentary film “Lions, Parakeets and Other Prisoners” led Trow to teaching writing in prison, where she once experienced a lockdown.

“The prison SWAT team came through,” she said. “You could hear the thunder of boots from the team, then hear them recede.”

And Trow had the personal heartache of marrying a seemingly reformed ex-con who later went back to his old ways.

Richie is not based on her ex-husband, she said, but through the relationship, she did get access to unfiltered information about real prison life.

In the end, the novel aims a spotlight at a corner of humanity we often ignore.

“I had this romantic idea of making the ordinary beautiful while also trying to make ugly things lyrical,” Trow said. “Those two notions are what drive me to tell stories the way I tell them.”

Joe O’Connell is a Texas writer.

Former slave passes as Mexican millionaire

Joe O’Connell, For the Express-News

June 11, 2016

Historian Karl Jacoby was driving near the Texas-Mexico border when he was stopped by the U.S. Border Patrol, the agency charged with keeping Mexicans out of the United States.

He explained, to their dismay, that he was writing a book about a Texan who had tried desperately to cross into Mexico.

In the completed book, “The Strange Career of William Ellis,” Jacoby has pieced together of the life a former slave who transformed himself into a wealthy Mexican.

Ellis was born to a mixed-race mother on a cotton plantation in Victoria one year before slavery ended, but found transformation in San Antonio, then the hub of commerce between the United States and Mexico.

“He was born ‘in between’ in multiple ways,” Jacoby said. “There was this fault line between slavery and freedom and what that might mean. There was also a fault line between the United States and Mexico.”

Both nations were courting immigrants as business boomed in the Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century.

“Victoria was the outer fringe,where the Mexican ranching frontier and United States cotton culture met,” Jacoby said. “San Antonio was the hub of transport across the border to Monterrey. Then the trains came and opened it up, and everything exploded.”

Ellis had a knack for language and soon served as an interpreter while working in the leather and wool trade.

“It’s remarkable — the boldness of what he did,” Jacoby said. “It’s easy to locate in historical records — he took out a full page ad in the city directory. He flipped the script. Instead of being a worker in someone’s store, all of a sudden he was running a large concern and doing it quite publicly.”

The newly renamed Guillermo Eliseo set up shop in the center of downtown commerce — Military Plaza.

“He wasn’t hiding on the outskirts,” Jacoby said. “He was out in the open.”

That was important to Ellis/Eliseo’s success, said the author, who teaches at Columbia University.

Slaves from Texas, Louisiana and New Mexico had been escaping in large numbers across the border to Mexico.

After being granted their freedom, African-Americans were quickly mired in Jim Crow laws that largely nullified it.

“Ellis was code-shifting,” Jacoby said. “While ‘passing’ is to completely surrender yourself to a new identity, he was strategically moving back and forth. He would rupture the stereotype of the African-American and play on the stereotype of the Mexican, so he could make his way in this world.”

Ellis’ brother-in-law was the only African-American physician in San Antonio at the time and lived just a few blocks from Ellis, but in the city directory a C next to the doctor’s name signified him as “colored.” In a San Antonio that was then a third Tejano, no such C appeared initially by Ellis/Eliseo’s name.

Ellis kept one foot in his African-American past through heavy involvement in the largely black Republican Party, but it proved his undoing, Jacoby said.

When the dots were finally connected between the freed slave and the Mexican businessman, Ellis vanished, only to reappear in New York City as an even more flamboyant Mexican businessman, this time on Wall Street.

The book plays on the trickster of African-American fiction, Jacoby said.

“The trickster is a character who simultaneously creates order and disorder,” Jacoby said. “In doing so, the trickster shows you where the boundaries are. Ellis was able to transgress every boundary U.S. culture tried to place on him.”

His dual life also reflected the differing views on race in the United States, where a single drop of African-American blood classified a person as black, and Mexico, where the mixed race Mestizo was revered, Jacoby said. Despite its own history of slavery, Mexico disavowed the concept long before the United States.

“It all underscores how basically fictional race is,” Jacoby said.

The book presents Ellis as a dreamer/schemer whose big plans proved as much fantasy as fact.

Jacoby’s initial interest in Ellis was sparked as a graduate student when he read of a plan Ellis organized to bring freed U.S. slaves to Mexico as sharecroppers. The plan eventually failed.

Ellis did have some success with controlling water companies in New York, but his far-flung adventures also included business failures, near misses and intrigue. His early trade negotiations with Ethiopia even brought him under suspicion of a murder that Jacoby gives little credence.

