{Lone Star International Film Festival}:
The Lone Star International Film Festival promotes the work of emerging international filmmakers through competition and showcases, providing resources to distribution and cutting edge technology. The goal of the festival is to cultivate global cultural awareness through the art of the moving image, while featuring Fort Worth, Texas, as an international destination for both artistic and professional resources.
Festival Consultants
Tom Huckabee
Festival Director for The Lone Star International Film Festival 2007
Fort Worth native Tom Huckabee has been a creative force in the film industry for more than 25 years, trying his hand at many facets of the trade along the way. Among other things, he’s been a writer, director, producer, film festival promoter, development executive and historical researcher.
After a childhood experience finding an old 16 mm camera in his dad’s closet and discovering it had film in it, Huckabee says, he became hooked on “hearing the clickety-clack of celluloid passing between sprockets.”
“It’s all I’ve wanted to do since I was thirteen,” he adds. “I've worked in other media– photography, poetry, painting and music--but my favorite thing is telling stories and film has a unique advantage along those lines because it incorporates most of the other arts.”
In 1975, after graduating from Southwest high school in the Wedgewood area of Fort Worth, Huckabee moved to Hollywood to seek his fortune. He worked for a series of production companies including Encyclopedia Britanica, Stephen Busustow Productions and The Film Factory, an early music video house and producer of the annual Country Music Hall of Fame Awards Show. All the while, he continued churning out short films of his own. As often as not, his partner was another Fort Worthian, Bill Paxton. The long-time friends met on a plane to England in 1973, where they both attended Richmond College, an adjunct to the University of London. They bonded over a mutual desire to make movies. Indeed, Huckabee had a slight head start, having just won first place at a TCU-sponsored film competition with a provocative morality tale called Into the Light:
“I built two big doors on a stage at J.T. Stevens Elementary,” says Huckabee. “ One door led to heaven and the other to hell. The devil, played by my friend Chuck Lee, tried to trick people into committing sinful acts and going to hell.”
The most notable sequence of Into the Light, inspired by Ingmar Bergman, depicted the symbolic battle between good an evil in one man’s conscious. Says Huckabee. “It was shot on the lawn at the Kimble museum. I had a friend dressed all in black, wrestling another guy dressed in white. White won.”
When they returned to Fort Worth in the summer of 1973, Huckabee and Paxton pooled their resources and bought Super-8 Ektasound equipment from Ridglea Camera. “It was the first amateur camera that allowed one to “marry” sound to film, the forerunner of sophisticated video equipment of today. “I still have the camera on a shelf in Los Angeles. It’s not good for much but conversation.”
Their first effort, Victory at Auschwitz, was staged at the train tracks between Lancaster and Vickery. “A friend’s dad had a lot of Nazi memorabilia he brought home from World War II, so we fashioned a story about an American pilot who parachutes into Auschwitz to save Jews from the gas chambers. Bill and I played prisoners who died during the rescue attempt. The only difference was Bill got to have a romantic subplot. It was a pretty good story; but during production we got ourselves in a lot of trouble by failing to get permission beforehand from the Railroad Authority.”
In fact, on the second day of shooting three police cars surprised the cast and crew by rushing onto the scene. The cops jumped out, leveled their guns and ordered them to drop their weapons. “They had gotten a tip that there was a Nazi uprising going on down at the train yard!” laughs Huckabee. “Luckily, one guys playing a Nazi was a rookie cop who knew the officers.” So, all was quickly resolved, and they were actually able to resume production.
Later that year their next project “The Parable,” a gonzo take-off of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, debuted at Daddio’s Club in downtown Fort Worth to a packed house. “Some people thought it was too violent. But knuckleheads like us loved it. The controversy was fun.”
Huckabee remembers Daddio’s impresario Nick Kithas well and says that he hopes to be to cinema in Fort Worth what Kithas has been to music. “Someone who makes the esoteric accessible and treats every customer like a star.” In an interesting bit of synchronicity, the Lone Star Film Festival’s “Blast off!” party on Thursday May 31st will be held under the same roof as Daddio’s, which is now Shannon Wynn’s Flying Saucer.
