ustxtxb_obs_2008_05_02_50_00030-00000_000.pdf

eh server reoaers are SMART PROGRESSIVE INVOLVED INFLUENTIAL GOOD LOOKING \($0 ore Nserver oavertisers r Get noticed by Texas Observer folks all over the state and nation. Let them know about your bookstore, service, restaurant, non-profit organization, event, political candidate, shoe store, coffee house, boutique, salon, yoga studio, law practice, etc. \(i n CO TheTexasObserver ADVERTISE IN THE OBSERVER! REASONABLE RATES GREAT EXPOSURE Call 512-477-0746 and ask for Julia Austin or e-mail [email protected] ke g , 06seruer readers r Consider advertising your business or non-profit in the Observer. GOOD FOR YOU GOOD FOR THE OBSERVER and Sonny Carl Davis, who was a singer for a way-off-the-wall band called The Sons of Uranium Savages. Both films portray Perryman and Davis as a couple of irrepressible losers. One critic would describe them as a tumbleweed Hope and Crosby. Though no one was being paid, Perryman says it didn’t matter. “We were making a movie,” Perryman says. “Life was good.” After the second film, tensions developed. Perry and Davis felt like Pennell was taking credit for the work, his words at the USA Film Festival in Dallas in 1978 notwithstanding: “I was very fortunate to find a group of very talented people who were willing to work for nothing for a chance to do a picture,” Pennell said at the premiere. “There’s about $15,000 worth of cash in the movie, but there’s about a million dollars worth of talent in terms of people who are in it. Screenwriter and producer Sutherland says the script was actually more of a blueprint, and that much of the film was improvised. But Doris Hargrove, one of the actors in Shooting Match, says Eagle knew how to corral the improvisation. “He had a way, he made room for us to carry on,” she says. “But he knew how to contain us.” Following Shooting Match, Pennell chose Houston for his next film. Last Night at the Alamo, shot at an old bar on the East End’s Harrisburg Avenue, again stars Davis and Perrymen, this time as regulars at a local tavern, The Alamo, who try in vain to keep their hangout from being shuttered. Film critic Roger Ebert praised the film for showing Texas as he had never seen it. But it was during the filming of Alamo that Eagle’s downward spiral hit its stride. Eagle often showed up drunk on the set, when he showed up at all. Daily wrap parties were held at the Museum District bar-restaurant 120 Portland. Eagle and the owner had a whirlwind romance and were married in a drunken fog by a ship’s captain in the Port of Houston. Their subsequent wedding party at an upscale Montrose restaurant was any bride’s nightmare. Eagle made some exceedingly inappropriate suggestions to his beautiful new sister-in-law, who was caught in a set of still photographs recoiling from Eagle’s grasp. Then things got really ugly, according to Brian Huberman, who had been the cinematographer on Alamo. The waiters, mostly MexicanAmericans, sensed a situation spinning out of control and began to close in on 30 THE TEXAS OBSERVER MAY 2, 2008