Can the Texas Longhorns beat the Baylor Fire Bolt?

I've been blogging the University of Texas football seasons for The Austin Chronicle for about four years now. This Saturday is the last game of this season. Here's my latest blog post (which doesn't mention unsubstantiated rumors that Mack Brown will retire as Texas coach after Saturday's game):

Texas fans nibbled on Thanksgiving turkey and expected the worst. The Aggies could taste this win. They wanted to end the rivalry with forever bragging rights as they shuffled off to the SEC and leave the Longhorns with the beer-soaked, early-morning regret that is the Big 12.

My die-hard UT fanatic brother-in-law feared a blowout. “It’ll be close,” I said. He shook his head with a grin that spoke of my naiveté. You know what happened next.

Aggies complained of a bad call, of the injury that kept Cyrus Gray out of the game. But the truth is the Texas defense finally rose to the level necessary to offset the befuddled Burnt Orange offense. Special teams did, too. We’re talking points off of turnovers. Quandre Diggs’ 81-yard punt return. A defense that battered the Aggies and their seasoned quarterback Ryan Tannehill, capped by a Kenny Vaccaro interception that led to a rare touchdown.

The rag doll named Case McCoy did the rest with a gutsy gallop into the Texas A&M defenders, who smacked him this way and that as he struggled for any yards they’d cede. Enough to get Texas in field-goal position. It worked. Justin Tucker made up for a night of horrendous punts by finessing the ball through the uprights from 40 yards out as time ran out.

In College Station you can find billboards still up in summer heralding the last win over the t-sips. In Austin, we marvel at the strange traditions: the overalled cheerleaders with their odd gang signs, the incessant “howdy,” the constant standing and swaying at Kyle Field. That cute little dog they worship. We’ll miss every bit of it.

Read the rest here.

Walking into the night

I took this photo last night as we were leaving a Dallas nightclub in the wee small hours.

My favorite recent street photo by far.

Saying goodbye to my brother Casey

I created the photo above by taking an older photo of my brother Casey and shooting it in the same spot in what was my late father's house this past week. In a sense it allows Casey to come home one last time. Casey died this past week in India when he fell from a train platform. The photo is featured on the web site Dearphotograph.com.

My sister Clare and I wrote the following obituary for Casey, which appeared in the Austin American-Statesman.



Casey John O'Connell died in an accident at a train station in Kerala, India, on Oct. 31.

He was born in Austin on June 11, 1956, to William Robert O'Connell and Wylma Louise “Cassie” O'Connell Ruelke, who both preceded him in death.

Casey graduated from Austin High School where his great joy was acting in plays as part of the Red Dragons. He later appeared in local productions, including at Zachary Scott Theatre, and was an occasional movie extra. He taught himself to juggle and ride a unicycle, and he rode his bicycle everywhere, including a cross-country trip with his oldest brother Wroc.

He received his LVN degree from Austin Community College and took great joy in working with newborn babies at Seton Hospital. He went back to school to earn a degree in chemistry and physics from Southwest Texas State University where he worked in the chemistry lab. Early on he commuted to campus by bicycle from Austin and liked to tell of his collision with a house (it was on wheels and being transported down I-35).

He had lived for many years in India, where he taught math and science and met his wife Magali.

Casey could fall asleep sitting up while doing a crossword puzzle and still have a semi-coherent conversation with you (though he wouldn't remember it later). He liked to play card games into the night or until he started winning. He was a vegetarian who could eat endless amounts of food and never gain weight. He remained as limber as a teenager. He liked to talk and talk and talk. He was a kind and gentle soul who truly cared about people and always had a smile. He was mischievous, funny and could tell a great joke, but only a mathematician would get the punch line. He somehow managed to keep alive the joy in life that fades for most of us with our first gray hairs, and what was left of Casey's hair was solid white. Most of all he was a great brother to five siblings who will forever feel his absence.

He is survived by his wife, Magali O'Connell; sisters, Mary Ann O'Connell and Clare O'Connell of Austin; brothers, William Robert “Wroc” and Lorie O'Connell of North Carolina, Daniel Pius O'Connell and wife Tarla, and Joseph Matthew O'Connell and wife Tiffany of Taylor; a niece, Shanthi O'Connell; and nephews, Russell Harvey, Will Harvey and Nicholas O'Connell.

