Crystal Wise
Red Sanders
Ben Hecht had his bases covered when he composed that couplet back in 1946: Classically speaking, the Seven Lively Arts would include drama, drawing, painting, movement, music, modeling, and speech.
Not to mention that the art and commerce of filmmaking fit all those categories, and never more so than in the film-friendly climate of Fort Worth. As the city gathers momentum toward an aggressive new phase for the Lone Star Film Festival — Nov. 2-5 and Nov. 10, in the North Side’s historic Isis showplace and the Stockyards District-at-large — it also cinches its grasp upon a moviemaking heritage that dates from the earlier years of the last century.
The overriding encouragement lies in a $200 million statewide grubstake, established this year by the Texas Legislature to provide a sweeping and competitive incentive to filmmaking projects, with on-the-spot encouragement from Sen. Craig Goldman (R-Fort Worth), Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker, and producer Red Sanders. The sum represents what Goldman calls “monumental” in its leap from the state’s former $50 million incentive package, a two-year sum that left Fort Worth and Texas overall ill-equipped to compete with such movie-welcoming states as New Mexico, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Georgia.
A key provocation to the beefed-up incentive lay in the 2016 crime drama “Hell or High Water.” Taylor Sheridan’s screenplay hinges upon a flatlands West Texas setting, but the shooting was accomplished in mountainous New Mexico — because Texas lacked the economic incentives to appeal to the producers. With an average major-league motion picture budgeted around $100 million, the ability to save even a small hunk can add millions to a film’s spending budget. To encourage production companies to spend more money in far-flung regions, various states offer such incentives as tax credits, grants, and bonuses.
Generally speaking, to qualify for Texas’ film-production tax credits, a project must spend 60% of its filming days within the state. Fifty-five percent of the cast must include local extras or background players. And 70% of the tech-support crew must be residents. A resident crew earns varying tax credits or rebates, 5% to 20%, depending upon a film’s budget in a range from beneath $1 million to above $3.5 million. The state affords a 2.5% tax credit if a project completes 25% of its shooting days in an economically disadvantaged region. Qualifying expenditures include money spent with Texas companies for goods and services used in production, from chow-time catering to lodging.
To sway a legislative faction that had regarded incentives as merely a handout to Hollywood, as Rep. Goldman says, “we needed to do a better job of educating and advocating.” Mission accomplished.
The $200 million incentive tank makes Texas competitive with neighbors such as New Mexico and Louisiana, each of which have invested significantly in film production. The goal, as Sanders tells it, is to use the $200 million to prime the pump to encourage a steady and self-renewing pace of productions statewide, “ranging from big-studio projects to small independent pictures.” Constant shooting for a procession of one film after another would call for a permanent resident class of crew members.
Toward that objective, the interlocked Fort Worth Film Commission has raised the stakes since September with a new educational pipeline program — called the Fort Worth Film Collaborative – that promises to blaze trails to employment on the city’s mounting film-production scene. The educational venture is an invention of the Fort Worth Film Commission and Tarrant County College, in partnership with 101 Studios — the production company responsible for such hot-ticket series as “Yellowstone,” “Tulsa King,” “Mayor of Kingstown,” and “Special Ops: Lioness.”
And, yes, the celebrated journalist-dramatist Ben Hecht (1894-1964) is a forerunner of the Fort Worth scene: Hecht’s collaborative circus/musical drama, “Jumbo,” was transplanted in 1936 from Broadway to become a centerpiece of Fort Worth’s Texas Centennial celebration. That summer-into-fall extravaganza pointed toward an eventual Hollywood filming of “Jumbo,” in 1962. In adapting “Jumbo” to a heart-of-Texas presentation, Hecht trimmed the production’s running time to a brisk hour-and-change — the better to lessen the discomforts of an unventilated Frontier Pavilion in 110-degree 1936 Texas weather.
Crystal Wise
Jessica Christopherson
About That Heritage Fort Worth owns a proud filmmaking heritage, as an inspiration to Hollywood — as seen in Mervyn LeRoy’s homage to child-adoption pioneer Edna Gladney, “Blossoms in the Dust” (1941), and in Western champ Randolph Scott’s frontier drama “Fort Worth” (1951). The city figures, too, as a site of practical locations, as in James Stewart’s starring picture of 1955, “Strategic Air Command.” “Blossoms” and “Fort Worth” required Hollywood sound-stage settings, standing in for historic Fort Worth. “Strategic Air Command” used real-world locations at Carswell Air Force Base, which also welcomed a much smaller production company in 1960 for the shooting of portions of the maverick director Edgar G. Ulmer’s science-fiction adventure, “Beyond the Time Barrier.”
