BEFORE: I can't believe we're in August already, the start of the second month of the Doc Block - but I'm already 60% through my FIFTY documentaries, watched in honor of our country's 250th Birthday. I'm not running out of docs OR states to profile just yet. Part of what inspired me to link each movie to a state was tonight's film, which obviously just HAD to represent TEXAS. So here's today's "Get to Know a State" profile on the Lone Star State:
Date admitted to the U.S.: December 29, 1845 (28th state)
Claim to fame: Wow, you name it, from the Mexican American War to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, the Dallas stockyards and the Austin Film Festival and SXSW, and everything in-between. Whoops, I almost forgot to remember the Alamo.
Nickname: The Lone Star State
State Motto: "Friendship" - I can get behind that.
State Flower: Bluebonnet
State Bird: Northern mockingbird
State Fish: Guadalupe bass
State Mammal: Texas longhorn, also the armadillo
State Instrument: Guitar
State Food: Chili (beans or no beans? I keep hearing different things...Texas Red doesn't have them, but then how is that really chili, it's just meat sauce, right?)
State Tree: Pecan
Notable Sports Teams: Officially the state sport is rodeo, but come on, they've got every other kind of sport, too. The Dallas Cowboys and Houston Texans in the NFL, the Texas Rangers and the Houston Astros in the MLB, the Dallas Mavericks, Houston Rockets AND San Antonio Spurs in the NBA and, umm, well I'm sure there's a hockey team, too. Ah, Dallas Stars, that's it. There's also no shortage of college teams, from the Longhorns to the Aggies to the Red Raiders.
Fun Facts: You know, you just don't hear enough good things about James K. Polk, he wasn't just a nothingburger of a President, he officially annexed Texas, along with the dozens of other great things he did for our country. I mean, sure, that killed our diplomatic relations with Mexico, but isn't that a small price to pay for great BBQ and state fairs in the future? Wait, what? Mexican-American War? No worries, just sign the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, it's an easy fix plus it's fun to say. We'll be fine as long as there's no Civil War coming up.
Yes, I've been there. We started TWO BBQ crawls in Dallas, in 2017 and 2018, which also meant TWO trips to the Texas State Fair, held outside Dallas. The first time we also went to the Fort Worth stockyards and then visited Southfork Ranch, only to learn that only the exterior shots for the show "Dallas" were filmed there. Most of the scenes for that TV show were shot on soundstages in L.A., which means the actors were constantly being shuttled back and forth every time a character stepped outside. (I know that's not what it means - and to be fair, in the follow-up TV movies they did shoot everything in Texas...). We had some great BBQ and then drove up to Arkansas, then Tennessee. The second year we started in Dallas again, but we also visited the Texas School Book Depository (now a JFK assassination museum) and the infamous grassy knoll (on my 50th birthday!) before getting killer BBQ and then driving down to Austin and San Antonio (the Alamo!) and then all the way over to Houston, where our hotel was next to Minute Maid Park and we visited the Johnson Space Center, saw the famous control room from the moon landings and got a sneak peek at Artemis. Finally a trip to an artist's warehouse where he'd stored the giant sculptured heads of many of our U.S. Presidents. It was like POTUS-henge, then we headed down to New Orleans. I had a great time in Texas on both Crawls, and so now that's 22 states I've visited out of 30.
Bill Clinton and George W. Bush carry over from "John McCain: For Whom the Bell Tolls", and here are the links that are going to get me to the end of the Doc Block, and hopefully then hook up with regular movies again: Conan O'Brien, Carol Burnett, Ryan Reynolds, Ron Howard, Dennis Hopper, Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, Jackie Robinson, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Elvis Presley, Jimmy Page, Paul McCartney, Harry Shearer, and then I think Eugene Levy, but I haven't finished the chain to the end of August. Life on the edge...
THE PLOT: The story of firebrand Molly Ivins, six feet of Texas trouble who took on the Good Old Boy corruption wherever she found it. Her razor sharp wit left both sides of the aisle laughing, and craving ink in her columns.
AFTER: Some of the footage here comes from the Texas State House in Austin, and that's another place I've been. After visiting the Cathedral of Junk and eating at Terry Black's BBQ (killer food, just absolutely sensational...) we were considering checking out that bridge on Congress Ave. that the bats fly out of every night - but we saw some people heading into the State House, they looked like just regular people and they did NOT get kicked out, so we gave it a whirl. Since the legislature was not in session, security was minimal, and it was technically a public building, and we were technically the public. That was fascinating, like the rotunda was four floors high and decorated with portraits of all the Texas governors, and then we got into the giant State Congress meeting room and enacted some legislation, just for funsies. Umm, yeah, sorry about those weird laws we passed, Texas people.