Memorials can be made to the Zachary Scott Theatre at Zachtheatre.org.

Shot in Texas: '12 Mighty Orphans' first up for new film company

By Joe O'Connell Special Contributor
The Dallas Morning News
filmnewsbyjoe@yahoo.com
joeoconnell.com
@joemoconnell on Twitter

Todd Allen hopes Fort Worth’s Mighty Mites are the start of something big for the Texas film scene.

Allen, an Austin native who has worked for decades as an actor, has formed Presidio Pictures. The company plans to first shoot 12 Mighty Orphans, an adaptation of Jim Dent’s true story of the Masonic Home of Fort Worth’s Depression-era Mighty Mites football team.

Preproduction for a spring Fort Worth shoot would start a string of Texas-made Presidio features with budgets ranging from $8 million to $30 million.

“The financing for most independent films is cobbled together with duct tape,” said Allen, who is raising funds in Texas for not just the cost of film production but also much of the distribution. “I think [Presidio] will have a substantial impact on the industry here. If it works, it’ll put a lot of people to work.”

Robert Duvall , Morgan Freeman, Bruce Willis, Aaron Eckhart and Andy Garcia are already attached to a planned second Presidio feature, The Last Full Measure, a true story of a father’s efforts to honor his son killed during the Vietnam War.

Presidio — with former Sundance Institute chairman, Orion Pictures director and Imagine Entertainment chairman Jack Crosby on its board — could prove a shot in the arm for the Texas film industry as major films choose locations offering larger financial incentives. Jerry Bruckheimer told The Hollywood Reporter this week that his revived The Lone Ranger movie starring Johnny Depp will shoot in New Mexico and possibly Louisiana because of those states’ heftier incentives. Texas had been looked at as the movie’s shooting location.

“My fear is it’s going to be a hokey cartoon,” Allen said of The Lone Ranger. “It’s going to cost $200 million and, if it doesn’t make its money back, it’s going to be another nail in the coffin of the genre.” (Bruckheimer says it will cost $215 million to be exact, trimmed back from $260 million.)

Allen knows the Western genre well, having acted in such films as Wyatt Earp and Silverado. “I can’t think of a single actor I’ve met who didn’t want to do a Western,” he said. “I think that’s where my mojo is at.”

Thus he’s also planning Rio Grande, a feature adaptation of Texas Ranger Joaquin Jackson’s memoir co-written by David Marion Wilkinson; a television miniseries of Wilkinson’s early-Texas novel Not Between Brothers made in partnership with Kevin Costner; and the big-screen film noir Western The Deserters based on Luke Short’s novel.

Allen got his start when he happened upon the ranch set of Honeysuckle Rose (1980) in Johnson City and was mistaken for the ranch owner’s son. Director Jerry Schatzberg asked if he wanted to be an extra, and Allen caught the acting bug.

Throughout his career, Allen said he tried to stay out of his trailer and on the set figuring out the film business.

He moved back to Austin from L.A. with the expectation that acting would take a back seat to producing. But Quentin Tarantino, whom he met in a Los Angeles acting class 25 years ago, tapped him for a role in Django Unchained, a Western about slave traders featuring Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson and Kurt Russell.
“When I first talked to Quentin he said he wanted to shoot in Texas,” Allen said.
But his acting gig starts in February in Louisiana, the land of attractive film incentives.

'Lone Ranger' lives, but not in Texas

Jerry Bruckheimer has managed to revive Johnny Depp-starrer The Lone Ranger with its budget tightened, ahem, from $260 million to $215 million.

There were rumblings earlier of a joint New Mexico-Texas shoot for this tale of a TEXAS Ranger, then talk of Utah, but the final words is New Mexico and possibly Louisiana. Why? Do you even need to ask?

Here's what Bruckheimer told The Hollywood Reporter:

"We found that Louisiana gave us a better tax incentive than New Mexico -- that was another $8 million. We're still shooting in New Mexico, and we might [also] go to Louisiana. We're asking New Mexico to come closer to the Louisiana incentive.
We dropped our California location not because they didn't offer a tax break but because it was another production office that we had to open. Every time you have a new location, you have to use crew time setting it up for you. There are a lot of expenses."

