Richard Linklater, 2005

Deep in the heart of Texas, Austin, once a sleepy college and government town, unexpectedly became a crossroads for American music and film. First came a new era of musicians, Janis Joplin and Willie Nelson among them, who played to mixed houses of cowboys and hippies. Then came the punk clubs and, with them, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Slacker (1991). What followed were the emerging careers of hundreds of filmmakers that live and work in a state boasting a vibrant film culture that incubates artists on the leading edge. The Austin Film Society has nurtured the ecosystem that makes Texas a third home for filmmakers and film art in the United States, a place where artists, unique voices, and artistic freedom – rather than the industry – are setting the tone.

Today, AFS is an unusual organization, especially as far as film societies go. AFS operates a production facility called Austin Studios; runs filmmaking education programs for all ages at a dedicated community facility; provides grant funding to filmmakers all over the state of Texas; hosts Texas premiere screenings and the Texas Film Awards, an annual gala event celebrating Texas’ greatest successes in film and television; and operates a two-screen art house theater (a second home to local filmmakers) with programming that runs the gamut from new international film releases, niche festivals, and classic auteur film to the most obscure selections of independent, genre, and underground film. AFS is at the center of Austin’s unique and unusual film culture. It is the product of years of evolution, growth, and change.

A confluence of forces would lead to Austin developing the homegrown artists and film community it knows today. In the briefest of terms, we can credit the rise of Austin’s alternative music scene, the growth of the film program at the large state university located in Austin, The University of Texas, and a few artists who took advantage of the vibrant bohemian youth culture to start experimenting with film. The first notable effort was in the late 1960s, when Tobe Hooper gathered a group of friends and some University-owned film equipment to make his first feature Eggshells (1969) and a few years later the legendary Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

UT’s student-run film society, CinemaTexas, was fertile ground for the crossover between film experimentation and the punk, new wave, and indie rock scenes of Austin in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Jonathan Demme, who visited Austin in 1981 specifically to experience the music scene, stumbled upon the unique interplay between music and film when Louis Black, the editor of the alternative weekly paper The Austin Chronicle (and later a founder of SXSW), introduced him to some recent work by local filmmakers. Demme commented, “The really startling thing […] given the chance to view several top-notch Austin-made films in the course of my brief trip there, was the exciting discovery of the epic fusion between Austin film and Austin music. For as it turns out, the majority of these short movies were made by the very same music people whose work had lured me down there in the first place. Maybe more than any place else, the potential creative cross-fertilization of new music and new cinema has found a breeding ground in Austin.”

Demme, already a big name in film at that time, subsequently organized a screening of Made in Texas shorts in New York City at the Collective for Living Cinema, the go-to downtown hub for New York’s emerging indie filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch and Todd Haynes. After the series made headlines in New York, it was programmed closer to home, in Houston, TX. The shorts were a revelation for Houston-based aspiring director Richard Linklater. He hadn’t seriously considered Austin’s potential as a town where he could begin his study of filmmaking, and the shorts were a beacon for Austin’s nascent film hive.

Richard Linklater arrived in Austin at exactly the moment when film culture winds were shifting due to the advent of video and the decline of some of the formerly vibrant film spaces. There was room for an energetic youth-driven cinema movement to be born among the same people who were going to punk and new wave shows, the people that Richard Linklater would collaborate with and immortalize in a few years in his break-out feature film Slacker. Richard had a plan: What if he and some friends started a screening series and charged $2-$3, enough to pay for the print fees and shipping of films that they couldn’t see otherwise? In order for the scheme to work, they needed a hook. Their first program would be called Sex, Blasphemy, and the Avant Garde – a program of provocative experimental films that would draw just the right crowd of outsider insiders. They negotiated with a local indie theater as a venue and started papering the campus with handmade xeroxed flyers. When the line to get into the show wrapped around the building that night, the Austin Film Society was born.

