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and foreign students, as well as students from diverse ethnic backgrounds, we all lived together. Later that semester, the University regents voted to integrate the dorms. For some of us, it was a late-in-the game effort to save face: LBJ had signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 while his daughter was still living in a segregated dorm. Meanwhile, those of us living in the barracks-style building on Rio Grande imagined ourselves to be taking part in a 20th-century incarnation of Brook Farm, the literary commune where Hawthorne, Emerson, and so many others tried to create an intellectual community in 19th-century Massachusetts. In 1965 we started a film society, which became Cinema 40. We petitioned for more film courses and the hiring of film teachers for what was then a nascent department that would become today’s department of Radio-TelevisionFilm. As a result of our efforts, the University hired New Yorker and Esquire film critic Dwight MacDonald. Soon, joined the ranks to teach filmmaking classes. We held a series of lectures open to the public: William Arrowsmith on Antonioni, Roger Shattuck on the French New Wave \(we brought Alain then 4-year-old son along with him. Now an Oscar-winning director, Steven Soderbergh busied himself coloring his We nearly got busted attempting to screen Jack Smith’s polymorphous perverse Flaming Creatures at the University Y. When we screened Kenneth Anger’s controversial underground film cycle [Magick Lantern Cycle], critic MacDonald prodded the audience by asking if they had indeed followed the edict in the program notes to drop acid before the screening. When no one raised their hand, MacDonald Robbe-Grillet and Godard to the cambrought the house down by retorting, World War II films. \(He brought his this is LBJ country.” 30 THE TEXAS OBSERVER MARCH 10, 2006