There is one man who gets supremely annoyed at suggestions about how to make Dallas filmmaking more communal. He's bugged when you phrase the issue of nurturing a film scene as a Dallas vs. Austin comparison. And as for the pioneer spirit of so many Dallas indie filmmakers, perfectly satisfied with their loner status, don't even get him started.
For six years now, David Fulton has been publisher-editor of Texas Film and Video News, the Dallas-based bimonthly newspaper for area film professionals. He thinks the discussion should be less about the difficulty of each filmmaker's project in a given city and more on building a state infrastructure that will bring projects to all Texas cities and, in turn, nourish local talents who want to shoot their self-penned scripts here and shop them nationally.
As an example of what might be, he describes the Texas Film Development Corporation, a proposal submitted during this year's state legislative session that would provide $50 million from banks, private investors, and filmmakers to shoot 20 small-budget films across Texas over the next five years. Some indie filmmakers have dismissed this legislation as irrelevant to them, since getting movies made with budgets of $3 million-$5 million are what it's aimed at. Fulton gets passionate on the subject.
"God bless the folks who shoot a $2,000 movie and run around saying it cost $250,000. But what are they doing to help build awareness in the banking community and other financing sources? Do we have a database of the major investors, so people don't keep reinventing the wheel? We don't have an independent film scene in Texas--we have pockets of independents, and until people organize in an intelligent and businesslike fashion, we'll continue to have peaks and valleys. And I'm talking about Austin too. What happens when Linklater's and Rodriguez's careers fade, when they have to move back to Los Angeles to get work?"
But Dallas filmmaker John Castarphen, who'd be the last man to stand in the way of the Texas Film Development Corporation's passage, sees industry following movements of filmmakers, not vice versa. In other words, the attention of outsiders will be paid when you have produced something worthy of their attention.
"Money is always hard to find at any time, even in Los Angeles," says Castarphen. "I think Texas today is a lot like New York in the early '70s. I'm from the East Coast, and I can tell you Hollywood mistrusted and snickered at New York then. When Scorcese shot Mean Streets, nobody wanted to trip over him. He couldn't get anyone to give him money, so he started shooting it on black-and-white reel-to-reel video. If you look at the history of film movements, they all started out as a reaction against something. Even Hollywood started out as a tiny community struggling in the middle of nowhere.
