'Carried Away' and blurbed

That Dallas Morning News blurb you see on the cover of the DVD of Tom Huckabee's film Carried Away is from a column written by yours truly back in 2010.

The last time I was blurbed was long ago for Tim McCanlies' Dancer, Texas.

Here's wishing great success to Huckabee and the film. It's set to come out on DVD, video on demand and television through Vanguard Cinema in June.

SHOT IN TEXAS: TV replaces films as local moneymaker

After a 12-year run--the last six in The Dallas Morning News, but previously for both The Austin Chronicle and Austin American-Statesman--this is my final Texas film industry column. I'll still be blogging, but I want to spend more time concentrating on fiction writing and other projects.--Joe


BY JOE O’CONNELL
Special to The Dallas Morning News
Filmnewsbyjoe@yahoo.com
Joeoconnell.com
@joemoconnell

Janis Burklund was in full action mode last week. Khloe Kardashian had, without notice, posted online that she was organizing a toy drive for the Children’s Hospital of Dallas, and Burklund’s Dallas Film Commission office was suddenly besieged with phone calls.

It’s a clear sign of the present and likely future of the Dallas film scene: television rules and reality TV buzzes. Feature films? Not so much.

Lamar Odom’s trade from the Los Angeles Lakers to the Dallas Mavericks brought his Kardashian wife and reality show Khloe & Lamar to town. More than 2,000 people crowded Dallas City Hall to donate toys after her web shout-out.

Meanwhile TNT’s Dallas is bringing some old-school attention to the city with its 10-episode shoot—production is on hiatus until 2012 with three episodes to go.

Burklund’s three-person office can’t afford a proper media tracking service these days, but it only takes a quick web search to see interest in the show that doesn’t air until June.

“It’s been ongoing for about a year with constant news and publicity about the show,” she said. “There’s lot of interest overseas.”

The Dallas Film Commission tracks its fiscal year from September to September, and Burklund is just now getting solid numbers for the last year and slightly more of both plusses and minuses: network television series shoots came and as quickly went with the quick cancellations/non-renewals of Lone Star, The Good Guys and Chase.

The controversial Dallas-set show originally known as Good Christian Bitches, later as Good Christian Belles and most commonly as GCB produced a pilot in North Texas but then retreated to Los Angeles for the series shoot.

“When all three shows didn’t stick, we had to wait for new ones to create again,” Burklund said. “We had to go through another cycle, and luckily Dallas was already in the cycle.”

The commission tracked 292 projects in its last fiscal year, including $73.6 million in direct spends on television and film, plus another $26.3 million in videogame projects. The way that money reverberates around the economy leads to an estimated almost $230 million economic impact.

“It was a good year,” Burklund said. “It was well above the last six or seven years.”

But feature films continue to be a no-show both in North Texas and the state as a whole. Texas film incentives haven’t slowed the flow of projects to states like New Mexico and Louisiana that offer a lot more.

“Our incentives program works best for television,” Burklund said. “Television understands in a different way about having the good crew base, good talent base, diverse locations and easy access through DFW (International Airport). They may be here for years, so they have to think, ‘If all incentives went away today, where would we want to be?’ ”

Feature filmmaking in Texas has thus turned into a mix of low-budget independents and higher-profile projects by primarily Austin-based Texas auteurs like Robert Rodriguez, Richard Linklater and to a lesser extent Mike Judge and Tim McCanlies.

Perhaps add to that list reclusive Austin resident Terrence Malick, who is quickly losing his rep for waiting a decade or more between projects. He shot likely Oscar nominee The Tree of Life largely in Smithville (and partly in Dallas) in 2008 and took three years to release it, but actually shot another as-yet-untitled film starring Ben Affleck in Oklahoma in 2010.

