POWER IN NUMBERS: If you play in a band, and no one ever hears you, do you really have a band? That’s a question that Fort Worth musician Matt Skates has certainly pondered. He’s played with more than a dozen current and former bands, so he knows that all the practice in the world is for naught if you can’t book a gig. Which is why he formed the Fort Worth Music Co-op, an organization that helps pair bands and solo artists with venues. How does it all work? Fort Worth Weekly spells it out.

REMEMBERING PAUL BAKER: The local theater scene paused on Monday to reflect on the passing of one of its most influential members – Dallas Theater Center founder Paul Baker. Theater Jones has collected the thoughts of several local luminaries and posted a video interview with Baker filmed in May. Lawson Taitte also looks back at Baker’s life on dallasnews.com. A public memorial will be held at the Rosewood Center for Family Arts on Dec. 7 at 2 p.m.

GET ME REWRITE: “Incentives” is the first and last word you ever hear these days when the topic of film financing comes up. For those who don’t follow the industry closely, states offer film and television productions tax breaks to entice them to shoot there. In recent years, Texas has finally gotten on board with the idea in order to compete with similar incentives offered by Louisiana and New Mexico. But what happens when the state offering the best deal doesn’t fit into the plot of  your movie? The Wall Street Journal has discovered that more and more producers are becoming comfortable with changing the details of their scripts to fit the new location. If the setting of your story is inconsequential, why not change it to Detroit? That’s what the writers of Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino did when Michigan offered the best deal. Who knows – if Texas ups its incentive program to the levels of other states, we might see more films with local story lines. The idea isn’t without its limits, though. As one producer told the paper, “I have had to tell people, ‘No you can’t shoot that surfing movie in Iowa.'”