Texas Theatre To Host Writer/Director Roger Avary for Screening of The Rules of Attraction

The Texas Theatre has hosted a variety of exclusive events that attract high-profile talent, ensuring that cinephiles have a space to seek out one-of-a-kind experiences during an era in which theatrical moviegoing has declined. Dallas’ most beloved theater has hosted a screening series with Oliver Stone in attendance and the world premiere of The Iron Claw, and in February it will present one of the most controversial screenwriters in modern Hollywood history.

Roger Avary is set to appear at an upcoming screening and Q&A event for his 2002 film The Rules of Attraction, which was based on the novel of the same name by American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis. Despite the fact that the film was by no means a commercial success when it debuted in theaters in fall 2002, it has subsequently earned a cult following. Discussions about the legacy of The Rules of Attraction have been heightened in recent months as Avary has steadily become a more polarizing figure in the independent film community.

The Canadian-born writer/director was one of the many film buffs who emerged during a renaissance of independent cinema that occurred in the early 1990s; after “renegade” artists such as Steven Soderbergh and Richard Linklater proved that inventive, challenging films could be made on shoestring budgets, many auteurs began self-financing their projects instead of begging studios for opportunities. Avary made a splash when he cast ’80s heartthrob Eric Stoltz in his directorial debut Killing Zoe, but he earned significantly more notoriety thanks to his collaboration with an up-and-coming writer/director known as Quentin Tarantino.

Like Avary, Tarantino had grown up outside of the studio system and managed to conquer Hollywood when his 1992 directorial debut, Reservoir Dogs, became a surprise breakout hit at the Sundance Film Festival. Tarantino enlisted Avary to help work on his next project, an epic crime thriller that followed various shady players over the course of several intersecting storylines. Film historians may debate how much of the screenplay for Pulp Fiction should be credited to Tarantino or Avary, but Tarantino has suggested that it was Avary who came up with the narrative featuring Bruce Willis as the down-on-his-luck boxer Butch.

Pulp Fiction instantly joined a list of films that completely reshaped the industry the moment it premiered; other contenders could include Gone With The Wind, The Sound of Music, The Godfather and Jaws. With its inventive soundtrack, sharp dialogue, wry sense of humor and surprisingly earnest moments of existentialism, Pulp Fiction became the epitome of cool. Although Tarantino undeniably benefited the most from the film’s instant canonization, Avary was not left out of the accolades. In early 1995, the two jointly accepted the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay; it was actually Avary who delivered a majority of the speech, as Tarantino cut his portion short so he could quickly find a bathroom.

Tarantino obviously had no issue finding work in the immediate aftermath, but Avary also took advantage of Pulp Fiction‘s popularity in order to invest in some passion projects. The Aviary-directed 1995 body horror film Mr. Stitch failed to land with any significant impact (despite a memorable Rutger Hauer performance), but he soon turned his sights on an adaptation of a controversial novel that was bound to get audiences talking.

The Rules of Attraction was the third of Ellis’ novels to be translated to the big screen; both 1987’s Less Than Zero and 2000’s American Psycho became cult classics in their own right, but Ellis himself has spoken negatively about their lack of fidelity to the source material. Avary’s adaptation of The Rules of Attraction certainly matches the darkly comedic, cynical sensibilities found in the text, but it also peppered in many of the nonlinear narrative conceits that Pulp Fiction had popularized.

Set in a fictional college campus in New Hampshire, The Rules of Attraction centers on a group of self-obsessed, struggling students who engage in various forms of debauchery. Although fluid sexuality and rampant drug use weren’t exactly foreign concepts for teenage audiences, The Rules of Attraction pushed the boundaries of good taste with more than a few shocking moments and nearly landed itself an NC-17 rating.

The film benefited from its well-known ensemble cast, which included several prominent heartthrobs working with surprisingly dark material. Fans of Dawson’s Creek who showed up to see James Van Der Beek may have been shocked to see what lows The Rules of Attraction stooped too. A minor box-office success, The Rules of Attraction served as the last major project Avary was involved in. In the subsequent years, he helmed the unreleased cult film Glitterati and the crime drama Lucky Day (a quasi-sequel to Killing Zoe), and he penned screenplays for the video game adaptation Silent Hill and the epic fantasy Beowulf.

Avary’s resurgence came as a result of another collaboration with his Pulp Fiction director. In 2022, Avary and Tarantino launched The Video Archives Podcast, an audio series dedicated to spotlighting rare VHS prints of low-budget films. The notion of hearing the two legendary writers speaking at length about obscure titles certainty attracted a cinephile audience, and The Video Archives Podcast quickly rose within the ranks to be one of the biggest film-related podcasts on Spotify.

Tarantino has been known to make incendiary comments in public, but he has surprisingly proven to be the more low-key of the two thanks to a series of subsequent podcast appearances. In a wide-ranging conversation on The Joe Rogan Experience, Avary claimed that Warner Bros. secretly edited Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 cult film Eyes Wide Shut to remove what he claimed was a much darker ending. Although this may seem like a rather innocent claim about a 25-year-old movie, Eyes Wide Shut‘s legacy has been hijacked by many members of the QAnon movement, who claim that the film served as a warning about a “secret cabal” of the power elite.

It wouldn’t be the last time that Avary hinted at the alt-right. He recently posted a series of tweets alleging that Antifa was responsible for the devastating fires in Los Angeles; according to Avary, Ellis has co-signed his claims. Whether this was an indication of his true beliefs is ambiguous, but it’s safe to say that Texas film buffs will be in for a unique experience when Avary visits Dallas.

The screening takes place at 7:30 p.m. on Feb. 28 at The Texas Theatre, 231 W. Jefferson Blvd. Tickets are $20 on Prekindle.