“You could never have made this story up,” Jacoby said of Ellis’s life. “What I love about history is its capacity to surprise me. When you can grasp the unexpected, it makes you reconsider your conceptions of the past.”

Joe O’Connell is a Texas writer.

Hinojosa-Smith honored for series on border life

 Joe O'Connell, For the Express-News March 21, 2014

Rolondo Hinojosa-Smith. Photo by Joe O'Connell

AUSTIN — Rolando Hinojosa-Smith chose to set his fictionalized Texas-Mexico border world in Klail City because there is no k in the Spanish language.

“It shows the Anglo side — the people who have taken over the land,” he said.

The first volume of the “Klail City Death Trip” series appeared in the '70s. Hinojosa-Smith is now at work on the 16th and what he expects to be the final series book. The novels and their world recently garnered him the National Book Critics Circle's Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.

“I was speechless,” he said of the call informing him of the award.

In late April, Houston's Arte Público Press will republish — in a never-available bilingual edition — his classic early '70s novel “The Valley/Estampas del valle,” the first in the Klail City cycle, which won a national Chicano literature award, Premio Quinto Sol, in 1972. Four years later, he won the highest award for the novel in Latin America, the Premio Casas de las Americas.

Hinojosa-Smith's work has been compared to William Faulkner's and the fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi. He humbly dismisses that, yet he often quotes Faulkner to his creative writing students at the University of Texas at Austin: “Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”

Born in 1929, Hinojosa-Smith wrote his first story — in Spanish — at 16 while spending a World War II summer with family in the small Mexican town Arteaga. The tale was about farm workers who come home and are pressed into military service. He lost the manuscript, then his mother found it and he lost it again, but it set a tone for what would come.

He is anonymous on the bus he rides to the University of Texas with book in hand and his mind often on the next story. By 7 a.m. each weekday he arrives at the same small office in UT's Parlin Hall he has occupied for more than 30 years. Colorful paper flowers decorate the wall — his daughter put them up two decades ago when she was an undergrad at the school.

Parlin Hall's bluish tile walls evoke its 1954 opening, which came after Hinojosa-Smith's own UT days as a member of the elite Tejas Club. He attended on the G.I. Bill after Army service spent largely in Puerto Rico as a military newspaper reporter and an Armed Forces Radio announcer called Rocky the Disc Jockey.

The UT campus was a big leap for a boy from Mercedes in the Rio Grande Valley, the model for Klail City, which resides in Belken County — meant as a stand-in for four border counties combined.

But his childhood home was filled with books. His Anglo mother was a teacher like her mother before her. His father had fought in the Mexican Revolution and loved to tell stories. The house was filled with a constant flow of Spanish and English. Four of the five children — Rolando was the baby — became teachers. His first creative works saw print in a high school publication called Creative Bits.

That mixed heritage imbues richness to the “Klail City Death Trap” series, which has Mexican-American and Anglo kids in conflict, and Mexican and Anglo politicians melding into one breed.

“There are fools on both sides of the fence,” he said.

Hinojosa-Smith figures he's got a few more years in the classroom, but he has no plans to stop writing. He used to write in longhand, with only his first novel composed in Spanish. These days he uses a computer, typing in English and later translating his own work to Spanish.

He travels home frequently and recently gave the convocation at his alma mater, Mercedes High School. He told students of how their town contributed to World War II, with 16 boys lost in the war and another 16 gone later from wounds they suffered.

It's the story of the Rio Grande Valley that has sustained him, fascinated him as a writer for decades.

“Sure, I'll keep writing,” he said. “I'd like to write something else than the series.”

His writing advice? “Don't fall in love with your writing. If it's good, you'll know.”

Joe O'Connell is an Austin writer.

Punks lost in time

Generation without a definition still remembers. Quietly

O'Connell, Joe.

Austin American Statesman; Austin, Tex. [Austin, Tex]. 12 Jan 1995

My signed Devo collectible.

Talk about a lost generation. At 34, I'm in a bracket the pop culture moguls forgot to define. I'm a baby boomer, you say? Technically, since I was born before that arbitrary cutoff line of 1964. But isn't that a group of '60s radicals who grew their hair long, popularized bell-bottoms and listened to the Beatles?

Sorry, the '60s opened with me in diapers and ended with me transformed into an avid collector of Monkees bubble gum cards. Sure, I listened to the Beatles. My sisters and I turned the transistor radio up loud and rocked until nap time. Groovy. As for protests, the closest I came was the third-grade play. My dead-on impersonation of President Lyndon Johnson got me the role of a lifetime: the commander-in-chief who died of air pollution. Ah-choo.