Early rumblings had the film shooting some in the Alpine-Marfa area, which goes completely unmentioned here. Granger was also scouted for train scenes, probably because they were shot there for True Grit.

When the hippies and the rednecks met in Austin

This review ran a week or so ago in the San Antonio Express-News, but never showed up on their web site, so I'm posting it here for folks to read.--JO

Comic Cowboys and New Hicks
By Travis Stimeling
Oxford University Press, $35



REVIEW BY JOE O’CONNELL

Who has the right to wear the cowboy hat?

That symbol of all that is Texas is at the core of Travis Stimeling’s Cosmic Cowboys and News Hicks, which examines the Progressive Country music phenomena that first put on its Stetson in 1970s Austin.

Stimeling focuses on that moment when old-school country butted heads and commingled with long-haired rock ‘n’ roll via a convergence that was all about being at the right place at the right time: The drinking age was lowered to 18, marijuana possession became a misdemeanor instead of a felony, the University of Texas student population was growing and the ragtag Armadillo World Headquarters opened in an old armory near downtown.

But, perhaps most important, musicians like Willie Nelson, Michael Murphey and B.W. Stephenson, had burned out on the music industries in Los Angeles and Nashville and hightailed it to Texas.

“Many of the people I spoke with made a point of telling me that rent in Austin was so cheap that it made perfect sense to move there,” said Stimeling, a West Virginia-born professor of music at Milliken University in Decatur, Illinois, who grew up listening to Willie Nelson and Jerry Jeff Walker.

The book covers ground well trod already in Jan Reid’s 1974 The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock (a new version came out in 2004), but Stimeling takes a different, more academic approach in his book that began as a dissertation in musicology.

“My book has the benefit of nearly four decades of hindsight, so I could be more objective in my approach to the scene,” Stimeling said.

The book’s strength is in its examination of the push and pull of the cosmic cowboys and a musical culture they rejected, embraced and transformed.

Stimeling goes in depth into how Alvin Crow and the band Asleep and the Wheel reached back to honor and revive Texas swing music that once had been a staple in dance halls across the state. And he gives props to Joe Gracey, who took over KOKE-FM and turned it into a progressive country haven. The station’s goat roper bumpersticker quickly became every bit as iconic then as a Lone Star longneck beer bottle.

Stimeling also shines when exploring how individual songs like Murphey’s “Cosmic Cowboy” cemented this new cultural identity. The song was born from Murphey’s playful nickname “Cosmic Bob” for Lost Gonzo Band member Bob Livingston, but resonated at a larger scale with fans.

“The cosmic cowboy sprang forth, therefore, from a bundle of cultural conflicts, including not only those resulting from the merger of the drug culture and the cowboy symbolism but also from the intersection of communal music making and the national music industry, the ongoing debate about civil rights and the invocation of rural romanticism in an American metropolis,” Stimeling writes.

If that sounds a bit highfaluting for a discussion of music, it perhaps is. And Austin wasn’t really the first locale for this musical debate. Country rock had already been cooking in Los Angeles and Capricorn Records was promoting acts like The Marshall Tucker Band in the true South.

But Austin seemingly produced a musical movement from the ground up without a corporate control that left it often messy, but ever interesting. Its mystique led us to the city’s modern-day, perhaps over-the-top slogan “Live Music Capital of the World.”

“What's really striking to me about Austin during the progressive country era is that the musicians who were involved in the scene explored so many different musical approaches, yet they all seemed to be genuinely concerned about how music might be used as a tool to understand the roots of Texan culture," Stimeling said.

Remember the Alamo (is on fire)!

Yes, as I type this there are reports that the set of the movie The Alamo near Dripping Springs, Texas (on the outskirts of Austin) is engulfed by a major brush fire is super dry Central Texas. This report says six structures have burned to the ground. In my memory there aren't more than six. Frankly it's a surprise that the buildings still exist this many years since the 2003 shoot. There was talk at one point of making it a tourist attraction. I know the set has been used for television commercials since.

Here's my report from the set during filming.