Following the measured success of The Parable, which garnered a special jury award at the Brooklyn Film Festival of 1974, they tried their hand at documentary, focusing on a subject that was dear to Paxton, the abandoned, monumental stock yards of Fort Worth’s North side. Their homage to local days-gone-by featured an interview with elderly native whom Huckabee remembers only as “Tommy and Guy Robert’s granddad.”
Their desire to attempt every type of filmmaking resulted in Welcome!, which ambitiously melded live-action and animation in an omnibus about life after death. It took about a year of constant labor by five fledgling animators to complete, but once finished it won first place at a KERA-sponsored festival and aired on Channel thirteen in the metroplex. Before the film was edited; however, Paxton had packed his bags for Hollywood. Huckabee stayed behind to complete their opus and earn his high school diploma.
Meanwhile on the west coast at nineteen, Paxton had achieved a foothold in the industry as a set dresser, most notably for art director Jack Fisk, the husband of transplanted Texan Sissy Spacek, who had only recently made an auspicious debut in Terrence Malick’s Badlands. Says Huckabee, “Bill called me and said, ‘you’ve got to come out here. The water’s fine! Even though my personal fantasy was to stay in Texas and try to foment a local film scene, I took the Hollywood plunge.” Literally, it seems, as it was not long before he had broken his shoulder in the Pacific ocean while body surfing.
While toiling at their respective entry level jobs, Huckabee and Paxton managed to keep cranking out flicks of their own, such as “Death Wish in Venice,” a sardonic mash-up of the art- house hit “Death in Venice” by Pier Paolo Passolini and the Charles Bronson exploitation blockbuster, “Death Wish.”
After a relatively successful year in Lala Land, Paxton ended up relocating to New York City, where he enrolled at NYU’s theater department, studying acting under the infamous harridan, Stella Adler. Huckabee returned to Texas, enrolling at U.T. Austin, where he majored in Radio Television and Film and was mentored by associate professor, Thomas Schatz. Schatz would make a name for himself a few years later as the author of influential books about Hollywood, including “The Genius of the System” and co-founder of U.T.’s innovative film production arm, Burnt Orange Productions. Another one of Huckabee’s college mentor’s was Edward Dmytryk, director of The Caine Mutinty, Raintree Country and the Young Lions. Dmytryk, a life-long leftist and member of the so-called Hollywood Ten (although he later renounced communism and named names) did not know what to make of Huckabee at first. “He saw a rough cut of my film The Death of Jim Morrison before actually meeting me. He told fellow teachers that the film was so depraved that it made him want to return to Hollywood, where there was still decency left in the world. When he finally met me, he said, “You don’t look like a monster.” After cutting two minutes out of the 14-minute movie, Dmytryk watched it again and proclaimed it the best student film he had seen. “He championed it for a Student Academy award in the experimental category. It won the regional competition, but at the nationals the organizers elected not to award a prize in that category. Dmytryk told me he thought that they did that in order to avoid giving me the prize!”
During his six years in Austin Huckabee co-founded the Austin Film and Video Society, programming monthly screenings of student and independent shorts from 1975 through 1980. This led to a formal partnership with U.T. directing the Texas International Film Festival (1979 – 1980. (Some of his T.I.F.F. associates at the time, Louis Black, Nick Barbaro and Marge Baumgarten, went on to found the famed SXSW Music, Film and Interactive Festival in Austin, which has helped make Austin a universally-recognized cultural Mecca.) Concurrently he played drums and wrote songs for two seminal Texas new- wave bands, The Huns and The Reversible Cords.
In his last year at U.T. Huckabee began work on an ambitious 35mm, wide-screen feature, Taking Tiger Mountain, starring old friend Paxton and featuring a contribution by legendary beat writer, William S. Burroughs. “Burroughs came to town and watched what I had on a flatbed moviola. He said, ‘I think you’ve got something there, kid,’ and gave me the rights to his material for $100. He even offered to appear in the film, but like an idiot I said there wasn’t really a part for him.”
As providence would have it, Huckabee graduated before finishing Tiger Mountain, which deprived him of the school’s resources. The most economical way to finish was to do it in L.A., where Paxton was making inroads as an actor and could help him.
