Karina on SpoutBlog

Call it the Rorschach theory of criticism: some movies function best as mirrors, inspiring writing that says more about the writer than the film. Watchmaker Films’ fabulous new DVD release of Eagle Pennell’s The Whole Shootin’ Match, the 1978 DIY feature which famously inspired Robert Redford to launch the Sundance Institute, which would eventually take over the Utah/U.S. Film Festival where he saw it play, includes an unusually artful documentary by Pennell’s brother/composer and nephew, an interview with the filmmaker, a soundtrack CD and an extensive package of writings on the film from the likes of Paul Cullum, Emmanuel Levy, and SXSW founder Lewis Black.

Two reviews by Roger Ebert are reprinted: the critic’s original three-star assessment from the Chicago Sun-Times, dated April 9, 1980; and a reevaluation pegged to the film’s 2007 restoration. Upping his rating by an additional star, Ebert focuses much of his second Shootin’ piece on Pennell’s alcoholism (the filmmaker essentially drank himself to death shortly before turning 50 in 2002) and the ways in which it can be seen to inform every frame of his first feature. Ebert remembers seeing Shootin’ for the first time at Telluride in 1980: “I went for a walk on the mountain-side with Eagle and mentioned that he had made a film about alcoholism. He said that had never occurred to him, though he thought I was right.” If this lengthy CHICAGO magazine profile on the critic is to be believed, that conversation took place just a year after Ebert entered treatment to deal with his own drinking problem.

It’s possible that this is just that time of year and I have SXSW on the brain, but when I watched The Whole Shootin’ Match a few days ago, more than seeing the film as a love/hate letter to the bottle, more than spotting its shared DNA with various films by Richard Linklater and Andrew Bujalski (and, to a lesser extent, Wes Anderson and Gus Van Sant), I saw it as a catalyst for a conversation about Austin’s evolving film cultural history.

The printed artifacts in the Shootin’ DVD book (much of it empirical evidence that indie film hyperbole was alive and well long before Sundance turned it into mainstream sport) again and again circle around the term “regional.” Just from reading these clips, it seems that in the burgeoning American independent film world of the late-70s and very early 80s, “regional” was bandied about as an ambiguous adjective, a genre label, a qualifier, a movement definer –– something as pervasive, as initially useful and ultimately meaningless as our linguistic cross to bear, “mumblecore”, is today.

“Regional” then, of course, was used partially to talk about geography. In The King of Texas, the documentary on Pennell that appears in the set directed by his nephew Rene Pinnell and produced by his brother/composer Chuck Pinnell (Eagle changed his own name in dual tribute to Arthur Penn and a character from John Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon), Shootin’ co-writer Lin Sutherland explains why there was need for films about Texas, by Texas filmmakers: “People who are not real Texans create cardboard characters.” She cites Hud and Giant as “great movies, but they’re not real about Texas.” But “regional” also indicated an exclusion from the business of filmmaking. As Mark Odintz puts it in his essay in the Shootin’ set, in tracking two drunks from lost menial day job to bar, to get rich scheme to bar, to giddy highs and dpeths of despair and back again, ultimately Pennell’s first feature is a film about what people do when they’re “feeling pretty left out.” As one of the first true American DIY success stories, this film — shot on nights and weekends for a mid-five figures of locally-raised funds, which went on to nationwide critical triumph and landed its maker a modicum of cash and celebrity — also set the model for non-Hollywood filmmakers who felt the same way.

There are obvious similarities between Pennell’s paradigm and that of a certain crop of rising filmmakers thirty years later, but is it still possible or productive to talk about “regional” cinema? Do regions matter anymore in an age when the internet breaks down all meaningful distinctions between place-based communities, and, in terms of statistics, virtually nothing that premieres at festivals gets national theatrical distribution anyway? Shootin’s oft-cited legacy is that it inspired the creation of Sundance, but with Sundance’s own future uncertain as its long-time leader leaves ostensibly to join the forefront of evolutions in the festival model, what does that legacy now mean? In the Shootin’ book, Redford is quoted as saying that he hoped Sundance would help “shortcut a lot of the problems [a filmmaker like Pennell] was going to be facing.” In that particular case, what Redford’s best intentions didn’t count on was the DNA programming that compels some of us to eventually **** our own shit up; it also seems to have not anticipated that the us-vs-them relationship between independent filmmakers and the Establishment would become as fragmented as it has, and ultimately maybe irrelevant.

What interests me most about the “regional” issue is that although Austin has become a place where independent filmmakers from all over the country — including LA and New York — come to show work, ironically, Austin’s past and present identity as a film town often gets lost in that process and excluded from the conversation. In the same doc in the Shootin’ set, Lewis Black says Willie Nelson’s move from Nashville to Austin “changes the model, because before then, if you were going to make it, you had to go to LA or New York.” Via SXSW, young filmmakers are now “making it” (or at least, attracting mainstream press attention and in some cases distribution) in Austin without establishing much of a relationship to Austin film history or even having to stay in town for more than a week.  In a time when the SXSW Film Festival, currently Austin’s highest profle annual flm event, is undergoing its own transition, the Watchmaker package seems like all the more valuable a document of the city’s ongoing film legacy.