Texas at large had established filmmaking resources as early as 1900, when the trailblazing cameraman G.W. “Billy” Bitzer defied a disaster-area ban on cameras to shoot motion-picture footage of the aftermath of the Galveston hurricane. San Antonio became a headquarters in 1910 of Gaston Méliès’ Star Film Company, branching out from its origins in France. As Los Angeles proved a practical and lasting base of operations for the major film studios, Texas provided shooting locales for the likes of Fox Films’ Civil War epic, “The Warrens of Virginia” (1924), and Paramount Pictures’ Oscar-anointed WWI drama, “Wings.” Those were shot in part around San Antonio.
As the Hollywood establishment came to rely increasingly upon sound-stage production, Texas saw less shooting during the 1930s and 1940s. A significant exception lay in Dallas-based producer Alfred R. Sack’s Sack Amusement Attractions, which shot its unique catalogue of Black-ensemble features during 1940-1947 on locations around Dallas and Fort Worth, with Waxahachie providing rural scenery.
Sack was a niche-market specialist, delivering pictures for Black-neighborhood theatres during an age of segregated filmgoing. The Jewish entrepreneur Sack formed a partnership with an African American actor/writer/director, Spencer Williams, Jr., to make 11 such feature films, ranging in genre from monster-at-large horrors (“Son of Ingagi”) to slapstick comedy (“Juke Joint”) to spiritual matters (“The Blood of Jesus”) to crime melodramas (“Dirty Gertie from Harlem, U.S.A.”). In 1991, the lone surviving print of “The Blood of Jesus” became the first of its kind to be selected as an addition to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry.
Texas reasserted itself during the 1950s-1960s as a lure for corporate filmmaking, owing to an increasing demand for scenic realism — as opposed to manufactured studio settings. From the renewed interest, there came such made-in-Texas powerhouses as 1956s “Giant” (at Marfa and Valentine) and 1960s John Wayne epic, “The Alamo” (at Brackettville). In 1971, Governor Preston Smith established the Texas Film Commission, and by the waning 1970s, the state had earned more than $40 million from film-related goods and services. In 1976, Fort Worth’s Water Gardens landmark placed its futuristic sculptural contours at the service of Michael Anderson’s science-fictional race-against-time picture, “Logan’s Run.”
Crystal Wise
Chad Matthews
The Here-and-Now No low profile for Fort Worth, not then and not now — though never has the city touted such an aggressive concentration of resources, emerging talent, and administrative gumption as it’s seen during the past few years.
The momentum began building anew as early as the fading 1990s when Interlight Productions, an off-Hollywood company, leased an idled shopping center to stage a $5 million shoot’em-up called “Recoil” — sort of a “‘Die Hard’ in a shopping mall,” as one show-biz newspaper put it. A 1998 notice in Texas Monthly offered the lowdown: “Fort Worth’s Town Center Mall [now La Gran Plaza] became a war zone — the principal location where Mickey Rourke, the brawl-prone star…, knocked out the indie feature ‘Recoil.’”
Matt Beesley’s “Recoil” (a.k.a. “Point Blank”) made scarcely a ripple at the box office, but its extensive use of local talent and technical expertise had demonstrated the city’s practical value to the larger sphere of filmmaking while providing a homecoming for supporting actor Frederic Forrest, a Waxahachie native and alumnus of Texas Christian University.
That same general period, 1996-1998, saw the establishment of the Fort Worth Film Festival as a year-round agency devoted to independent productions (including premieres for locally made pictures) as well as general-interest film appreciation. The nonprofit agency had evolved into the Lone Star Film Society by 2003-2004, and by 2015 the Fort Worth Film Commission had emerged as a driver of more than $50 million in economic impact.
The state’s newly minted $200 million incentive requires support from a localized community of filmmaking talent. A production company is likelier to select a location-shooting region that has a built-in supply of lighting technicians, hair-and-makeup artisans, set-building crews, and the like. Hence the Fort Worth Film Collaborative.
The Fort Worth Film Collaborative Launched this fall at Tarrant County College, the Fort Worth Film Collaborative proposes to create pathways to employment on Fort Worth’s growing film-production scene. The project is a milestone in the eight-year progress of the Fort Worth Film Commission and a breakthrough for Tarrant County College, with the added clout of 101 Studios, whose more prominent telefeature productions of modern times include the likes of “Yellowstone,” the soon-to-release “Lawmen: Bass Reeves,” the generational sagas “1883” and “1923,” and “Tulsa King,” “Mayor of Kingstown,” and “Special Ops: Lioness.”
“I want to see what we can grow here,” says Rep. Goldman. “Fort Worth has the growth potential to become the other major filmmaking hub in Texas.” (Austin would be the state’s filmmaking kingpin, having built steadily over a span of two generations upon such touchstones as Tobe Hooper’s rough-and-ready production of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” (1973-1974) and Warner Bros.’ major-league production of “Outlaw Blues” (1977).