In the beginning this was AFS – a loose assembly of young “film freaks” (Linklater’s words) who wanted to get their hands on work ranging from Kenneth Anger and Stan Brakhage to Orson Welles and Robert Bresson. Boosted by the promotional efforts of The Austin Chronicle, which was run by the same dedicated cinephiles who had been a part of CinemaTexas, the society had the benefit of a powerful megaphone. After roving around campus area cinemas for a few years, the group found its own space, previously home to a psychedelic-themed ice cream parlor called Nothing Strikes Back. Though film was at the center, the new hang out was a magnet for all creative types. The new Austin Media Arts space would host in equal measure Russian avant-garde film series and events like an Andy Warhol Factory Party, complete with 998 boxes of Brillo Pads, borrowed from the stockroom of a local grocery store.

Austin Media Arts only lasted for a few years, but its practical uses as a production hub, and the artistic collaboration it inspired, were foundational to Richard Linklater’s Slacker. After making a number of super 8 mm films (including a feature), Linklater had a more ambitious idea, a feature that would take shape through a chain of interactions over the course of a single day, the action moving from one scene to the next by following each new character. The film would be made by and include the people that populated Linklater’s Austin world, the young college grads, over-educated and under-employed, whose days were filled with philosophizing, chance encounters, rock shows, overblown conspiracy theories, and run-ins with the truly insane. While the film was not a mainstream success, it was an electroshock to US film culture, as it was really the first time that Generation X had been depicted in all their authentic disenchantment. Richard’s singular voice and vision marked the arrival of an important filmmaker. The truly surprising thing to the rest of the world was that this new voice was coming out of the “nowheresville” of Austin, Texas.

Around this same time in Austin, a UT film student named Robert Rodriguez shot his feature debut El Mariachi (1992) for a scant $7,000 in Mexico. It was rejected by the intended buyers, the Spanish language home video market, but then discovered by a major studio, Columbia Pictures. Rodriguez too became an overnight sensation, adding yet another Austin, Texas-based independent filmmaker to the national film conversation.

While Robert and Richard were making waves, a bigger production scene was coalescing in the city in the 1990s. After making a number of films in Hollywood, Rodriguez found a way to return to Austin through the acquisition of state-owned property that he turned into his own dedicated production space, Troublemaker Studios, where his hit Spy Kids and Sin City franchises would later be shot. Linklater’s dedication to living in Austin was only strengthened by his work inside the Hollywood studio system on Dazed and Confused (1993). New big names like Guillermo Del Toro, Quentin Tarantino, and Mike Judge were living in Austin on and off, writing and developing projects, and the SXSW Film Festival was founded, adding even more life to the community by driving the wider film industry to Austin every spring. Buoyed by the energy from Slacker and the more active production scene, emerging filmmakers from the University of Texas like Athina Tsangari, Bob Byington, and David Zellner were experimenting with their first films. The presence of so many new talents made it clear that more infrastructure was needed to support what Austin was becoming – a growing hub for emerging and established filmmakers. AFS could no longer exist as a film club; it had to grow into an organization that could speak to the needs of the filmmaker community state-wide.

AFS founded the Texas Filmmakers’ Production Fund, now called the AFS Grant, to become the key source of homegrown support for the making of independent films in Texas. Starting in 1996, the fund provided key financing for the films of Athina Tsangari (The Slow Business of Going, 2000), David and Nathan Zellner (Kid-Thing, 2012), David Lowery (Pioneer, 2011), Jeff Nichols (Take Shelter, 2011), Laura Dunn (The Unforeseen, 2007), Bob Byington (Somebody Up There Likes Me, 2012), Yen Tan (1985, 2016), and Andrew Bujalski (Computer Chess, 2013). The first years of the fund also awarded Eagle Pennell, another University of Texas drop-out of the 1970s and wildcard Texas filmmaker, whose micro-budget independent films like Last Night at the Alamo (1983) had broken out on the international festival circuit. His brand of character and dialogue-driven independent film had inspired Robert Redford, whose founding of the Sundance Institute had a lot to do with creating opportunities for filmmakers like Eagle. While Eagle never completed his AFS Grant-funded film prior to his death, his award was symbolic of AFS’s commitment to Texas’ most promising independent artists.

As AFS’s support of the grassroots efforts of new filmmakers proved to be an essential part of building the community, so was the founding of Austin Studios in 2001. With the strength of a powerful new executive director named Rebecca Campbell (who has now been at the helm of AFS for 20 years), AFS partnered with the City of Austin to take over part of an abandoned airport and establish a studio facility to support and encourage film production in Texas. To date, Austin Studios has generated $1.7 billion in economic activity for the city of Austin. The studio business has nurtured AFS’s development as a not-for-profit organization, providing more operational infrastructure for program growth. Today, the organization has new plans to add to the now 200,000 square foot studio facility in order to develop a bigger creative hub for small media businesses, larger productions, and production services shops that support Austin’s film community.

