Texas Film Sites

Texas Film Sites 3: Paris, Texas

Wim Wenders’s 1984 film Paris, Texas (which I have written about before), never reaches the town referenced in the title, but it is filmed in large part on location in various Texas towns from El Paso to Galveston. The final sequences take place in my home town of Houston.

Houston was a big city even in the early 1980s, riding one of the crests of an oil boom that was about to come crashing down later in the decade. But it has exploded in both population and sprawl since that time, now boasting one of the nation’s largest and most diverse populations. Houston is also infamous for tearing down and replacing old architecture, but a number of the iconic locations, so memorably captured by Robby Müller’s cinematography, can still be experienced in person.

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Texas Film Sites 2: Rushmore

The Rushmore Academy sign…
…based on the many similar signs at the real Rushmore, St. John’s School.

Rushmore is one of my favorite films from writer-director Wes Anderson. It was released in 1998, but I probably didn’t see it until about 2004, when I was living in the Houston Heights neighborhood. I had stopped in at a local, old-fashioned barbershop for a haircut, and the barber struck up a conversation with me. He asked me if I had been there before, and when I indicated that I hadn’t, he told me a bit about the place, including how it had been used as a filming location for Rushmore. After I paid for my haircut (cash only, even more than ten years later) I headed straight down the street to the local Blockbuster Video (RIP) to rent the movie.

I had previously seen Anderson’s Bottle Rocket, though I don’t know that I even made the connection at the time. So Rushmore was my gateway into Anderson fandom, and now I consider The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou probably my favorite film period. I love all his films, though I am a contrarian to popular opinion in that I feel The Royal Tenenbaums to be his least successful work.

It wasn’t only the quaint barbershop that was used for filming, though. Rushmore was shot on location in many places throughout Houston. I decided this week to revisit three of them that I have become personally familiar with since seeing the film.

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Texas Film Sites 1: TRUE GRIT

Exterior

The world’s most symmetrical building: The Old Blanco County Courthouse

This summer, I was on vacation with my family in the Texas hill country, when I stumbled accidentally into a site of interest for this blog. Cinephiles everywhere can spot the many uses of Monument Valley in John Ford’s westerns, or the LA’s iconic Bradbury Building in everything from sci-fi classic Blade Runner to the silent film tribute The Artist. But it is a real joy to find a hidden gem of a film site, right here in my home state. In the first of what I hope to be a series of posts about lesser known film locations in Texas, I would like to share my discovery of the Old Blanco County Courthouse in Blanco, Texas. You can read about the history of the building, which is now a visitor’s center and event venue, at their website.

Joel and Ethan Coen’s terrific 2010 version of True Grit features a memorable introduction of Jeff Bridges’ Rooster Cogburn as a witness in a courtroom scene. This scene and the following one on the staircase are shot in the interior of the Old Blanco County Courthouse.

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