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LBJ movie shooting outside Texas?
Despite recent and thorough location scouting, from Austin to South Texas, veteran writer-director Robert Benton still doesn’t know if he can shoot his in-the-works biopic of President Lyndon Johnson in Texas at all.
The hitch is becoming more and more common, and no less painful for the local film community: Other states offer richer tax breaks for filmmakers than Texas does, so productions are flocking to New Mexico, Michigan and Louisiana to get more bang for the buck.
Local movie insiders say Benton is aching to shoot at least part of the untitled project, which he wrote, in his home state. (Benton, who won the directing Oscar for “Kramer vs. Kramer” and writing Oscar for “Places in the Heart,” was born in Waxahachie.)
“If I can get a week in Texas I’ll be lucky,” a local quotes him as saying.
HBO, which is producing, wants to film in Louisiana and Georgia. Once officially greenlit, the production will begin in late spring.
Location scouting for the project has been energetic, says Bob Hudgins, director of the Texas Film Commission. Benton has looked everywhere from Austin to Llano, Taylor to Georgetown, Fredericksburg to Alice.
“It was not a small scout,” Hudgins says. “We’re in the running.”
If the state loses a picture about iconic Texan LBJ, “That would be really hard to bear,” he says.
Last year’s Drew Barrymore roller-girl movie “Whip It!” was set in Austin, but only a couple of pick-up shots were actually filmed here. Michigan lured the production with incentives.
Everyone agrees this is a different case.
“It will be very interesting to see how they shoot South Texas outside of Texas,” Hudgins says.
Benton
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By Bubba
February 21, 2010 1:56 PM | Link to this
Keep Austin weird! And keep the movies coming to Michigan!
By Franco in California
February 5, 2010 11:12 PM | Link to this
I have always felt, as a lifelong movie-goer, that if a movie’s screenplay is set at a specific locale, then the movie ought to have at least some of its exterior scenes filmed at that locale (unless we’re talking about Mars, of course). It is a quaint notion, but it has its merits. This is why, as an example, “There Will Be Blood,” one of better films in recent years, nonetheless felt less than authentic. Though it was set in the oil fields of early 20th century California, “Blood” was filmed in West Texas and New Mexico—and I, for one, noticed the differences in the landscape. (Those mesquite trees in the background looked somewhat out of place.)
(By the same token, all those movies that have been filmed in Hollywood and California over the past 100 or so years perhaps might have turned out differently had they been filmed truer to their scripted source and filmed elsewhere. I love “Summer of 42,” but it was shot not in coastal New England but in Mendocino, one of California’s prettiest towns.)
On the other hand, if the makers of the upcoming L.B.J. movie were to attempt to recreate an earlier Texas cinematically, they would likely have a tough time. Envision them going down to Cotulla (on I.H. 35 south of San Antonio) for a scene in which a very young LBJ, fresh out of Southwest Texas Teacher’s College (as Texas State U. was known in his day), to start his new job as a teacher for the town’s uncared-for Mexican-American students who lived, as the biographer Robert Caro wrote, impoverished in their hovels. Well, today, Cotulla, like so many Texas towns, is just another big truck stop.