The Fort Worth Film Collaborative is a workforce development certification program, calculated to address the growing need for trained film industry crew members in the Fort Worth-to-Dallas metropolitan area. The one-of-a-kind curriculum promises to provide students with a pathway to employment in the film industry.
In addition to 101 Studios, the Fort Worth Film Commission and Tarrant County College have worked with several locally based entities on the project, including Red Productions and Backlot Studios, Out of Order Studios (producer of “The Chosen”), MPS Studios, and Panavision, the camera-equipment company. The Film Commission has produced 20 instructional videos, featuring working professionals, to accompany the curriculum. These videos cover such key fields of specialization as gaffer (lighting and electrical power), grip (rigging to support cameras), set construction, location-scouting, hairdressing and makeup, accounting; camera use, production assistance, and props (inanimate objects required to tell a story on film). Additional disciplines will be covered as the series progresses.
“This initiative will create a talent pipeline within the Fort Worth film industry,” says Jessica Christopherson, Fort Worth’s film commissioner. (The Fort Worth Film Commission is a division of the tourism organization known as Visit Fort Worth, of which Christopherson is vice president of marketing. Her family background includes filmmaking, as well.)
“Our goal is to attract projects that will create sustainable job opportunities for locals,” adds Christopherson.
Tarrant County College will serve as the educational framework of the Fort Worth Film Collaborative. By leveraging its state-of-the-art facilities and experienced faculty, the college will provide a platform for students to gain an understanding of the film industry and to develop practical skills essential to success in the film industry.
Dr. Kenya Ayers-Palmore, president for Tarrant County College’s Northeast Campus, explains: “This way of doing business — with community colleges providing nimble responses to support the expressed needs of industry partners — is how we jointly create sustainable opportunities. The Fort Worth Film Collaborative serves as a driver for economic development through job growth… We are very appreciative to our Texas Legislature for … facilitating job opportunities through increased incentives for filmmakers to work in Texas.
“This unprecedented partnership in Texas is truly a game-changer, as it reflects a new normal for education in Texas with the development of micro-credentials and short-term, flexible offerings [at the college] to ensure that our citizens are work-ready,” adds Dr. Ayers-Palmore.
Tarrant County College’s fast-track certification program is designed to accommodate students’ work-and-family schedules. Coursework includes classes at an affordable tuition. Certifications in additional filmmaking specialty fields will follow in 2024. Details can be found online at tccd.edu.
Meanwhile, back at the Film Festival Meanwhile, at November’s Lone Star Film Festival, two formal world premieres are locked in for the principal venue, Downtown Cowtown at the Isis Theatre: November 2 sees a 7 p.m. showing of Eric Parkinson’s “Wildfire: The Legend of the Cherokee Ghost Horse,” with director Parkinson and songwriter Michael Martin Murphey in attendance. November 5 sees a 7 p.m. showing of “Lane,” Bradley Hughes and James Trawick’s documentary biography of the championship bull-riding cowboy Lane Frost (1963-1989), with directors Hughes and Trawick in attendance.
Then at 6 p.m., November 10, at the Hotel Drover, the Lone Star Film Festival’s gala climax will include presentations of the traditional Visionary Award to Fort Worth-bred film producer Marty Bowen, the Stephen Bruton Award (in memory of the Fort Worth-based musician and actor) to the Texas roots-music artist musician Charley Crockett, and the Bill Paxton Award (in memory of the Fort Worth-to-Hollywood actor-producer-director) to the Dallas-born actor Luke Wilson.
The festival’s slate of films in competition includes Katherine Propper’s “Lost Soulz,” a tale of a rap artist’s odyssey through Texas, Thaddeus D. Matula’s “Into the Spotlight,” documenting the empowerment of artists dealing with disabilities, and Chase Joliet’s family drama “Grapefruit” (online at lonestarfilmfestival.com).
“There is something special happening in Fort Worth,” says Mayor Parker, citing the burgeoning accumulation of opportunities and interest, which also includes a summertime filmmaking workshop by the Lone Star Film Society at Texas Christian University. “The aim is to make our city a destination for film and television productions.”
The city has long since proved its civilian interest in film appreciation, generating steady audiences nowadays for such recurring participatory attractions as the Fort Worth Film Club at Stage West Theatre and Cowtown Movie Classics at Downtown Cowtown at the Isis. From civilian movie-buff interests, there often grow professional interests. The city now finds itself equipped to nurture such ambitions, to encourage spontaneous local filmmaking projects — and to give the Hollywood establishment increasing reasons to take advantage of the indigenous production resources, as well as the natural and ready-built scenic values, that abound in Fort Worth.
“Investing in local film productions has an incredible return on investment,” as Mattie Parker explains in a formal statement through the Fort Worth Film Commission. “And in Fort Worth, we’re ready to capitalize on their opportunities.”