A member of Generation X? Those born in 1961 and later? I think not, dude. Douglas Copeland, the author who popularized this most annoying of terms, might be about my age, but just mentioning a transistor radio should disqualify me. That and not having a tatoo or a pierced nipple. And Xers did the unforgivable by glorifying the '60s, Boy George and disco (though they had to dub it "trash disco" to qualify it as kitsch).

My recent experience with a member of the angst-ridden group of twentysomethings should close the case. Here's the scene: I had a need only she could fill. Thirty minutes after phoning her, she knocked on my door. I welcomed her supple frame into my humble abode. God, she smelled spicy. Her eyes lit up as she spied the high-tech electronic gear in my living room. It was clear I had her attention. I waited for the adoration to flow from her lips. "A turntable?" she squeaked. "You have records? Cool. I've read about those." I was afraid she might report me to the MTV police, so I quickly ended our discussion. I gave her cash, took the pizza from her nubile hands and drowned my sorrow in pepperoni.

So, if I'm not a Boomer and not a Buster, what I am? This is the question that perplexes those of us caught in that hazy line between two generations of bell-bottoms wearers. Oh, we hide it well. Those of us who made it into corporate America with only nicks and bruises claim to be cash-hungry baby boomers and try to look enthusiastic when those Woodstock and Vietnam tales come up again and again ("Charlie let off a blast that tore my sergeant's head off. We just loaded up the bong again and grooved").

The hazy-liners who got caught in the crunch of tough economic times - recent studies show that all of the boomers EXCEPT those on the tail end of the generation are doing just fine financially, thank you - have learned to love grunge and have tried to hide the fact that those trendy flannel shirts we're wearing have been in the backs of our closets (where the button-downs are now) since high school. We pretend to welcome the disco revival and don't admit we only tolerated it the first time to get laid.

We've been living a lie, and it's time to come clean. We're not baby boomers and we're not Generation X. To both of you we have this to say: Jim Morrison bores us. We refuse to wear Birkenstock sandals. Eating a hamburger and fries occasionally is not a mortal sin. Your two generations combined gave us political correctness and Neil Young. Take it all; we're fed up.

My generation's problem is a lack of definition. We contain traits from both of our better-publicized cousins, but we are different. If music defines a generation, then call us the Wavers or the Punks. We came of age in the late '70s and early '80s listening to the Sex Pistols, Devo, Talking Heads, the B-52's, Elvis Costello, the Ramones, etc. Austin Punks still long for the days when the Huns, the Standing Waves and the Skunks drove us to a pogoing frenzy at Raul's and Club Foot. We took from our era's music an attitude, a swagger that said "authority sucks, but just a little."

The Kennedy assassination (sorry, I don't remember where I was then; probably getting potty-trained) defined the boomer youth; Xers' adolescence was indelibly marked by Reagan's colon surgery. Punks were weaned on Nixon and Watergate. Think about it.

Punks were sexually promiscuous before AIDS hit, then we calmed down and kept our mouths shut. We have no problem with the concept of making money, after all, most of us voted for Reagan (we were drunk at the time). But we want more meaning from life than a 40-hour-a-week grind can provide. We waited, and some still are waiting, to get married out of fear of repeating our parents' failures. We are artists and stock brokers. We're probably a lot more liberal or a little more conservative than you imagine us.

Who are the Punks? Woody Harrelson is a prime example. He made a career out of playing a dumb guy on Cheers, but it was all an act. George Stephanopoulos is a Punk, but you already knew that. Remember the Brat Pack: Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Ally Sheedy? Punks one and all. Jerry Seinfeld is stretching the age limit, but his television show is 100 percent Punk: It's all about nothing. Ditto for Ellen DeGeneres. In fact, television in general is Punk, everything except The Brady Bunch, which the Generation Xers have stolen from us and turned into pop art.

Michael Jordan and Carl Lewis are the Punks of sports, but don't tell them I told you. Spike Lee brought our preteen years to the big screen in Crooklyn, and Austinite Richard Linklater glorified our late '70s high school days in Dazed and Confused, but Pulp Fiction's Quentin Tarantino is the Punk who really understands the way we talk and think.

Suddenly we're everywhere, and it is time for the Punks of the world to stand up and be counted. We demand a voice equal to that of the boardroom boomers and the bored Xers. It is time for a publicity campaign to define a generation that can hum the theme song to Room 222 and still worships the Frito Bandito. Soon every magazine and newspaper you read will be brimming with the trials and defining moments of our unique generation. It'll be enough to make you sick.

Joe O'Connell, a graduate student at SWT teaching freshman English, still thinks Pong was a cool video game.

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.