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!

IT CAME FROM DALLAS CHAPTER ONE!

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".