“I went back to L.A. out of necessity,” says Huckabee, almost apologizing for abandoning the Lone Star State. “Although there was much talk about Texas becoming the third coast [of filmmaking], it was still just a fantasy, really. It would be another decade at least before the emergence of Rick Linklater, Robert Rodriguez and SXSW would make the fantasy come true.”
Taking Tiger Mountain got finished, found distribution, garnered a couple of good reviews and was the catalyst for Huckabee’s next career move – producing film festivals and packages of short films for the Los Angeles-based Landmark Theatres (currently owned by Mark Cuban of Dallas Mavericks’ fame).
Meanwhile, Huckabee’s Austin girlfriend Barbara Cohen soon joined him in Hollywood, abandoning a successful career in social work. They got married in her hometown Dallas in 1983. The next two decades were a whirlwind of showbiz opportunities for the young couple. Cohen lucked into a job in the casting department at Disney Studios, eventually starting her own company with her former boss Mary Gail Artz. Together they cast forty-five feature films, including “Rushmore,” “The Night Before Christmas,” “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang” and two by Huckabee’s buddy Paxton, “Frailty” and “The Greatest Game Ever Played.”
Not to be outdone by his precocious wife, Huckabee worked on dozens of films and television programs in various capacities from quality control to executive producer. One of his most memorable endeavors was co-writing and producing Martini Ranch’s Reach, an eight-minute post-apocalyptic epic directed by the notorious taskmaster James Cameron (The Terminator; Titanic). Reach premiered on MTV to great acclaim but subsequently languished in the vaults of obscurity until popping up again recently on Youtube in it’s entirety. Another favorite memory was working as the main researcher and associate producer on the first season of the History Channel’s flagship series, Modern Marvels, which included hour-long documentaries about the building of the Eiffel Tower, the Stature of Liberty and the Golden Gate Bridge. “I love history so much, if I had a chance to go to college again, I would major in history rather than film. A background in history gives you something to make films about.”
During the 1990s Huckabee held down a part time job supervising quality control for Lucasfilm, for which he traveled extensively to laboratories in Toronto, London, Paris and Berlin. The latter job took on the air of a religious mission for the perfection-oriented Huckabee: “ I have always been very finicky about film presentation and it was a privilege to serve in that capacity for some of the best filmmakers in the business.” Huckabee rattles off a list of who’s-who in contemporary Hollywood: George Lucas, Stephen Speilberg, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Michael Mann, John Lasseter, John Boorman, Barbet Schroeder, Tim Burton, etc. At the same time he got to supervise the laboratory process on some of his favorite films of the past twenty years: Toy Story, The Last of the Mohicans, Cape Fear, Far and Away, Apollo 13. Strange Days, Pretty Woman, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, The Nightmare Before Christmas….” The list goes on infinitum, but one film stands out far and above all the others for the emotional impact it had on him. “Believe it or not I saw Schindler’s List 250 times in laboratories around the world. Maybe it’s because my wife was Jewish, I don’t know. But I cried the first 75 times I saw it. I can cry now just thinking about it. Sometimes when I see an awful movie, I swear I’ll never see another one. And then I think of Schindler’s List. That brings me back to reality.”
The paradox of film standing in for reality is not lost on Chickadee. He studied semiotics at film school, after all. “What’s the difference between a cinematic pile of you-know-what and Schindler’s List? They’re both just shadows on the wall, right? But one group of shadows will make you want your money back, not to mention your time, where another group of shadows raises your consciousness and reaffirms your belief in humanity. I find that fascinating.”
In 1997, after a few years pursuing their own career paths, Paxton and Chickadee joined up again on the latter’s produsorial debut, “Traveller,” starring Paxton, Juliana Margulies and a not-yet-heralded superstar, Mark Wahlberg. Huckabee came aboard as post-production coordinator and music supervisor, eventually earning an honorary credit as associate producer for his contribution to this little known film about Irish Travelers, which Fort Worth critic Michael H. Price identifies as one of his favorite films in the Southern Gothic tradition.
