The Ultimate Time Kill: Rare Dallas Movies From the Texas Archive of the Moving Image

A heads-up to the Friends of Unfair Park who dig old movies about Dallas: Now might be a good time to dig 'em up. Doesn't matter the format: 8mm, Beta, 3/4-inch videotape. You name it, they want it -- "they" being the Texas Archive of the Moving Image, which will be in Dallas next Friday and Saturday at the Angelika Film Center in Mockingbird Station.

The reason for the visit is twofold: The museum wants to show off its collection of "rare vintage footage of Dallas" -- including old industrials, long-lost docs and home movies, not to mention LakeWWWooder's favorite locally made movie (State Fair) and The Big Show. And it  wants to collect your private pieces for inclusion in the archives. Seems like a fair trade-off: Bring in your whatever ("so long as it's Texas-related"), and the museum will digitize the film gratis so long as it can keep a copy.

The full schedule and press release can be found here, but the museum's outreach and education coordinator, Elizabeth Hansen, tells Unfair Park this morning this is the fifth round-up in the last two years. And during that time, she says, the museum has collected "around 3,000 films." Those include "a lot of home movies, industrial films, commercials, local television, commercials for family businesses -- just kinda anything," she says. "Lots of different stuff."

Some 800 of those films have been collected online. But here's a direct link to the 82 Dallas-related offerings. Twenty bucks you head straight to the one titled "Dallas, TX - Pillow Fight." I know you. Unless you're Patrick Kennedy, who should probably check out Report to Dallas, about how "traffic is the lifeblood of the city. Slow down the traffic, and the heartbeat slows down. Stop it, and the city dies."