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The Thursday Roundup!


by Jerome Weeks 15 Mar 2012 7:45 AM

It’s almost all film today – with two items about Fort Worth filmmakers and a film-turned-musical — but don’t miss the quick survey of how North Texas art museums fare in the New York Times.

CTA TBD

FORT WORTH FILMOLOGY, PT. 1. Tonight, AMC Sundance Square will screen the premiere of a documentary about the controversial 2009 Fort Worth police bust of a gay bar. Robert Camina has spent the past three years making Raid on the Rainbow Lounge, including interviewing police chief Jeff Halstead. His film was going to be a 20-minute short, but Camina tells Arnold Wayne Jones, when Halstead said he was happy with how the officers behaved, “that’s when I knew, this ain’t gonna be a short film.”

FORT WORTH FILMOLOGY, PT. 2. And while we’re in a Fort Worth filmic state of mind: Whatever happened to Chad Feehan? The Fort Worth Weekly‘s cover story catches up with the guy who, five years ago when he was only 27, sold his first feature film, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, for $3.5 million to Harvey Weinstein. And that particular horror film has never seen a projector light since.

After changing ownership, the film descended into distribution hell … not even given the kind of direct-to-DVD release that the worst horror films often receive. Its inaccessibility has made it an object of fascination among horror enthusiasts, along with the fact that some of its cast and crew have gone on to greater fame.

It’s not all unhappy news ’cause Feehan is still making movies.

FILMOLOGY TO MUSICOLOGY. Hands on a Hard Body, the 1997 documentary about a last-person-standing, Texas truck competition,was shot in Longview and became a surprise hit. Director Robert Altman was even considering a fiction film version before he died. Now the La Jolla Playhouse will premiere a musical adaptation April 27 – with music by Trey Anastasio of Phish and Keith Carradine in the lead.

WE LIKE TO KEEP A LOW PROFILE? The New York Timesannual special section devoted to museums appeared today in all its 40-page glory, including an article about art museums’ acquisitions budgets. The accompanying chart of the 22 biggest ‘buy!’ budgets across the country does not include the Kimbell or the Getty because, as the article explains, they have gigantic endowments but they don’t have specific pots of money designated “get new stuff.” The fact, though, that not a single North Texas museum appears on the list made me curious about how we fare overall. So I checked. The Nasher Sculpture Center is mentioned in passing in an article about how difficult fundraising can be when a rich guy’s name is out front. And the section does include ads from the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Amon Carter, the Kimbell and the Meadows (the last two are impressive full-pagers). Other than that — as regularly happens with the paper’s annual section on theaters and theater festivals — Dallas and Fort Worth do not exist, period. Not even in the nationwide listings of upcoming shows, which include places like West Palm Beach and Toledo.

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