Now Malick has publicly announced two more upcoming projects: Lawless and Knight of Cups. In September he shot scenes with Christian Bale during the Austin City Limits Music Festival, and followed that in November filming Ryan Gosling and Rooney Mara at Austin’s Fun Fun Fun Fest. The shots have been reported to be for Lawless, but Malick never releases plot details or future filming plans if he can help it.

Photos from the set of 'When Angels Sing'

Thanks to the lucky person who made it onto the set of When Angels Sing in Bastrop this past week and granted me permission to post these photos. In the photos you can see Willie Nelson, Connie Britton, Turk Pipkin and--if you squint--director Tim McCanlies.

Connie Britton chats with tall guy Turk Pipkin, on whose story the film is based.


Willie talks to the crew.


Willie Nelson peeks out at the set.


Willie strides into the action.


That's Tim McCanlies in the blue shirt and khaki baseball hat in the middle facing the camera.

Fionnula Flanagan in 'When Angels Sing'

Winner of the award (given out by me) of the sexiest older woman, Fionnula Flanagan is another interesting name to join the cast of Tim McCanlies' directed/Elizabeth Avellan produced When Angels Sing, which is currently filming in Central Austin. The film is based on the book by Turk Pipkin and has a very interesting cast including Harry Connick Jr., Connie Britton, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson (he's been on the set this week), Sara Hickman (singing with her daugther Lili!) and Lyle Lovett. Oh, but unconfirmed reports have that spare Jonas brother out of the film.

See more about the film here. It shoots through March in Austin and Bastrop.

Oh, and for you Connick fans: He will end his film shoot with a show at the Long Center on March 26. Tickets are available here.

Connie Britton starring in 'When Angels Sing'

One name I hadn't heard associated with Tim McCanlies' film adaptation of Turk Pipkin's book When Angels Sing is Friday Night Lights alum Connie Britton. Sounds like an interesting cast, headed by Harry Connick Jr. and featuring such musical actors as Willie Nelson, Lyle Lovett, Sara Hickman and Kris Kristofferson.

You can read more about the film, which is shooting through March, here.

I listened to Britton talk about FNL a while back. You read about that here.

Harry Connick, Kris Kristofferson, a Jonas brother and Willie Nelson make a film?

UPDATE: That should be "a" Jonas brother, as in the youngest one. and Sara Hickman and her daughter are also likely to have a role in this very musical cast.

Extras info is here.

I've been hearing rumblings about the film adaptation of Turk Pipkin's story When Angels Sing, and it looks like it's about to start filming in Bastrop.

A casting call from Beth Sepko Casting & Third Coast Extras for photo doubles today asks for:

Adult Male- light-gray hair 5'9 - 5'11 thin to medium build
Adult Male- brown hair 6'2 - 6'7 medium build

The first is likely Kris Kristofferson, the second Lyle Lovett, (or perhaps extra-tall Pipkin, who surely will have a cameo role at the least) who are both set to star with Harry Connick Jr. and Willie Nelson. Hometown hero Tim McCanlies (Secondhand Lions) is directing and Elizabeth Avellan is among the producers. Oh, and the Jonas brothers are somehow in this one, too.

Looks like a February and March shoot.

The story:
Michael was eight years old on the Christmas Day he lost his brother David. The day had started out well-Michael and David opened their presents and, much to their delight, they both received ice skates from Santa. With great excitement they set out to the pond behind their grandparents' house in New Mexico to try them out. But the pond wasn't safe, and David never made it out from its icy cold depths. For Michael, the meaning of Christmas changed forever that day.

Thirty years later Michael (Connick) is the neighborhood Grinch. "To me the only wonder of Christmas is not why that tragedy marked me so," Michael says, "but how the rest of my family can seem so completely unscathed." He scowls at his neighbors' fervent holiday traditions and at his own children, who want nothing more than to string Christmas lights through their front yard. But when another holiday disaster strikes and his own cherished young son loses his spirit to live, Michael searches deep within himself to root out the anger, the fear, and the pain of the past. Can he bear to remember exactly what happened that Christmas day? And will he make peace with this past for the sake of his own children?