Austin is now the 11th largest city in the United States. Year after year over its 32-year history, SXSW has expanded Austin’s reputation as a center for culture and innovation, so that, nationally, Austin is now known as a growing metropolis and creative hub. The number of filmmakers living in Austin is extensive, and the city is now home to a wide swath of creatives, including television writers and producers, post-production houses, multiple studio facilities, and more and more independent filmmakers.

While the landscape has widened, Austin still maintains its own identity as a film community. The fluidity across creative disciplines that gave birth to Austin’s film scene continues to characterize Texas film today. Terrence Malick, Robert Rodriguez, and Richard Linklater are some of the biggest names in Texas filmmaking, but the aesthetic distance between them is the defining factor that describes the creative environment they inhabit. The autonomy that working in Texas afforded artists like Rodriguez and Linklater continues to define those who live here or are attracted to the hive. The singularity of vision across the spectrum of work presented is something we hope you’ll find and appreciate in the selection of films we are bringing to the Czech Republic. Our big open skies may inspire something unique in you.

Holly Herrick

Jonathan Demme Presents: Made in Texas, Six “New” Films from Austin

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the punk and new wave scenes in Austin were giving birth to an underground film scene. Many of the cinephiles at CinemaTexas (UT’s student-run film society) were also in bands and were experimenting with their own Super 8 and 16 mm shorts. Filmmaker Jonathan Demme, already a well-known filmmaker for his work with Roger Corman and his first studio features, was enamored with Austin’s music scene from afar. The Austin Chronicle founder Louis Black invited Demme to experience it in person, and during his stay Black introduced Demme to recent film work by some of the musicians Demme had been following. The films floored Demme, who subsequently organized a New York City screening at the Collective for Living Cinema in 1981. This was the first pronouncement of a new burgeoning scene in Austin and was predictive of Austin’s future as a creative incubator for music and film.

Films included in this program:

Invasion of the Aluminum People (David Boone)

Leonardo, Jr. (Lorrie Oshatz)

Death of a Rock Star (Tom Huckabee and Will Van Overbeek)

Fair Sisters (Missy Boswell, Edward Lowry and Louis Black)

Mask of Sarnath (Neil Ruttenberg)

Speed of Light (Brian Hansen)

Descriptions courtesy of Louis Black, The Austin Chronicle and SXSW co-founder, who released the compilation of films in 2015 in collaboration with Watchmaker Films and the University of Texas Press.

Austin Film Society Shorts

Since 1996 the Austin Film Society has granted over $1.7 million to Texas-based filmmakers, often launching significant careers in the arts. The grant looks to fund filmmakers with a unique vision. The shorts presented in this program were all recipients of Austin Film Society funding and were stepping stones in these filmmakers’ promising careers.

Films included in this program

Pioneer (2011, David Lowery)

Rat Pack Rat (2014, Todd Rohal)

Skunk (2014, Annie Silverstein)

1985 (2016, Yen Tan)

The Rabbit Hunt (2017, Patrick Bresnan and Ivete Lucas)

Carne Seca (2015, Jazmin Diaz)

Sources and further reading:

Books:

Austin Film Society 10th Anniversary Retrospective, edited by Elizabeth Peters. Published by Austin Film Society, 1995.

Austin Film Society 20th Anniversary Retrospective, edited by Rebecca Campbell. Published by Austin Film Society, 2005.

Chainsaws, Slackers, and Spy Kids: Thirty Years of Filmmaking in Austin, Texas, by Alison Macor. University of Texas Press, 2010.

Rebel Without a Crew: Or How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker with $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player, by Robert Rodriguez. Plume, 1996.
Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes: A Guided Tour Across a Decade in American Independent Film, by John Pierson. Faber & Faber, 1995.

DVDs:
Jonathan Demme Presents: Made in Texas, Six New Films from Austin. Louis Black Productions and Watchmaker Films, 2015.