Between 1998 and 2001 Huckabee and Paxton made their partnership official by forming American Entertainment Co., underwritten for a time by Disney Studios. As vice-president of development, Huckabee originated ideas and set up film projects at companies such as Disney, Imagine, Sony, Lions Gate, HBO, Revolution and Destination, as well as a TV series with HBO, in partnership with Robert Zemeckis. The process of development was frustrating for both of them, however. “We instigated some of the best film projects you’ll never see,” Huckabee says wistfully. “There was an epic about the building of the Golden Gate Bridge, to be directed by Ron Howard, and a comedy about sibling rivalry set in the world of Civil War reenactment to be directed by Jon Turtletaub for Disney. Jim Carrey wanted to play the Yankee brother opposite Bill’s confederate brother. We called it “Gettysburgville.” Both got bogged down in development and went into turnaround when the scripts didn’t satisfy the studio heads.
There was another pet project, Hacksaw, a true story about the greatest prison escape artist of all time, Edward R. Jones. “My dad had recommended the book to me, suggesting it would make a great movie. One day I got a call from an agent saying that he wanted me to meet a writer of his that was set to get out of prison soon. He said the name “Ed Jones,” and I flipped out. Bill and I met Ed on the day he got out of prison. We all hit it off big time.” They attached Al Reinert (Apollo 13) as screenwriter and Ron Shelton (Tin Cup, White Men Can’t Jump) as director. With Paxton attached to star, they sold it to Joe Roth’s new company, Revolution. The script came out great but Revolution got cold feet. Another studio made an offer, but other offers distracted Shelton. Hacksaw faded away, too
Despite these losses, in 2001 American Entertainment finally got a picture off the ground from a script Huckabee discovered. It was Paxton’s acclaimed directorial debut, “Frailty,” distributed by Lion’s Gate. The psychological thriller set in Texas starred Texan natives in the three principal leads: Paxton, Matthew McConaughey and Powers Boothe. Frailty won awards, garnered rave reviews, inspired theological debates on the Internet and established the careers the writer Brent Hanley from Dallas and young stars Jeremy Sumpter and Matt O’Leary. Huckabee’s wife Barbara was credited with a casting coup.
At the same time Huckabee was helping Paxton find films to produce and direct, he worked as an un-credited script consultant on films in which Paxton appeared, including “Twister,” “Mighty Joe Young,” “Vertical Limit,” “U-571,” and “Thunderbirds.” He was credited as Executive Consultant for his work on the script of Paxton’s sophomore directorial effort, The Greatest Game Ever Played, “a grievously undervalued masterwork in my estimation,” says Huckabee in proud admiration for his off-again-on-again partner.
So, why after all these years in L.A. has Huckabee returned to his hometown? The answer is a series of tragic events. In May of 2006 his wife Barbara died after a nine-year struggle with breast cancer. Then in January of 2007 his mother died of kidney cancer. “My mom had been the principal support for my father, who has Alzheimer’s. The family rallied and it was decided it would be best if I came home to help out. So, I rented out my house in L.A. and moved back to Fort Worth.” It just happened to be at the same time that the Lone Star Film Society was looking for help with their festival.
“I had met a bunch of the folks on the board when I was here in February 2006 for the tribute to Paxton. Once I moved back, it was a foregone conclusion that I would get involved in some way.”
Recently appointed to be Artistic Director of the Lone Star Film Festival, which is set to make its debut November 7 – 12, 2007, Huckabee is predictably enthusiastic about the opportunity.
“I’ve been a film nut since I was a teenager growing up in Wedgewood,” he said. “However, there was very little access to non-mainstream movies. If we wanted to see a Fellini film or the like, we had to drive to Dallas or at least to U.T. Arlington where Andy Anderson was programming experimental films like Dog Star Man and Scorpio Rising. Now 35 years later to a large extent that's still the case. Fort Worth is being underserved in the realm of independent and foreign film. It’s odd because it’s so well represented in other areas of modern art. I want to help solve that problem through the auspices of the Lone Star Film Society. If I can do that, I will feel like I have given something back to the town that gave me so much during my formative years.”