I saw the name Molly Ivins when I was a teen, I used to hang out in the humor section of bookstores because that's where they kept the MAD! paperbacks and also the Doonesbury collections. I gathered that she was some kind of political humorist, but I didn't really have time to do a deep dive into her work or investigate further. You know, I had a paper route and I did like doing my homework. She did work for the New York Times for a while, but that was a decade or two before I moved there, and then she bounced around a couple other cities doing the journalism thing before returning to her roots in the Dallas area. I never felt the call to journalism, not the same way I got called to filmmaking, obviously, but I get it, some people had an interest in reporting or commentating years before EVERYBODY could do it via social media.
Molly was born in Monterey, CA but grew up in Houston, TX - the daughter of an oil executive, so they lived in a pretty nice part of Houston (I think it's all nice, but what do I know?) She was on the yearbook staff and worked on the student newspaper in high school, hey, if that's your thing, more power to you, I was math team and vocal groups, too nerdy for even the A/V squad. Then she went to college in California but transferred to Smith College in Massachusetts, if you're from Texas you really only go to school in New England if you're trying to piss off one or both of your parents. After that came the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and stints at the Minneapolis Tribune and Texas Observer before the Times, and Dallas Times Herald and Fort Worth Star-Telegram after. But she also had a syndicated column that went out to dozens of newspapers, so she was known all over the country, really.
She covered the Texas legislature and politics in general, came up with nicknames "Shrub" and "Dubya" for George Bush the lesser, and then The Times hired her because their writing style was perceived as too lifeless, then ultimately decided that she was putting TOO MUCH life into the newspaper, so she was relegated to Denver office as bureau chief of the Rocky Mountain region, but in that capacity she was the entire bureau, as well, in an office of one person. The Dallas newspapers offered her a columnist job writing about whatever she wanted, and that of course was a much better position. In ten years at the Times Herald she was nominated TWICE for a Pulitzer, meanwhile she was also doing speaking engagements around the country and collections of her columns were reprinted in book form, and those spent weeks on the best-seller lists.
From what I can gather, she used irony and satire to poke fun at any and all politicians, but especially the Republicans and the ones she didn't like. Wiki says she was a leftist libertarian, but I'm still not exactly sure what that means. Believing in social equality and gun control were, I gather, not very popular opinions to have in the great state of Texas, at least not back then.
Look, politics is not really my bag, and since Molly died in 2007 she never had a need to rail against Donald Trump, who during her day was just an annoying TV reality show star, with no concrete plans to run for office. But Molly's message is more relevant than ever, reminding us that "WE run this country, we are the board of directors, we own it, they are just the people we've hired to drive the bus for a while." Those politicians holding office, they work for US, or at least they should. We hired them to do a particular job, and if they're not doing it, we can fire them - collectively, anyway. Just something to keep in mind, what with the midterms coming up and all that.
Directed by Janice Engel
Also starring Ben Barnes, Paul Begala, Carlton Carl, Don Carleton, Marcia Wigby Carter, Harold Cook, Lou Dubose, Ronnie Dugger, Marg Elliston, Liz Faulk, Jim Hightower, Marilyn Hoegemeyer, Andy Ivins, Margo Johnston, Charles Kaiser, Paul Krugman, Anne Lamott, Linda Jann Lewis, Myra MacPherson, Rachel Maddow (last seen in "Rosewater"), Marty Maley, Sara Ivins Maley, Dave McNeely, Betsy Moon, Muffie Moroney, Victor Navasky, Kaye Northcott, Terry O'Rourke, Dan Rather (last seen in "When We Went MAD!"), Cecile Richards, Dave Richards, Anne Siefert, Sara Speights, Ellen Sweets, Forrest Wilder, Anthony Zurcher,
with archive footage of Molly Ivins, Humphrey Bogart (last seen in "Priscilla"), Pat Buchanan (last seen in "Remastered: Tricky Dick and the Man in Black"), George H.W. Bush (also carrying over from "John McCain: For Whom the Bell Tolls"), Laura Bush, Warren Chisum, Bruce Collins, Katie Couric (last seen in "Pamela: A Love Story"), David Letterman (ditto), Debra Danburg, John Henry Faulk, Henry Fonda (last seen in "Being Eddie"), Douglas Foster, Newt Gingrich (last seen in "Bang My Box: The Robin Byrd Story"), Bryant Gumbel (last seen in "Earth, Wind & Fire"), Jim Ivins, Margot Milne Ivins, John Leonard, Mitch McConnell (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Conan O'Brien (last seen in "Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!"), Elvis Presley (also last seen in "Being Eddie"), Dan Quayle, Ann Richards, Mitt Romney (last seen in "The Accidental President"), A.M. Rosenthal, Morley Safer (last seen in "Rather), Brian Williams (last seen in "Martha")
RATING: 5 out of 10 A.A. meetings (late in life, Molly took steps to deal with her alcholism)
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