At left, you’ll see SF Weekly music editor Jennifer Maerz’s
assessment of Anvil! The Story of Anvil, director Sacha
Gervasi’s documentary about the Canadian metal band with considerably
more enthusiasm than album sales. Anvil! has been rapturously
received by both audiences and critics — winning awards at the
Chicago and Los Angeles International Film Festivals, among others.
Like about 99 percent of movies released theatrically or on home
video, Anvil! has nothing whatsoever to do with Houston (except
that it opens here Friday). But this is Memorial Day weekend, the
traditional start of the summer movie season, so if nothing else,
Anvil! set Noise to thinking about Houston, music and the
movies.
Houston has never been, and probably never will be, Hollywood on
White Oak Bayou. The reasons why we’ll never be a trendy
domestic-travel destination like San Francisco, Austin or Chicago are
mostly the same stale ones— too flat, too fat, too spread-out,
too congested, too polluted, too humid, too ugly, blah blah blah. Never
mind that you could also level most of those criticisms at L.A.; most
Houstonians are perfectly aware the San Jacinto Monument is not the
Eiffel Tower, and are — if not downright proud — pretty
okay with it.
Besides, it’s not like the city is completely invisible either.
Although the last major studio production filmed mostly or entirely in
the Houston area was a solid decade ago — the 1999 Jeff
Bridges/Tim Robbins thriller Arlington Road — Houston Film
Commission director Rick Ferguson says enough television (both reality
shows and series like Prison Break), independent-film,
commercial, music-video and documentary traffic comes through town to
net the city an average of $20 million per year.
That figure only reflects projects the HFC is involved with, which,
Ferguson estimates, is between 50 and 60 percent of the total
production activity in the area. $35 to $40 million is nothing to
sneeze at, of course — a whole lot of people in the Houston music
community wish it could post numbers anywhere close to that.
Anyway, if this is all starting to sound a little Variety or
Hollywood Reporter for you, adjust your mental projector a
little to consider not only the movies onscreen but the music that
comes with them. All of a sudden, Houston starts to look — and
sound — a little more important.
For one thing, a handful of films shot and/or set in the Houston
area are now best remembered for soundtracks whose influence proved to
be much greater than the films themselves. The slicked-up,
watered-down, two-volume Urban Cowboy soundtrack put Boz Scaggs
and Anne Murray side-by-side with the Eagles and Charlie Daniels Band
and, periodic “New Traditionalist” hiccups aside, established the
blueprint for mainstream country music as we know it today.
In 1994, Reality Bites pushed all kinds of Gen-X buttons with
Squeeze’s “Tempted,” The Knack’s “My Sharona” and Big Mountain’s update
of Peter Frampton’s “Baby, I Love Your Way,” but it was the spunky
alterna-pop of Juliana Hatfield and Lisa Loeb that made the soundtrack
the Juno-size commercial juggernaut of its time. That same year,
the expert blend of New Jack Swing, gangsta rap and blues scoring
Jason’s Lyric was a major factor in making that Third Ward
romance the most authentic urban drama to emerge in the wake of Boyz
n the Hood and Menace II Society, one that still shows up on
TV today.
As Jason Schwartzman and Bill Murray vied for the affections of
Olivia Williams’s comely prep-school teacher in 1998’s Rushmore,
onetime Houstonian Wes Anderson introduced millions of young moviegoers
to the shaggy, fuzzed-out ’60s sounds of UK bands like Creation, as
well as the folkier strains of urchins such as the Kinks, Chad &
Jeremy, Donovan and Cat Stevens. Not long after, music was in the grip
of a full-scale garage-rock and neo-folk revival that’s still going on.
Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not.
If you’re the Netflix type, Noise recommends re-watching 1988’s
Married to the Mob to catch two songs by Pearland New Wave
heroes The Judy’s (director Jonathan Demme was a big fan; bassist Jeff
Walton is now a film/TV composer himself). Besides a stellar
slide-driven Ry Cooder score, Wim Wenders’s dreamlike Paris,
Texas (1984) features Houston femme-punks the MyDolls rehearsing
during one nightclub-set scene, while Albert Collins instructs
Elisabeth Shue and her young Chicago charges “Nobody leaves here
without playing the blues” during another in 1987’s otherwise
completely forgettable Adventures in Babysitting.
Don’t forget John Cusack’s ex-girlfriend packing her stuff while he
defiantly blasts the 13th Floor Elevators’ “You’re Gonna Miss Me”
during the opening of 2000’s High Fidelity. Local ’90s pop-punks
Fourth Grade Nothing’s cover of Kim Wilde’s “Kids in America” may be
the only reason anyone remembers the dreadful Pauly Shore “comedy”
Bio-Dome at all. Rent the 2001 straight-to-DVD Steven Seagal
action flick Ticker (he plays a San Francisco bomb-squad captain
battling terrorists, if you’re curious), and you can catch Gulf Coast
country-blues legend Gatemouth Brown and Houston-born Beatles
protégé Billy Preston in the onscreen band.
Documentaries may be the richest category of all, and only getting
richer. Les Blank’s soft-spoken, no-frills film about soft-spoken,
no-frills late Navasota bluesman Mance Lipscomb, 1972’s A Well Spent
Life, is now required viewing for any aspiring music-doc filmmaker
(or should be anyway). Anyone who doesn’t get enough Townes Van Zandt
in Heartworn Highways, the story of his days in Nashville
swapping songs and stories with Guy Clark and fellow former Houstonians
Steve Earle and Rodney Crowell, to name a few, can make it a double
feature with 2004 bio Be Here to Love Me. Also, For the Sake
of the Song: The Story of Anderson Fair, about the Montrose club
and early home to Van Zandt (until he was banned), Earle, Crowell,
Lucinda Williams, Eric Taylor, Nanci Griffith, Lyle Lovett and a lot
more, is due soon.
And who can forget Peter and his fellow white-collar gangstas
swaggering to the Geto Boys in Office Space? Or, after he’s
cold-cocked by the nihilists, The Dude’s psychedelic bowling-alley
dream sequence as Kenny Rogers and the First Edition croons “Just
Dropped In To See What Condition My Condition Was In” in The Big
Lebowski, whose end credits roll with Townes singing the Rolling
Stones’ “Dead Flowers”?
You never know when a Houston-connected song is going to show up at
the movies; Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings did a lights-out cover of
“Condition” for last year’s Soul Men, in fact. And the next time
2007 raging-hormone yukfest Superbad comes on cable, listen up
for one of Van Zandt’s musical mentors, Lightnin’ Hopkins, singing
“Policy Game.”
So when the lights go down and you turn off those cell phones this
summer, remember that plenty of times, if only for a few minutes,
Houston musicians have made some good movies even better, and some
pretty awful ones a little — or even a lot — more
watchable.
This article appears in May 21-27, 2009.
