IT CAME FROM DALLAS CHAPTER TWO!

Never heard of it? One of the most important of all Dallas movies...


PREVIOUSLY ON IT CAME FROM DALLAS!

I introduced myself, revealed some childhood obsessions, and told you how I came to Dallas and spent years in the home video industry. By the way, when I was a kid, my mom used to grab me by the ear and drag me from in front of the TV while admonishing, "No one's ever going to pay you to watch TV!" Decades later, when they were paying me to watch TV, I just had to rib her about that...Get on with it already! Okay.

When all that ended I became an independent contractor, calling myself "Altair IV Productions" and if you're a true fanboy/girl, you'll get that reference (hint: Leslie Nielsen got it right away). Fast forward your old Mitsubishi top-loader to early 2005. At his request, I met with Garry Potts of the Dallas Producers Association at Starbucks. Prior to that I had been doing a little one-man show around town called "Attack of the Big D B's". I had been collecting trailers and other memorabilia of Dallas' glorious B-movie past, and accompanied the visuals with a lecture in which I extolled the virtues of such Dallas-spawned gems as The Giant Gila Monster, Rock Baby Rock It, Beyond the Time Barrier and, of course, Mars Needs Women. Garry wanted to expand that idea into a big scale production that would honor the trailblazers of the Dallas film industry, an annual DPA fundraiser that would benefit, among other things, the newly developing Texas Motion Picture Alliance, and wanted my participation. Glad to. I was introduced to other DPA folks who would make this event possible -- Bob Dauber, Clayton Coblentz, Todd Sims, Scott Hadden, Don Stokes of Post Asylum, Kelly Kitchens, David Friedman, Rebecca Preston, Brandon Jones and many more. In choosing local film pioneers to honor, we started by going back to the 1940s:

Spencer Williams (1893-1965) was known to America at large in the 1950s as "Andy" on the "Amos 'n Andy" TV series, but in the '40s, he was living in Dallas and was the first man to make narrative feature films (as a writer/director/actor) on a regular basis here (and other Texas cities). They were very low budget and sometimes amateurish by today's standards, and at the time not seen outside of all-black movie theaters. Thirty years later, many of Williams' films were discovered in a Tyler warehouse. Today they're seen as unique representations of wartime African-American history, including the jazz, gospel and blues of the period. The most famous of these is the deliriously surreal Blood of Jesus (1947), which was inducted into the National Registry of Film in 1991.

Next on IT CAME FROM DALLAS! CHAPTER THREE: ROCK BABY ROCK IT! and Dallas radio giant Gordon McLendon delivers the greatest Dallas drive-in double bill of all time!