Joe's Top 10 Texas film stories of the decade

The last decade has been a wild ride. I started writing about the Texas film industry in the late '90s, mainly covering film festivals for the San Antonio Express-News and writing the occasional film feature for the Austin American-Statesman. Then I had the notion that Texas needed a column about the industry itself that looked forward not backward. I, of course, was clueless that Jane Sumner had been writing just such a column for The Dallas Morning News for a couple of decades.

Being the fool I am, I proceeded to write a column with hopes that I could sell it to smaller newspapers all over Texas. I was wrong. But I got lucky and the Austin American-Statesman picked the column up in early 2000. I moved the column to The Austin Chronicle in 2004 and added a Dallas Morning News column in late 2005—a year after Sumner took early retirement. As we end the aughts, here are the top film stories I covered during the last decade. They provide a microcosm of what the state's film industry underwent:


1. The Alamo comes to town. I heard rumors that Ron Howard was planning to do a remake of The Alamo and shoot it in Texas. When Howard went to the governor's mansion to announce the project, I was there covering it for the Statesman. Unfortunately so was one of their capitol reporters. I wrote the story anyway, and it ran the next day on the cover of Variety. Later I sniffed out the filming location and that story ran on the cover of the Statesman. During filming I visited the set and provided this report for the San Antonio Express-News. Are you getting the point of why this film that wasn't directed by Howard and wasn't particularly good (blame Disney and its cost-cutting and script-chopping ways) still tops my list? It also is perhaps the biggest example of the Texas Myth.

2. My original Statesman column was titled “On Location,” which made it easy to convince my editors to send me to the sets of such local productions as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Rookie, which was directed by Texan John Lee Hancock, the same guy who would go on to direct the ill-fated The Alamo. He's a great guy, a fine writer and we'll be seeing more and more for him years to come.


3. The most in-depth stories I wrote about the film industry appeared in The Austin Chronicle. Certainly my best journalism is contained in a piece that put a face on the slow down of the Texas film scene, but this piece on the death of Burnt Orange Productions also had its merits. Both pieces are about dreamers and what happens when art runs up against business.

4. I wrote about the technical side of film as well in this piece marking the death of VHS. Video Business, a sister publication to Variety had me investigate the now-forgotten EZ Disc. And then there were the high-def format wars and the changes in film distribution.

5. Friday Night Lights reared its head majorly during the decade, including in the under-reported case of Richard Linklater, who started work on what I now realize was his last try at directing a version of the book. He even cast Mehcad Brooks, an Austin native who credits the nascient project with getting his career going. Linklater declined to talk to me about the project, despite widespread publicity in Texas, and wasn't pleased by this story that ran in Variety. I somehow didn't cover the actual FNL film much, but I did visit the set of the television show both in the first season and in the second.

6. I've written a few hundred film columns across the decade. Here's an example from the Statesman, another from The Austin Chronicle and yet one more from The Dallas Morning News.


7. The Alamo Drafthouse's Rolling Road Show gave me the chance to try more creative writing approaches as I watched The Last Picture Show in Archer City and viewed The Goonies in a cave with tiny Corey Feldman in attendance.

8. It all began for me with coverage of film festivals. I wrote about Tim McCanlies' Dancer, Texas at one of those early festivals, which was technically in the '90s. But a blurb from my review still appears in publicity materials. This piece about Alejandro Gomez Monteverde's film Bella was a cover story in The Austin Chronicle. The Texas Film Hall of Fame awards are a chance to do a little star gazing. Here are some fun photos and a few more.

9. The big film industry battle of the decade was the long struggle to convince the Texas Legislature to create a film incentives program, then to adequately fund it. Here's a story about the side battle over how Texas is portrayed on screen, and here's another piece about the overall incentives push.

10. Television series production is clearly the current savior for the Texas film industry. Here's a visit to the set of North Texas-shot The Deep End and a chat with star Billy Zane.