Eagle Pennell was Texas’ own outlaw filmmaker. Pennell attended the University of Texas film program in the 1970s before dropping out to make micro-budget feature films about his Texas world, which was full of saloons and country people, barmaids, drunks, schemers, and small time criminals. His break-out film The Whole Shootin’ Match (1978) famously inspired Robert Redford to found the Sundance Institute. Pennell had worked on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and in the early 1980s he convinced that film’s producer, Kim Henkel, to help him realize his vision for a film that would capture “a dying breed of westerner” whose existence was threatened by Texas’ sprawling urban development and ever-growing oil wealth. In 1996 Pennell received funds from the Austin Film Society for a new film, which was never completed due to Pennell’s struggles with alcoholism and subsequent death in 2002.