Besides co-founding and directing the Texas International Film Festival, Huckabee’s Festival experience includes producing The Santa Monica Drive In at the Pier (2002) and the LA Animation Celebration. He is a board member and programming consultant of the Santa Monica and Oxford, Mississippi film festivals. Most recently he was a juror for Texas film competition at AFI Dallas in March of 2007.
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Jon Fitzgerald
Right Angle Studios
Jon Fitzgerald has over fourteen years of experience in the studio, independent and film festival communities. In addition to working in production on a number of features, he has written, directed and produced a feature film, founded and directed film festivals, and worked in programming on the Internet. It is this unique combination of experiences that led Fitzgerald to launch Right Angle Studios, an entertainment company for the digital age.
In May of 2002, Fitzgerald became the Executive Director of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, and was responsible for overseeing the programming, sponsorship, marketing, and artistic direction. Subsequently, the 2003 Festival was the most successful to date, as Fitzgerald added several new dimensions to the event, including an elaborate Hospitality Suite and new sidebars (Journey to Italy, Surf Sessions, Showcase Planet Earth). Fitzgerald also introduced the Rosebud Project, a new master class program designed to appeal to the large film student population in the area. The audience was up more than twenty-five percent with over 45,000 people in attendance. Perhaps most importantly, sponsorship had climbed more than forty percent and the Festival turned a small profit.
Prior to Fitzgerald accepting his position at the SBIFF, he was invited back to the University of California at Santa Barbara as a visiting instructor in the Film Studies Department. Over a three year period, he has taught several classes, including: The Anatomy of an Industry – Hollywood and The Business of Movies - The Independents & The Studios.
In May of 2000, Fitzgerald joined IFILM as Vice President of Programming, where he helped to create a new programming model, following the company’s launch of its new portal structure. In addition to general program management, Fitzgerald developed festival, international and educational models, while working with marketing and promotions to expand special programs and sponsorship support.
From 1997-1999 Fitzgerald held the position of Director of Festivals at the American Film Institute. He was brought on to breathe new life into the decade-long running Los Angeles International Film Festival (formerly Filmex). During his first year, he successfully increased the Festival's attendance by over thirty percent, introduced competitive sections, established a corporate marketing and community outreach program and focused the slate by lowering the number and increasing the quality of films shown. This led to AFI's most successful Festival ever. In his first year, the Grand Jury Prize winner, CHARACTER, went on to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Fitzgerald also brought the Festival back into the black for the first time in years.
Utilizing his existing and newly formed industry relationships, Fitzgerald created the Festival’s first Advisory Committee. Made up of top-level studio and agency executives, as well established and rising talent, the Committee contributed to the recognition of the event within the industry and throughout the world. Members included: Steven Soderbergh, Julianne Moore, Adam Goodman (DreamWorks), Mark Ordesky (New Line), Nick Reed (ICM) and others.
In 1998, further improvements in programming, marketing and fundraising led to an impressive box office increase of over ninety-percent. Fitzgerald opened the '98 Fest with the US Premiere of LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL, a film that has since garnered three Academy Awards.
Box office increased once again in Fitzgerald’s third and final year with AFI. Highlights included the US Premiere of Lasse Hallstrom's THE CIDER HOUSE RULES and Pedro Almodovar's ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER. AFI Fest '99's most important milestone, however, was the decision to bring the Festival’s screenings and activities to a central location in Hollywood, as films were showcased in the movie palaces along Hollywood Boulevard. Through this, the event gained a vital sense of community and continues to contribute to the renaissance of Hollywood.
Fitzgerald's success with Festivals and IFILM has been due to his strong fundraising abilities, entrepreneurial skills and strong ties to the film community. Prior to his position at AFI, Fitzgerald was a co-founder and Executive Director, of Slamdance International Film Festival, the first-born alternative to Sundance designed to generate an avenue of exposure for new talent. This cutting-edge Festival was created after Fitzgerald's directorial debut, SELF PORTRAIT, was not accepted at Sundance.
Prior to producing SELF PORTRAIT, Fitzgerald worked in production on half a dozen feature films, including: MY COUSIN VINNY and ASPEN EXTREME.
Fitzgerald holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Film Studies from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Upon graduation in 1989, he joined a training program at the William Morris Agency.
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