What do these have to do with Dallas? Read on and find out...
Welcome to the It Came From Dallas! blog. Since we first started this unique Dallas institution in 2005, many folks have recommended that ICFD! have its own blog. Being the foolhardy sort and still, at age (cough cough), a frustrated writer, I volunteered. (Hey, if you can get famous by blogging about recipes from 1961...) First, mark your Snap-On Tools shop calender for this year's event, Curse of It Came From Dallas:Taking the Fifth, happening October 15 at the Studio Movie Grill-Dallas. Next, read on for our first backstory chapter...
First, in the words of Austin Powers, allow myself to introduce...myself. I am Gordon K. Smith, a writer, filmmaker, film historian and sometime actor, based in Dallas. I was born in Houston, but from second grade through college (go Raiders), grew up in Lubbock. A card-carrying nerd who couldn't have hit the side of a West Texas barn with a baseball, I was hooked on movies and TV from an early age (there wasn't a helluva lot else to do in Lubbock). As a kid I saw Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea* at The Village Theater (unaware then it was already a 10-year-old reissue) and became particularly fascinated with science fiction, fantasy and horror (*20 years later I was an extra in one of the last films by that director, Richard Fleischer, the Dallas-filmed Tough Enough). My favorite childhood series was "The Wild Wild West" which I am currently rediscovering via DVD (and man, network standards have certainly changed since the '60s). And like a lot of baby boomer guys, became, uh, enthralled by Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC and Diana Rigg on "The Avengers". (30 years later I got Raquel, a one-time Dallas model, to sign my One Million poster).
After graduation I lucked into my first film biz job on a legendary Alamo Village mess called The Code of Josey Wales (aka The Return of Josey Wales) -- look it up on imdb.com -- and moved to Dallas. In October 1985 I hooked up with Blockbuster Video, days after they opened their first store, and worked for them for the next 16 years in Dallas, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, and back in Dallas. Remember those synopses paragraphs on the back of the blue and white VHS amarays? I'm the guy what wrote'em, thousands in fact, over several years. Might have been the widest read author in the USA during the peak years of home video, sort of. Also was one of the creators of the video programming that played on the in-store monitors (Homer watches Blockbuster monitors in a classic "Simpsons" episode). During that time I also contributed research to some network TV programs such as "Reflections on the Silver Screen" on AMC and "It's Alive: The True Story of Frankenstein" on A&E.
next: the birth of "It Came From Dallas".
